Rebels on the Backlot by Sharon Waxman Read Free Book Online Page B

believes Tarantino’s talent has never been in originating ideas; instead it resides in his ability to refine and synthesize the ideas of others.
    “Quentin is extraordinary at homage,” she observed years later. “He pays homage to other people’s words and visions. He can retool other words, put it to his own pentameter, bring his own voice. Quentin can take the material on the page, or on the screen, and pump a whole new perspective into it. He can tell it in a new way. He doesn’t mimic people.” For Jaymes, like for critics and fans, Tarantino’s ability to synthesize the culture was entirely unique, and more than enough to be thankful for in a movie world dominated by studio pap. But it wasn’t enough for Tarantino. He didn’t want his audience to know that it didn’t all flow seamlessly from his own pen.
    Cathryn Jaymes had taken Hamann on as an actor client after he worked in her office as a secretarial assistant, among his other jobs. One day in the mid-1980s he brought his friend Tarantino around to her office.
    At the time, Tarantino didn’t have much to recommend him; he was an aspiring actor but not exactly a kid at age twenty-five. He had no credits, no acting reel.
    But he definitely had something. He walked into Jaymes’s live-in office in a ripped T-shirt and jeans, with his hangdog shuffle, and he did the quintessential Quentin performance, spouting stream-of-consciousness movie ideas, holding forth passionately about his favorite movies, about his plans to act and make movies himself. He was funny, gregarious, charming—and engagingly manic. Jaymes, then thirty-four years old, loved him immediately and at the end of the meeting said simply: “I have no doubt you will become a major force in the industry.” She signed him.
    Later she recalled, “I wasn’t sure what he had but he was so charming. He was this compelling oddball.”
    Tarantino was determined to act, so at first Jaymes got him jobsdoing just that. She called up a friend, a casting agent over at the television show
The Golden Girls.
They needed an Elvis impersonator for one episode, and Jaymes touted her new client as “Elvis meets Charlie Manson.” He got the walk-on, his first real job in show business.
    By the second half of the 1980s, Jaymes represented all three of the us-against-the-world clique—Tarantino, Avary, and Hamann—and played den mother to them all. They became like family, and even began to speak in the same stream-of-consciousness rhythm, a sort of Quentinese. Jaymes particularly took care of Tarantino, who seemed oblivious to the needs of taking care of himself. She fed him, made sure he got to his appointments, and paid his expenses when he was utterly broke. But in these same years he began churning out a number of screenplays:
True Romance, Natural Born Killers
, and
Reservoir Dogs
, all with the common vocabulary of casual, brutal violence and a raging intensity to the story line.
    From the start, the combination of Jaymes and Tarantino seemed odd. Jaymes was a corn-fed Midwesterner and the daughter of a Presbyterian minister, a petite, beautiful blond who had spent years surfing off the coast of Mexico and Central America before drifting into Hollywood. She had a heart of gold and seemed to lack the killer instinct required for Hollywood. She never cared. “When I go,” she once said, “I know I’ll have done my best to be kind to people and to be fair and honest in my business.” This was not a formula for getting ahead in Hollywood. On the other hand, Jaymes was passionate about her clients and was not easily put off when she believed in someone. That was certainly the case with Tarantino, and yet it still seemed strange; Jaymes was single, took in housefuls of stray cats, and used words like “Jiminy Christmas” and “goldarn” instead of the foul language spouted by Tarantino and his friends. She found herself fighting for a client who—apart from bathing only rarely—seemed to use the