Cinema Speculation, Quentin Tarantino’s first non-fiction book, revolves around his love for movies, storytelling and filmmaking. Born in 1963, Tarantino’s childhood influences consisted of mostly 70s films. Tarantino describes watching countless movies as a kid in Hollywood’s Tiffany Theater, the Carson Twin Cinema and the Pussycat Theater. Tarantino details an influential cinematic moment in 1972 when his mother’s boyfriend Reggie, a professional football player, took him to see the Jim Brown blaxploitation film Black Gunn.
Tarantino connects films, scripts and stories in the book involving Coppola, Scorsese, DePalma, Peckinpah, Ford, McQueen, DeNiro, Coburn, Eastwood, Bogdanovich, Siegel, Altman, Milius, Corman, Hitchcock, Hopper, Welles, and Friedkin. He deconstructs movies and explains the filmmaking process with a well-reasoned analysis of each film’s results.
In the middle of the book there’s a 1966 article by Barry Brown from Castles of Frankenstein #10 titled “The True Facts Behind Lugosi’s Tragic Drug Addiction”, featuring “one of the last pictures ever taken of Bela Lugosi”. Great stuff.
Like Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song, Tarantino writes little about his own work except from personal experience allowing the reader to gain insight regarding Tarantino’s films. He provides glimpses into the business few can deliver. Cinema Speculation contains arcane facts like Steve McQueen hated reading scripts and his first wife, Neile, read and provided McQueen a synopsis for each script. Tarantino explores the 1972 Sam Peckinpah film The Getaway based on the Jim Thompson novel.
On page 288, Tarantino writes about a classic underdog story. “From that point on cynicism in the Seventies cinema was dead on arrival. Needless to say as a young boy at the time, I loved Sylvester Stallone. I loved everything about him. I loved Rocky, I loved him in Rocky, I loved the story how he wrote Rocky (easily the most inspirational Hollywood story I ever heard).”
The last essay–“Floyd Footnote”–renders the book worth its price, but no spoilers here.
Any film fan should read Cinematic Speculation…