Rebels on the Backlot (3 page)

In retrospect, this book might have been better undertaken when the rebel directors were in the sunset of their careers, rather than at the height of their creative powers. While I was chasing
them down, they were all busy writing, directing, producing, and promoting their movies. Also, I will not pretend it was easy to woo a group of fiercely individualistic, rather control-conscious artists. David Fincher resisted my entreaties for months, insisting that he was not actually a rebel (he finally granted me many hours, for which I thank him). Paul Thomas Anderson held out until three weeks before the manuscript was due. Quentin Tarantino found time in between directing and promoting not one movie but two, his
Kill Bill
oeuvre. The directors also granted me entrée into their world through the perspective of their close collaborators. Other young directors, who were not featured in as much detail, granted me interviews and their points of view were invaluable.

I am deeply grateful for their help, as I am for the time and energy of the many dozens of people interviewed for this book. They include the current and former studio executives who presided over the making of the rebels’ movies.

Where memories or accounts conflict, I have done my best to find multiple sources and indicate the differences of opinion. Any errors in the weaving of this narrative, whether in style or substance, are my own.

Or, as Steven Soderbergh put it in our last conversation: “I’m the bird. You’re the ornithologist.”

M
emorial Day in 1990 dawned bright and hot in Hollywood, even for a maker of horror films. Scott Spiegel, a screenwriter and the horror filmmaker in question, wanted to celebrate. He had some cash in his pocket from selling his first big screenplay, The
Rookie
, to Warner Brothers with Clint Eastwood attached to star. With his neighbor, actor D. W. Moffett, Spiegel threw a barbeque bash and invited to his backyard every starving actor, screenwriter, director, and movie wannabe he could think of, including some dedicated fans of his horror genre work.

Under leafy elm trees, behind a blue clapboard house on Mc-Cadden Place just off Sunset Boulevard, dozens of young wouldbes and could-bes in Hollywood gathered. Some of them would eventually make it. Director Sam Raimi was there along with actor/director Burr Steers and screenwriter Boaz Yakin. Others wouldn’t: One of the aspiring screenwriters present, Mark Carducei, would kill himself in 1997. The eighties still hung in the air; the cool guys had mullet haircuts and leather jackets; the hot
women had long, permed hair fluffed out to there and bright red lipstick. While playing an electric keyboard, actor/screenwriter Ron Zwang belted out “Wild Thing” to a crowd slightly buzzed on beer and stuffed with Moffett’s burnt burgers and hot dogs. Inside the house a few people were slumped on a loveseat watching
A Clockwork Orange.

One of the restless young men hanging around the yard was Quentin Tarantino, a twenty-seven-year-old screenwriter who’d spent the previous night on Spiegel’s couch. He loped around the backyard like a habitué of this crowd. He came from Manhattan Beach, an aspiring young screenwriter who only lately had started spending more time in Hollywood than in the working-class neighborhood down the coast.

Tarantino had reason to feel confident. After a decade of scraping by doing odd jobs, hanging with the other video geeks and movie dreamers at Video Archives, a video store in Manhattan Beach, Hollywood was beginning to show some interest. He had several scripts making the rounds, and a low-grade buzz had begun around his raw, clever screenplays:
From Dusk Till Dawn, True Romance, Natural Born Killers.
He was still penniless and unknown, but all of these scripts were on the verge of being sold. His moment was just off the horizon.

On this particular day, Tarantino was his blabbermouth self. He looked rumpled, of course, his striped blue shirt slightly untucked, his brown hair overgrown and stringy. As Spiegel wielded his video camera, Tarantino regaled film editor Bob Murawski with his latest insight on the latest movie he’d seen for the umpteenth time. When it came to film arcana, no one out-triviaed Quentin Tarantino.

“That movie—
Motorcycle Gang
—remember the goofy guy? His buddy? The goofy guy?” he asked, looming over his friend.

Murawski nodded.

“That’s Alfalfa!” Tarantino was psyched; he’d recognized one of the
Our Gang
actors in the B movie. “That’s Carl Switzer! I couldn’t believe it.”

Marowski was slightly less enthused. “That makes me glad I saw it,” he deadpanned.

