This is creepy in every possible way, but somehow it all fits.
I’ve been reading Matthew Polly’s amazingly inspirational Bruce Lee: A Life and it now fits even more.
I have in no way Quentin Tarantino’s writing or cinematic abilities, but I’ve lived an odd doppelganger existence with him.
Except for his love of cheap exploitation movies, we seem to have been obsessed with exactly the same things.
I don’t think that there has ever been a Hollywood figure subject to more exploitation movies than Bruce Lee, and I don’t really want to be a party to another.
Before “Reservoir Dogs” came out and announced Quentin Tarantino to the world in 1992, I had written very little, but what I had written all had to do with Elvis Presley, pop culture, and alternate angst ridden versions of television shows, movies and comic books.
The first thing I ever wrote was obsessed with Elvis.
The second thing I ever wrote was this weird alternate hyper-realistic, dread filled version of the show Mr. Ed. It was very short and is still the best thing I’ve ever written.
It led me to the only great idea I ever had, which was basically a low brow version of Tom Stoppard’s “Rosencrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead.”
It was a re-imagining of Clark Kent’s life if he never saw the need to become Superman and instead just obsessed over his accidental existence as a god among mortals. He thinks too much, he plays and destroys major league baseball, he winds up in World War II and sort of ambivalently ends it.
It was a weird mash up of Superman, Bernard Malumud’s “The Natural,” Bill Veeck, circus freaks, Hitler, and perhaps 50 other characters that existed on paper or in real life.
I started writing it in 1988 and had about half of it done by 1990. I called it an “existential cartoon” and I stole it’s title from Samuel Beckett’s “Waiting for Godot.”
I called it “Waiting for Clark Kent.” and finished it in 1995.
I thought it was unpublishable because I had stolen and morphed from so many previous works that were well copyrighted and mentioned so many real historical figures doing things that they had never done. I had no idea that it could be published as a parody.
Only one person ever read it, but did like it. I have no idea how well executed it was, but I never wrote any fiction again ever.
If I had any fictional abilities or training, then I wouldn’t have written something that just mashed up and bizarrely altered 1000 different things and my personal life story in the first place.
Then I just sort of sat back and watched all these super successful versions of the same thing make tons of money and get tons of acclaim. I can list like 100 of the top of my head.
I had zero influence on that because other than sending part of it to the Iowa’s Writer’s Workshop and getting rejected in a Quixotic attempt to get out of the securities industry by only applying to the best graduate writing program in the country (Maybe those guys stole it!), I never did a thing with it.
All I had was the notion and belief that I decided to steal from Tom Stoppard and mix it with pop culture first, and the one who slapped me in the face with it the most was Quentin Tarantino, who I knew instantly that I had no chance of competing with talent wise.
The worst moment for me was in 2004 when I saw him take my entire novel, execute it better, and dismiss with one monologue at the end of “Kill Bill: Volume Two.”
Bill: As you know, I’m quite keen on comic books. Especially the ones about superheroes. I find the whole mythology surrounding superheroes fascinating. Take my favorite superhero, Superman. Not a great comic book. Not particularly well-drawn. But the mythology… The mythology is not only great, it’s unique.
The Bride: How long does this shit take to go into effect?
Bill: About two minutes, just long enough for me to finish my point. Now, a staple of the superhero mythology is, there’s the superhero and there’s the alter ego. Batman is actually Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man is actually Peter Parker. When that character wakes up in the morning, he’s Peter Parker. He has to put on a costume to become Spider-Man. And it is in that characteristic Superman stands alone. Superman didn’t become Superman. Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he’s Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red “S”, that’s the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears, the glasses, the business suit, that’s the costume. That’s the costume Superman wears to blend in with us. Clark Kent is how Superman views us. And what are the characteristics of Clark Kent. He’s weak. He’s unsure of himself. He’s a coward. Clark Kent is Superman’s critique on the whole human race.
Superman wasn’t my favorite superhero, Spider-man was, but the character’s bland use and great mythology was the entire reason I wrote what I did write and I did it to critique myself.
The whole thing was about how small and insignificant I felt, and I felt infinitely more small and insignificant after I watched that!
By the time a documentary had come out called “Waiting for Superman” in 2010, it hardly mattered.
Everything I stole Tarantino also stole, but he stole more and he stole it better. Subtract my sports stuff, replace it with his love of cheaply made violent movies, double my movie catalog and my American bias, add in his knowledge of camera angles, visuals and his ear for dialog and you can get from me to him.
He formed perfect dialog imitating other movies, music, books, breakfast cereals, and anything else around.
He was a white geek trying to imitate hipster beatnik white guys who tried to act like black guys like Norman Mailer wrote about and Lenny Bruce did and so was I.
It was like tenth generation cultural appropriation of the post Elvis era from two guys that never left the room their television was in except to go to the movies and buy comic books.
“True Romance” was a fairy tale, but it was exactly the fairy tale I would want to write for myself, but couldn’t, and I fell in love with a girl who was willing to use references from it to show her love for me.
That Beatles outfit he put himself and his characters into was exactly the Beatles outfit that I put myself into for the first real dance I attended.
One thing I was obsessed about was the Manson Family, but it was way too creepy for me to fictionalize. I accidentally saw the abominable crime scene photos from the book “Helter Skelter” and haven’t been able to turn away from that horror ever since.
