A Look at 33 Years Ago Today, A Quentin Tarantino Masterpiece Hit Theaters (& He Didn’t Even Direct It)
Quentin Tarantino made his name with his first movie, Reservoir Dogs, in 1992. However, that wasn’t Tarantino’s first script, and that first script ended up getting made into a movie that was released one year after his own directorial debut. While Tarantino got his break thanks to the Sundance Institute and meeting actors who showed interest in Reservoir Dogs, he wrote a few other scripts that he chose not to make. In fact, the first script that Tarantino sold to Hollywood was written while he was working at Video Archives, the rental store where he built his massive film knowledge.
That script was for a movie called True Romance, and while he originally wanted to direct it, he lost interest and sold the script. The result was a movie released between Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, and a film that holds up well to both of those.
A Quentin Tarantino Masterpiece Hit Between Reservoir Dogs & Pulp Fiction
True Romance ended up being directed by Tony Scott, someone who previously found great success with Top Gun. However, after seeing the movie, Tarantino admitted that it was almost exactly how he envisioned it when he wrote the script, with the exception of the ending, which Scott changed against Tarantino’s wishes. That said, when Tarantino watched the movie, he decided that Scott made the right decision with the changes based on the way that the director made the film.
True Romance stars Christian Slater as Clarence Worley, a young man who meets a woman named Alabama Whitman (Patricia Arquette) at a Detroit theater showing kung fu movies. She admits she is a call girl that Clarence’s boss hired as a birthday present, but after they sleep together, she admits that she has fallen in love with him, and they get married the next day. When the ghost of Elvis Presley (Val Kilmer) tells him to kill her abusive pimp, Drexl Spivey (Gary Oldman), he goes to the brothel, kills Drexl, and takes what he thinks is Alabama’s bag. That bag isn’t hers and is full of cocaine, which belongs to the local mob.
Clarence and Alabama run for their lives, and things don’t look good for the young lovers. The cast here is incredible. Slater and Arquette are both great, and hearing but never seeing Kilmer as the voice of Elvis is always fun. Add in Brad Pitt in a tiny role as a stoner, Dennis Hopper as Clarence’s dad, Oldman as Drexl, and Christopher Walken as a mob consigliere, and this is a stacked cast. That isn’t even the tip of the iceberg either, as Scott loads this movie up with some of Hollywood’s top stars.
True Romance has a 93% fresh Rotten Tomatoes score from both the critics and the audience, and it deserves it. The acting is great, and the movie is full of Tarantino’s trademark dialogue. It is also a very violent movie, especially one hard-to-watch scene where James Gandolfini’s enforcer gets his hands on Alabama. It is even easier to see with the changes to the ending, where Clarence and Alabama escape alive, that this could have been a nice start to the Natural Born Killers story that Tarantino also wrote.
In the end, True Romance is a movie that feels more like a Tarantino movie than a Tony Scott movie. With great dialogue, incredible characters, and a very violent story, this is the film that Tarantino is proud to call one of his own, unlike Natural Born Killers, which he has disowned.
True Romance Was Tarantino’s First Screenplay
Quentin Tarantino didn’t get his start at a film school or by learning under other masters. He was a clerk at a film rental store called Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California. While working there, Tarantino watched movies non-stop and tried to see everything he could. He then soaked in all the beats, cues, and moments from these films and became an encyclopedia of knowledge. Anyone who has watched a Tarantino movie will see influences from everything from classic noir films and kung fu movies to blaxploitation, gangster flicks, and Westerns. Everything has been fair game for Tarantino.
While working at Video Archives, he wrote a script called Love Birds in Bondage, which he then made as a short film. Tarantino then wrote and directed a movie called My Best Friend’s Birthday in 1987, but it was unfinished. That said, some of the dialogue from this movie was used for True Romance, which was the first feature-length script that Tarantino sold.
The next script that he wrote was for Reservoir Dogs, and Tarantino finally made his first feature-length film, a release that made him a star. While working on his next film, which would be his breakout, Pulp Fiction, True Romance was released, and it proved that Tarantino was a master screenwriter, even if he wasn’t the man behind the camera.