Tarantino didn’t seem to notice. “It’s the same movie” (the same one as yet another B movie he’d seen,
Dragstrip Girl.)
“It’s the same lines. Yeah—I was reading about it last night.”

I
N THE 1990S
Q
UENTIN
T
ARANTINO WOULD TURN OUT TO BE
the biggest thing to hit the movie industry since the high-concept film. He became an image, an icon, and inspired a genre, if not an entire generation, of hyper-violent, loud, youthful, angry, funny (though none as funny as Tarantino) movies. His
Pulp Fiction
was the first “independent” film to crack $100 million at the box office, though technically it was made at a studio that had just been bought by the Walt Disney Company. Cinematically he spoke in an entirely new vernacular, and he threw down the gauntlet to fellow writer-directors as if to say Top this, assholes.

He also happened to come to prominence as the spinning, whizzing media machine began to be the central function of Hollywood rather than a mere by-product of its production line. In the 1990s the buzz machine, the sprawling, relentless entertainment media, became the very engine that made Hollywood run, a monstrous contraption that required constant feeding. And the Quentin Tarantino story was the perfect product to fill the cavernous maw.

The only thing is, a lot of the story wasn’t true.

T
HE MYTH THAT WORKED FOR THE LIKES OF
E
SQUIRE
MAGAZINE
and
Entertainment Tonight
went that Tarantino was a half-breed, white trash school dropout from rural Tennessee who went to work at a video store in Torrance, saw every movie known to mankind, and emerged, miraculously, a brilliant writer and director, a visionary autodidact with his finger on the pulse of his generation.

The reality is something far more subtle and complicated. Quentin Tarantino was not raised in poverty, nor in a white trash environment, nor as a hillbilly. He was from a broken home, but his mother was unusually intelligent and ambitious, and she did all she could to associate her son with the bourgeois values of the
upper-middle class: education, travel, material success. Which Quentin chose to utterly reject.

After Quentin became a media star, his mother, Connie Zastoupil, was horrified to see a distorted view of his background spun into myth. After journalist Peter Biskind interviewed her for
Premiere
magazine, she was mortified by the first sentence that referred to Tarantino’s background as “half Cherokee, half hillbilly.” At the time, “I was the president of an accounting firm; my lawyer sent it to me,” she said in 2003. “You have no idea the humiliation that caused me. Nobody ever got beyond that one sentence.” She refused to talk to journalists for years after that.

C
ONNIE
M
C
H
UGH WAS BORN IN
T
ENNESSEE, AND SHE DID
indeed come from a middle-class, redneck background, half-Cherokee and half-Irish. But she was raised in Cleveland, Ohio. Her father, who was violent, owned a garage. Her mother, an alcoholic, was a housewife. From a young age she determined to get away from all of that. “I had a really bizarre childhood,” she explained. “I lied, schemed, and cheated to get out of that home.”

Ahead of her age group in school, Connie moved to California at age twelve to live with an aunt. She stayed for a year until her parents moved to Southgate, a small town in southern California, and made her move back with them.

When she was fourteen years old, Connie met would-be actor Tony Tarantino while horseback riding at the Buena Vista Stables, in Burbank. She looked older than her age and never told him she was fourteen. “Tony Tarantino fancied himself an actor. He had attended Pasadena Playhouse and taken classes there,” she said. “I married him to get away from that home. I had no desire to get married. I wasn’t really even into boys. I wasn’t sexually aware or precocious.” She got pregnant at fourteen but left Tarantino within four months. Connie has always told people that she got pregnant at sixteen, because “the minute a girl from the wrong kind of background gets into trouble, she’s trash. I had professional aspirations, class aspirations—I really wanted out. From the time I was a small
child I knew there was something more in life for me; and education was going to be my way out of there.” Instead, she finished high school and moved back to Knoxville, Tennessee (her parents had left California and gone back to Tennessee), where she attended nursing school. Her mother cared for Quentin in the first two years, but Connie was in a hurry to get out of the south.

By age nineteen, she moved back to California “to get my life in order,” as she puts it. She got a job in a doctor’s office in Hacienda Heights, outside of Los Angeles, then met her second husband, Curt Zastoupil, at a local nightclub. He was twenty-five years old and worked as the pianist and guitarist in a family restaurant and bar. They married, and she sent for Quentin, aged three.