Nothing is too creepy or horrible for Tarantino to either exploit or turn into art. Given my perspective he usually does both.
Everything seems creepy about Tarantino’s upcoming movie “Once upon a Time in America,” that was originally slated to come out on the 50th anniversary of the Tate killings.
I already knew that Tarantino was obsessed with the Manson killings because he begged Christopher Jones, the star of “Wild in the Streets,” to be in both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction.
Here is Jones playing rock star, cult leader Max Frost lip syncing his theme song “Shapes of Things to Come in the film in 1968. Richard Pryor actually played his drummer.
Jones probably would have been a big star, but when his friend Sharon Tate died, he became immersed in it and withered away. He even lived in the guest house on the property where William Garretson basically slept through the entire thing.
Here is a not even close to complete list of creepy things about Tarantino’s next movie:
- Everything about Charles Manson and Hollywood.
- Tarantino’s obsession with both Charles Manson and Hollywood.
- The Harvey Weinstein scandal, the fact that all of Tarantino’s previous films were produced by Weinstein and that Tarantino might have been complicit of overlooking Weinstein’s crimes, which definitely included obvious bullying and probably include rape.
- Tarantino’s previous atrocious statements about the 13 year old rape victim of Romanski Polanski, who was married to Sharon Tate when she was killed carrying his baby.
- Everything about Roman Polanski.
- The fact that Jones after his death was accused of raping a woman in that same house weeks after the murders happened and that perhaps if Jones were alive Tarantino would still want him to be in the movie.
- The movie’s original release date.
- All of the stars who will be in it that have connections to Weinstein, because pretty much every star does. Right now that cast seems to include: Leonardo DiCaprio (who has been with endless women and is known to have led something called the “Pussy Posse”), Brad Pitt (who apparently threatened to put a beat down on Weinstein defending Gwyneth Paltrow when he was dating her, but then was with tons of women and didn’t ever really expose Weinstein), Al Pacino (Everything about Al Pacino is a bit creepy. He has a lifelong feud with Jack Nicholson, who owned the house where Polanski committed his rape. He worked with Kevin Spacey. His acting has gotten a ton creepier as he’s aged, and since 2000 he’s portrayed Roy Cohn, Jack Kevorkian, Phil Spector and Joe Paterno), Kurt Russell (No one says anything bad about Kurt, but the last words Walt Disney may have uttered were his name, and he was very creepy in Tarantino’s “Death Proof,” which was initially released as part of Grindhouse.), Dakota Fanning (over-sexualized by Hollywood since a very young age who at 16 played Cherie Currie a singer who was over-sexualized at 15 in Hollywood, and was allegedly present when a band mate was either statutorily raped or just raped at 16), Emile Hirsch (career went south after being arrested for assaulting a female Hollywood executive), Margot Robbie (just played Tonya Harding), Burt Reynolds (contentious divorce with Loni Anderson and last two notable roles were over a decade ago when he played a sleazy politician in “Striptease” and a porn king in “Boogie Nights.),” Timothy Olyphant (I love him, but he played a creepy drug dealer in “Go,” and co-starred with Hirsch in “The Girl Next Door” as the sleaziest purveyor of child porn ever), Michael Madsen (cut off a guys ear in “Reservoir Dogs” and pretty much is the first one called for any role characterized as creepy), Tim Roth (the guy lying in blood for most of “Reservoir Dogs”), and James Remar (who played one of the most psychotic villains ever in “48 Hrs.” and the ghost mentor to a serial killer in “Dexter”).
No one has a clue what Quentin Tarantino is going to do with all that, but I can’t imagine a crazier, more disturbing project in cinema history. The only way to make it sound more disturbing would be to cast Robert Wagner, Christopher Walken, and Natalie Wood’s corpse in it.
An actor named Mike Moh is going to play Bruce Lee in the “Once Upon a Time in America.”
I did know that the Manson murders scared the living shit out of all of Hollywood. The most spooked was probably Steve McQueen. McQueen had an altercation with Manson where he broke Manson’s nose. McQueen was supposed to go out to dinner with Tate the night she was murdered and accidentally avoided it. McQueen also thought he was on a Manson Family hit list after the murders.
I also knew that McQueen was taught by Bruce Lee, was very tight with him, and that Bruce taught many big Hollywood actors at that time.
What I did not know until I just read it in Polly’s book was that Bruce Lee made contact with all of his Hollywood students through Jay Sebring, the celebrity hair stylist, who was killed with Sharon Tate.
I haven’t read yet how exactly this affected Bruce Lee. It had to be less than comforting to him.
Quentin Tarantino’s previous two films were “Inglorious Basterds” and “Django Unchained.” The first was an alternate history where Jews exact revenge by killing every significant Nazi as violently and as gorily as possible. The second was an alternative history where an ex-slave puts as many bullets as he can into every evil person on a Southern Plantation.
I know that Hollywood loves trilogies, but I can’t see even Tarantino doing this again with “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” although I suppose anything is possible with Tarantino.
But now I can’t get the exploitation movie out of my head where instead of Steven Parent showing up at 11:45 p.m to sell a Sony AM-FM Digimatic clock radio to William Garretson and getting killed first by Tex Watson, instead Bruce Lee shows up a few minutes later to hang out, takes care of business, and hunts down Charles Manson.
Please don’t let that movie be made!
Sadly, if it were made, I’d likely pay to see it.
