Web posted
April 5, 2007
Tarantino invites film fans into his 'Grindhouse'
Inspiration for film came from director's youth
By GEOFF BOUCHER
Los Angeles Times
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| Courtesy of Dimension films |
 An Ode to mayhem: Rose McGowan, left, and Marley Shelton star in the first segment of "Grindhouse."
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HOLLYWOOD - Some kids love Disneyland, but for little Quentin Tarantino, the happiest place on Earth was always a scabby L.A. movie theater. That's where he could sit in the dark with bloodied samurais, dangerous pimps and zombie brides. His search for the next matinee took him to every freeway and to distant neighborhoods, which is why Tarantino now knows the city like the back of an amputated hand.
Sometimes, it's even hard for the filmmaker to say where the movie screen stops and the real Los Angeles begins.
"I was watching this blaxploitation movie called 'Death Force' at the World Theater, which used to be on Hollywood Boulevard just up from Gower. I'm there watching this movie about these two gangs fighting to take over L.A. They're pulling a 'Scarface,' just killing everyone. Well, (in the movie) two gang members are walking down Hollywood Boulevard and a car pulls up and guns them down right in front of the theater that I'm sitting in! I was like 16, and it remains to this day one of the great moments for me."
No one mixes art house and butcher shop quite the way 43-year-old Tarantino does. And now he is sending a valentine back to the vintage exploitation films that have been his lurid muse: a two-film collaboration with director pal Robert Rodriguez that will be in theaters April 6 under the umbrella title "Grindhouse." Tarantino's contribution is "Death Proof," a juiced-up tale of muscle cars and fistfights, while Rodriguez's "Planet Terror" deals with aliens on a rampage.
For the uninitiated, "grindhouse" is a nickname for the creaky theaters that would "grind" away their projectors for triple features filled with second-run films, exploitation flicks and foreign-film curiosities.
An example of the perfect grindhouse theater, says Tarantino, was the Carson Twin Cinema in the Scottsdale Shopping Center.
"It was family-owned, this cool old Italian guy ran it," he said. "They would show 'Enter the Dragon' and 'The Five Fingers of Death' as a double feature three times a year, because it would always sell out."
The theater had sticky floors and plenty of fights. It's the place that, once he could get into R-rated films, Tarantino would spend his weekends soaking up Italian horror films, pompom-girl flicks and an endless parade of kung fu fights. The dialogue Tarantino heard from the other patrons stuck with him as much as the cheesy lines from the movies; the racial epithets, drug talk and leering blue chatter taught him the celebrated idioms of his characters in "Pulp Fiction," "Reservoir Dogs" and "Jackie Brown."
"I'm never going to be shy about anything, what I write about is what I know; it's more about my version of the truth as I know it," Tarantino said. "That's part of my talent, really - putting the way people really speak into the things I write. My only obligation is to my characters. And they came from where I have been."
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