It was the 1960s, and Connie Zastoupil began to climb the corporate ladder. The doctor’s office where she worked became a partnership and eventually morphed into Cigna, the giant medical insurer. She quickly became a manager there and eventually rose to become the vice president of Cigna health plans in California.

“I was a little corporate geek wannabe,” she recalled. “When I was home with Quentin our life revolved around fun. We had hunting falcons, we fenced. We got kicked out of one apartment for our outrageous hobbies—fencing on a balcony. My husband was very eclectic; we had eclectic friends. We never left Quentin with a babysitter; if we went to an archery range, he’d come in the back of the car. We took him to every movie, regardless of whether it was appropriate, from the time he was three.”

Quentin spent a lot of time with Curt Zastoupil, who became his father for a time, and whose extended family became, permanently, his extended family. “Curt did love him,” said Connie. “He was his caretaker when I was working, because I worked days; he worked nights. Curt provided a steady stream of musicians, actors, poets—all the creative stream. I was the corporate drudge. I loved movies. We lived at the movie theater. Movies were a part of our lives. We went often and would do double, triple features.”

So Quentin Tarantino never lived in a trailer park. The closest he came to living a hillbilly life was at age eight, when his mother sent him to live in Knoxville, Tennessee, for a year when she was
diagnosed—erroneously, it turned out—with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Quentin lived with Connie’s alcoholic mother, who was verbally abusive and went off on drunken benders. It was also about that time that Connie divorced Curt Zastoupil. The divorce was devastating to Quentin, depriving him of the one stable male figure he’d known.

Beyond these turbulent moments in Quentin’s young life, he was a restless young man. As fate would have it, God handed the success-oriented, upwardly mobile Connie Zastoupil a downwardly mobile, academically averse child.

He was restless and had a short attention span. An early grade-school teacher wanted him to be put on Ritalin; Connie resisted, fearing the consequences of medicating her son. That teacher left a painful imprint on him, once telling him, “You’re so unlovable, I don’t understand how your mother can love you.” He told the story to his mother when he became a teenager, still a painful memory. But Quentin’s aversion to school never changed. He hated to go. He hated homework. School became, and always was, a place of discomfort for him.

From fourth grade he attended private school, Hawthorne Christian School, after his mother bought a sprawling house—thirty-five hundred square feet—in El Segundo, near Torrance, in the wake of the divorce. But things did not go better there. Quentin had sprouted into a tall kid and would get picked on for sticking out. His personal grooming was abominable, and he dressed like a slob. He didn’t want to be with upper-class kids and begged his mother to let him transfer back to public school, which she did in seventh grade. But by the ninth or tenth grade, he refused to go back to school at all.

“I knew you couldn’t force a teenager to go to school; he’d go on the streets and get into more trouble,” Connie explained. “And with Quentin I feared it would be worse than truancy. He’s a leader. He wouldn’t be passive. At least if I let him stay home, he’d be doing relatively harmless things, writing screenplays, watching TV. He’d be off the streets.”

So what Quentin did was watch TV and movies. All day. He was obsessively interested in movies, and he became a pop culture sponge. It was the sum total of his education. He began to write.
His mother would come home from work and find Quentin’s scribbles on every available piece of paper, filling every yellow legal pad she brought from work. “He was sleeping all day, watching TV all night, and scribbling on paper. Pardon me if I didn’t recognize that as genius,” she admits. “I thought it was avoidance of responsibility and living in a dream world.”

The division between Quentin’s take on the world and his mother’s had become painfully obvious. She wanted to send him to Europe on vacation. He wouldn’t go. She wanted to buy him designer clothes. He insisted on dressing like a slob, in torn T-shirts; he wouldn’t bathe. Connie could never understand Quentin’s slacker attitude, and for a very long time didn’t take his interest in movies seriously.

“I’d get after Quentin about glamorizing poverty or the wrong side of the tracks, and he’d talk about Robert Blake not caring about the way he looked or dressed,” she recalled. “I was after Quentin about grooming, which was dismal. And his bedroom, and the attitude: It wasn’t important. Education wasn’t important. Nothing was important except movies. Hollywood. And at that time, although I was very entertainment-oriented, it drove me crazy.”