![]() I saw Jackie Brown for the first time in the spring of 1998, in a living room in Northampton, Massachusetts. “There’s a college boy under there after all,” the hairdresser said, when I let her cut my hair short a few weeks later. I only knew it was the coolest thing I’d ever seen. Was there something in this stuttering, violent, profane, uproarious jumble that suggested a way out, an alternative? I sensed, dimly, that those were the stakes, though I had no idea how to think about the question I still half-thought Tarantino had invented surf rock. Had I just watched a person’s ear being cut off? We all knew corporate pop culture was trying to kill us. Afterward, I rewound the tape, feeling dazed. Blonde”-I still thought of my own hair, which I wore in a floppy ’90s cut, as blond, my childhood color, though anyone else would have said it had turned brown a year ago. In our living room, I pushed the videotape into the machine. ![]() Other things of which I had no firsthand knowledge-again, a partial list-included: Los Angeles, the early films of Stanley Kubrick, the spaghetti Western tradition, and the existence of a gangster-movie industry in Hong Kong. I still knew nothing about Tarantino except that Pulp Fiction, which I’d already been to see a second time, made my brain unfold like a kaleidoscope. I’d seen the internet once-my uncle had a CompuServe account, and had shown me how he could check the weather anywhere in the United States, a trick that struck me as almost offensively useless-but I’d never been online myself. I rented it on VHS, from the Blockbuster Video on 14th Street. I saw Reservoir Dogs for the first time the very next weekend. The world, I thought, is bigger than I knew. He seemed to have spoken to me in a language I’d never heard before and hadn’t realized I understood. Quentin Tarantino, whoever he was, seemed not only to speak my language in a way no film director ever had. It was dusk, and the sky looked huge and strange. Afterward, I came out into the enormous parking lot, which was almost empty of cars. Vincent Vega opened the briefcase the orange-gold light of magic poured out onto his face. My friend Cindy from orchestra was working the box office, behind a sheet of plexiglass with cutouts for air and money. How the ‘Inglourious Basterds’ Were Born The Ballad of Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio Tarantinoesque: The Making of the Last Great Celebrity Director Other things I had never heard of-a partial list-would include: film noir, postmodernism, the artistic technique of pastiche, the French New Wave, surf rock, Anna Karina, and pulp fiction. I liked going to the movies by myself because I thought it seemed romantic. I’d been driving around looking for something to do, and Pulp Fiction happened to be starting. I wasn’t really curious about it, though. ![]() I’d heard of the movie, barely, because at the other theater in town, the Northpark Four-“the good theater,” as we called it-there were posters in the lobby of John Travolta wearing long hair and a black suit and Bruce Willis wearing boxing gloves. ![]() I was 18 I’d never heard of Quentin Tarantino. I saw Pulp Fiction for the first time in the fall of 1994, at the Ponca Plaza Twin in Ponca City, Oklahoma. Here now, a life through the films of QT. We’ll drill down on his extraordinary rise from video store clerk to filmmaking legend and talk to the man himself about his long career. To celebrate, we’re looking back at the best of QT-the best scenes, the best stunts, the best dialogue. This week marks the release of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, director Quentin Tarantino’s ninth feature film. ![]()
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