Recently I’ve been listening to the Video Archives podcast, hosted by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary, in which they, along with Roger’s daughter, Gala, and occasional guests, discuss movies from the catalog of the long-shuttered Manhattan Beach video store at which Quentin and Roger once worked. It’s an interesting show, covering the whole range of film, from prestige studio films to cheesy low-budget sci-fi flicks, many of which happen to be screening at Tarantino’s L.A. revival theater, the New Beverly Cinema, around the time each of the films’ discussion goes online.
I started listening to the podcast because I have a somewhat tenuous connection with Tarantino; my best friend in 10th grade was a guy named Steve Polyi; at the end of that school year, my mom decided we had to pack up and move to West Covina, the place where strip-malls go to die. I had to leave all my friends behind, along with the spinner rack I had acquired from a local liquor store. While I was making a new life in the town that Crazy Ex-Girlfriend mocks, “Stevo” became the proud owner of my beloved spinner rack; eventually he also became became one of Quentin’s co-workers at Video Archives.
You can find both the real Stevo and fictionalized versions of him in some of Tarantino’s films. He’s Tim in Kill Bill. In Reservoir Dogs, the story that Mr. Orange tells about going into a train station bathroom carrying a brick of pot and finding himself face-to-face with four cops and a drug-sniffing dog…
That actually happened to Stevo. He also played the cop on the left in the screenshot above. Lance, the stoner in the bathrobe played by Eric Stoltz in Pulp Fiction? That’s based on Stevo during the time he and Quentin were roommates. Floyd, the stoner in True Romance? Likewise. Stevo also played a background character called “Bong-Boy” in Roger Avary’s Rules of Attraction. I’m sensing a theme here.
As Stevo later told me when we got back in contact some years ago, “lotta drugs in the ’80s, man.” He was by then a writer for the E! television network. We exchanged emails a few times and talked about getting together sometime, but he died unexpectedly before we could make any plans. Too many years later, I started listening to Quentin’s podcast hoping to hear some stories that Stevo hadn’t told me about their wacky hijinks at the store and in the movies. I’ve not been disappointed.
In their weekly email newsletter not long ago, the podcast producers asked a question, and since we use the whole buffalo here, I figured I could answer it in public…
I’ve got a question for you – if Quentin or Roger were hanging out with you and your friends at a bar, and everyone came back to your apartment for a drink, and got to see your movie shelf (as detailed in this episode)…what would it say about you? Would you feel proud? Anxious? What movie would you feel most excited to show off?
What would it say about me?
That I’m equal parts whitebread and weirdo. My video shelf is mostly pedestrian middle-class movies (but ranging from the ‘30s to the present day), with a lot of animation…
…children’s movies and shows…
…cult flicks…
…and more than a few objectively awful….
.. and weird ones thrown in.
Would I feel proud or anxious?
Nah. I long ago gave up worrying about what other people think of me. I can’t describe any of my movies as “guilty pleasures,” because I feel no guilt or shame about any of them. Your opinion of me is none of my business.
What movie would I feel most excited to show off?
Not necessarily “show off,” but eagerly share. I’d say a few of my favorite films that none of my friends have ever heard of would be the the ones below. (Most of these were previously discussed in a post titled “On the Way to ETEWAF” about five years back, when most of them were still unavailable or hideously expensive. Times change.)
Sidney Lumet’s Garbo Talks (Anne Bancroft’s greatest performance)…
Jim Kouf’s Miracles (Tom Conti and Teri Garr in a wonderful comedy)…
…and two other Tom Conti films, Reuben, Reuben (Kelly McGillis’ debut)…
… and Saving Grace (in which the Pope accidentally gets locked out of the Vatican).
Also a few forgotten TV shows and streaming things…
I would be curious to hear Quentin & Roger’s takes on any of these.
Danger 5 is awesome…as is Middlemen.
I’m not enamored of Quentin Tarantino; so I could give a rat’s keister what he would think and my friends know I don’t care what people think about my stuff; I like what I like, My collection is a mix of classics, favorites, odd little things, genres, countries and what not. One factor is stuff I saw on some tv channel, that caught my attention, back in my youth. That is everything from light comedy Hello Down There (Tony Randall and Janet Leigh, with their family, in an underwater habitat, along with a very young Richard Dreyfuss) to Kings of the Sun (Yul Brynner as a Native American whose tribe encounters exiled Mayans), to Drive-In (a night at a small town Texas drive-in theater, complete with fake disaster movie that plays throughout) to socio-political satires like Lindsay Anderson’s trilogy with Malcolm McDowell (If, O Lucky Man, Britannia Hospital) to a bunch of war movies that involve commandos blowing something up, Bond films, spy spoofs, sci-fi, noir and films of foreign directors like Pedro Almodovar, Luc Besson, Paul Verhoeven, Jean-Pierre Melville, and Antonio Margheriti.
