The Day I Met a Tarantino Legend
In 1991, my mom worked as a production coordinator on a low-budget movie shot largely in downtown Los Angeles. Midway through production, she called to tell me about the young director who beguiled the crew with his boundless energy and enthusiasm. “He reminds everyone why we got into movies,” she said.
The film was Reservoir Dogs and the director was Quentin Tarantino.
I was a struggling screenwriter at the time. My mom befriended Tarantino’s manager Cathryn James and arranged for me to have lunch with her. We hit it off and a year later I was invited to a Christmas party at Cathryn’s Studio City home.
I attended the party alone. Most of the guests were young white male screenwriters managed by or courted by Cathryn. They knew each other and talked about their latest screenplays. One guy wrote a script called Monkey Boy about a half-man half-monkey hybrid born after a gorilla rapes a female zookeeper. Another described his sci-fi Noah’s Ark script about an interplanetary ark crashing on earth and repopulating the world with alien beasts.
Soon, a buzz filled the room. “Quentin’s here,” one of the screenwriters yelled. The front door opened and Tarantino appeared. He hugged Cathryn, grabbed a beer and joined the screenwriters. The scribes surrounded Tarantino as if he were a returning war hero. I stared at the…
