When is somebody finally going to call bullshit on Quentin Tarantino?
While promoting his new movie Grindhouse to writer Scott Foundas of LA Weekly, Tarantino pulls (at least) two whoppers. First, he mentions an article he wrote on director William Witney for The New York Times. He references it repeatedly, this article he wrote.
Thing is, he wrote no such article. He was interviwed by author Rick Lyman for a series of articles Lyman was doing for The Times in which various film luminaries would screen a favorite film with Lyman and expound upon it as it unreeled. So we'd get harvey Weinstein talking about Exodus, Michael Bay on West Side Story (!), Kevin Smith on A Man For All Seasons--and Tarantino on a Republic western William Witney had directed. In other words, he was interviewed by The Times--he never wrote for it.
In the very same breath, Tarantino spins another fantasy, as he claims the article he "wrote" prompted a flood of responses from old-school auteurist critics and filmmakers who'd never heard of Witney, and were so grateful to the Almighty Quentin for setting them straight.
Uh-huh. The 1978-79 edition of Leonard Maltin's invaluable reference guide TV Movies features a review of William Witney's early seventies Jim Brown vehicle I Escaped from Devil's Island: "This actioner is an insult to vet director Witney's standing with buffs who know his earlier work."
If Leonard Maltin--as mainstream a critic as you could imagine--was making reference in the seventies to the cult of William Witney, it is simply inconceivale that, as Tarantino claims, critics like Andrew Sarris and filmmakers like Peter Bogdanovich had no idea who the man was until The Benevolent Hand Of Quentin showed them the light.
He's lying, in other words. This is a relatively minor instance, but when Tarantino accepts credit for the "brilliant" dialogue in his films, when he knows damn well he may have lifted some of that from other sources (In Kill Bill, David Carradine is given a speech taken entirely from Jules Feiffer's book The Comic Book Heroes), it is theft. When caught, he always claims he intended it as hommage--the last refuge of the cinematic scoundrel.
The sad thing about Tarantino is that he has real talent, both as a writer and director (and I'd dearly love to see him direct somebody else's script), but he seems absolutely uninterested in developing that talent, preferring to stay in permanent fanboy mode, cranking out endless riffs on pop culture arcana, put in the mouths of characters who in reality wouldn't give a shit about any of this. He's like a slightly hipper Kevin Smith, mired in a hopelessly insular worldview, afraid if he goes out on a creative limb that it might reveal his creative shortcomings, or worse, make him seem less cool.
And if there's anything clear about Tarantino, it's that he clearly thinks he's the coolest guy in the room.