I have Disney fare, like Candleshoe & Freaky Friday right next to things like La Haine and Z. I have some silly lightweight stuff, too, like The 3 Fantastic Superman and several lucha movies (Mexican wrestlers vs vampires & monsters), spaghetti westerns, gangster films, westerns, romantic comedies (especially late 50s and 60s stuff, I saw as a kid, on tv) and a bunch of British comedy and detective series.
The thing that most surprised me about the podcast is that Tarantino is far more passionate about a far wider range of film genres that I gave him credit for, and speaks with depth and nuance about some surprising choices. His public image is of a guy who only cares about hyper-violent films in the style of ’70s grindhouse flicks, so it was a bit of a shock when he devoted an entire episode to rhapsodizing over THE GREAT WALDO PEPPER. To be sure, a lot of the films they discuss are “revenge-o-matic” flicks and obscure low-budget movies of exactly the sort you’d expect. But I never would have guessed how much he likes RUSTLER’S RHAPSODY, for example.
Well, it is a great Old Time Western spoof.
I own some of Tarantino’s films; but I think the worship of him gets ridiculous. He’s good at what he does, but it isn’t original. Nothing wrong with that, but just recognize what it is. Kind of the same feeling about Grant Morrison.
I always enjoyed stumbling across a film and then have it turn out to be something that really grabs me; but isn’t a big hit film. Weekend afternoon movies could be good for that, like when I saw The Night They Raided Minsky’s, one Saturday afternoon. No idea what I was watching, except they were doing comedy sketches on stage, and Britt Eklund is a dancer who performs Biblical stories and sees a burlesque show. Kind of a dark film, often funny, way over my head for the age I saw it…but, it wasn’t one that too many people seemed to have seen. Saw it only once in a video store. Cable, in the early days, was good for that. I once saw what I thought was another Harry Palmer spy film (the spy series with Michael Caine) and it turned out to be the theatrical version of the pilot for Callan, the British tv spy series, with Edward Woodward. Saw that on the USA Network, never saw it on video in the US. Same for an Australian comedy, Touch and Go, about a group of women who disguise themselves as men to pull off robberies, to fund a school for orphans (or special needs, or something like that). They then target a resort hotel/casino, on an island and have to expand their team. Not a great film; but an interesting idea that is handled in an entertaining fashion. I actually tracked down copies of both.
Cinemax, in the early-mid 80s was good for that kind of thing. They got the bigger films, after HBO, but had a lot of lesser seen films that were actually pretty good and interesting foreign films. This was before they really became Skinemax, though they had bits and pieces, like the Emanuelle films.
I dislike the question because like “What’s on your iPod?” (which used to be a clever interview question about 20 years ago) the interviewer can take any view they want, positive or negative. Which is not a reflection on your collection: I’ve marked a couple of films to look for later.
5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. is a delight.
Middle Man is just awesome. I rewatched the series relatively recently, then read the two sequel graphic novels to wrap the whole thing up — though the resolution to Wendy’s father still doesn’t work for me.
Well, I also have Bubba Ho-Tep and 5000 Fingers of Dr. T. Still haven’t watched the latter.
Recently I cataloged all my DVDs, Blu-Rays, and 4Ks, and I’m somewhere north of 900 movies on disc. Most of which I probably haven’t looked at. This is in addition to still having a bin full of VHS tapes and a couple bins of CEDs for the RCA SelectaVision.
In the past several years I discovered Dollar Tree was a good place to find DVDs and Blu-Rays and ended up buying a lot of junk there. Basically, if I ever thought I’d want to see it before I died, I picked it up. Their stock has seriously dwindled in the past year or so, but thanks to them, and also Big Lots, my shelves are overflowing.
The best/most obscure movie I have is probably Vinegar Syndrome’s release of Deadly Games/Dial Code Santa Claus. It’s incredible, pre-dating Home Alone in its story of a (French) boy left alone in a giant Gilliam-eseque mansion when a killer dressed as Santa Claus breaks in.
Another great one is the VelociPastor, a no-budget movie (about a priest who turns into a dinosaur and fights ninjas) that you assume is going to be crappy until you begin to realize the director knows exactly what he’s doing and it becomes legitimately good.
I also really loved Coherence, a mostly improvised micro-budget indie starring Xander from Buffy about friends at a dinner party who end up encountering alternate universes.
And of course I have Mac and Me, for which I will go to my grave swearing is better than E.T.
Okay, VelociPastor is definitely on my “must see” list now. That’s got to be a seven layer dip of weird.
Streaming free on a couple of Amazon apps. It’s one of the few times someone’s set out to make a deliberately bad (by most standards) movie and not made an unintentionally bad one.
Coherence is interesting. I watched it for my time-travel films book.
Velocipastor is free to stream; I’ve bookmarked it. Have you ever see Kung Fury, about a cop/martial artist traveling back in time to battle Adolf Hitler, the Kung Fuehrer?
I’m fairly certain I did, but I should rewatch it. I believe the feature-length sequel is supposed to come out one of these days.