Once Upon a Time...in the Hot Summer

A preface: before I even mention the name of the person whose life experience will be discussed in this essay, I can hear an army of reply guys assembling, ready to volley several “Well, actually...” disputations to the details herein. As a historian, one should be capable of sussing out the messy nuances that binary thinking cannot accommodate, thus I’ve determined which testimonies in the public record can be taken as trustworthy, and which need to be dismissed. As the late Robert Evans pithily said, “There are three sides to every story: yours, mine, and the truth. And nobody is lying.”

In several interviews given to coincide with the release of ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD in 2019, writer/director Quentin Tarantino frequently expounded on general topics that influenced the movie – actors, seminal movies, historical events – but also stressed his own personal relationship to its setting of Los Angeles in the summer of 1969, when he was six years old, and how that perspective would impact the production. In an extended chat with Kim Morgan, he stated the following:

[The] jumping-off point was going to be my memory – as a six-year old sitting in the passenger seat of my stepfather’s Karmann Ghia. And even that shot, that kind of looks up at Cliff as he drives by the Earl Scheib, and all those signs, that’s pretty much my perspective, being a little kid…as a little kid – and probably now too, but especially as a little kid – you see what you want to see. You throw the things you don’t care about out of focus and you throw sharp focus on the things you care about – so… I’m looking out the window and see Los Angeles out in front of me and I’m being more selective about what I’m looking at...And so, in doing a memory piece, I create that landscape.

Tarantino details to Morgan that the films that most shaped his vision were Paul Mazursky’s BOB AND CAROL AND TED AND ALICE, his follow-up ALEX IN WONDERLAND, and Frank Perry’s PLAY IT AS IT LAYS, and as such, these were what he showed the cast in preparation of shooting. Several other titles occasionally would be name checked for providing individual bits of color to the effort as well. However, there is another film, previously cited by the director in the past as a particular favorite of its genre, which has never been mentioned in conjunction with OUATIH, yet, in its own way, carries very striking parallels to the memory mandate lain out before, especially in how its crucial architect (if not its actual captain) chose to memorialize a place and a moment of history…

For roughly one week in late July, 1967, Detroit was engulfed in violence that began with what would have been an ordinary shakedown raid on a black-owned after-hours bar, which led to multiple instances of confrontations with protesters and looting, an excessive and militarized response by government authorities, a horrifying set of murders at the Algiers Hotel committed by police under questionable justification, along with a child killed in her family’s apartment by sniper fire, and federal troops occupying the city by orders of the Governor and the President. When it was declared over, 43 people were dead, 1,189 had been injured, police arrested 7,200 citizens, and more than 2,000 buildings were destroyed.

Gail Parmentier was 12 years old and safely ensconced an hour northeast in Port Huron, living in a conservative Catholic household with a father serving as the county’s superintendent of schools, and four stereotypical jock brothers, when these events were taking place in Detroit. According to the 2010 census, the city was still an 84.0% White population, and logic dictates it would have been even higher back then. But growing up in a city that, in its origin, had been Ojibwa territory until they were forcibly removed by the United States government, and the only site in Michigan where, in 1889, an African-American was lynched, she was not insulated from a legacy of racist brutality. And something about those events in Detroit heavily impacted the adolescent, staying in her consciousness as she otherwise went about joining the spirit squad and the student council in her teens.

As she recounted to AP writer Harry Atkins in 1976, Parmentier’s initially staid trajectory of high school to college to marriage veered off track significantly in 1974 when, during her freshman year at Western Michigan University, she made her first contact with the adult film world. “I had a girlfriend who was dating a guy who managed an adult theatre in Kalamazoo. He was supposed to have had [Cyndee Summers] on hand to sign autographs one day. Well, [she] didn’t show, and he asked us if we’d fill in and fake it – pretend we were the girls in the porn film. We really needed the money, so we said we’d do it.” The signing was a relative success, and it put her into the orbit of the theatre’s owner, Harry Mohney, the state’s most powerful provider of adult entertainment. 

Before he met Gail Parmentier, Harry Mohney had already been a teen runaway, spent a year in reform school after pleading guilty to breaking and entering, married, and kicked around several jobs before finding his niche in operating theatres, drive-ins, and bookstores devoted to erotic entertainment, beginning with one in Saginaw in 1966, to running over 100 locations in 10 states by 1973. Mohney was beginning to contemplate direct involvement in the films that would play his nationwide circuit; the first credit affirmatively tied to him as executive producer (under the alias “Harry Dracma”) was DEVIL’S ECSTASY, a Los Angeles-based project originally initiated as a straight horror film in 1972 under the title SABBAT, but reformatted into a porn film before its release in 1976. Ironically, it starred Cyndee Summers, the actress Parmentier was asked to impersonate in her first job for him. Upon meeting this co-ed pretender in 1974, Mohney was quickly smitten with the 18 year-old, and in short order, courted her, left his wife, made her his longtime companion, and coaxed her to transfer to Michigan State in Lansing, where she was installed as a manager at his Cinema X theatre, one of several he owned. Her whimsical impersonation of Summers would be the first of several instances where she would be providing a cover story for her new boyfriend. 

A year later, tiring of grueling negotiations over booking terms with outside producers, Mohney was ready to proceed with making his own film. He had already optioned a 1972 pulp novel, BLACK ABDUCTOR, by pseudonymous author Harrison James (later revealed to be science fiction writer James Rusk Jr.), a lurid potboiler about an heiress kidnapped by Black radicals that so uncannily predicted several details of the Patty Hearst/SLA affair in 1974 (beginning with the main character being named Patricia), the FBI tracked down and interrogated the author thinking he’d been involved in the case. However, Mohney did not particularly care for the story, and recruited an acquaintance using the alias “T. James Write” to concoct a new screenplay using the same premise of a girl abducted by a gang without the plot points of the novel. There would ultimately be an official film adaptation of BLACK ABDUCTOR made around the same time, under the title ABDUCTION, directed by Joseph Zito, who would later make FRIDAY THE 13TH: THE FINAL CHAPTER and INVASION U.S.A., and shot by João Fernandes, who had previously operated camera on two of the most famous adult films of all time, DEEP THROAT and THE DEVIL IN MISS JONES.

Parmentier, now using the professional name Gail Palmer, had been present for all of Mohney’s activity, and when his project was assembled, she reached back into her teenage experience to make a narrative contribution that would significantly distance it from the Patty Hearst allusions, and construct it into something much more personal. “I wrote HOT SUMMER [IN THE CITY] when I was in high school. It was a real heavy story which I was impelled to write after the Detroit race riots. That was in 1967. I added the sex later, much later,” she told Charles Faber in an interview for The Advocate on March 22, 1979. After adding her material to the existing T. James Write screenplay, Palmer then made his plan viable by using her MSU student status to borrow the school’s 16mm equipment for shooting, and by recruiting amateur striptease performers from live shows she supervised at Cinema X for the cast, along with non-professionals from her college who were also interested in acting. “The students thought I was kidding, but I convinced them they could make $200 a day. They changed their names, every one of them, so their parents wouldn’t find out. My girlfriend, who was my roommate, was the star; she used the name Lisa Baker. The student body was liberal, and most came to see the film. And they were curious to see if they knew any of the actors. HOT SUMMER had to cause a lot of excitement; it was the first porno film made in Michigan.” Mohney supplied a holiday cottage he owned in Kalkaska as the primary location, and the project was shot over the summer of 1975.

HOT SUMMER IN THE CITY depicts the odyssey of Debbie, a suburban girl about to marry, over two unspecified days in July 1967, before the Detroit riots commence. Upon returning from an engagement party (and refusing to have premarital sex with her betrothed), she is horrified to find her mother in a three-way with her fiancée’s father and another male friend. And shortly after fleeing her home, she is abducted by Duke, an ostensible Black agitator, and his three friends. After an initial violation in their car, she is taken to an isolated cabin, where the men are awaiting a meeting with “The Man,” and is subjected to more humiliations, though Duke frequently attempts to intervene in his gang’s desire to take advantage of her. When the white criminal fixer arrives the following day, with Duke’s previous girlfriend Jody in tow, he pays the gang $20,000 to create a distraction that is intended to draw police and fire departments to the scene, who in turn will be fired upon by hired snipers, with the ensuing escalation of chaos intended to allow local merchants to commit insurance fraud under pretense of riot damage. In the hours before the gang is to initiate the uprising, the tensions fostered by Debbie’s presence will divide the gang, leading to personal violence before the political violence can take place.

When their production was ready for release in the Bicentennial summer of 1976, not only did Mohney create false details for the onscreen credits, he also crafted one huge one for the press. In an article in Macleans published in May that year, Mohney had been nicknamed as one of “The Shy Pornographers” because of his constant avoidance of the limelight, as police trying to shut down adult entertainment desperately wanted to connect him to the product but never could. However, he was already being prosecuted in other cities: he was held liable by a Kentucky court for playing DEEP THROAT at his Covington Cinema X location at the time. So it was certainly in his best interests to stay in the shadows. Thus, a charm offensive was launched where he elevated Palmer, a likeable female, as the overall author of merit, on this film and more to follow, though some industry-savvy people surely saw the directorial credit for “The Hare” and deduced it was Harry Mohney’s alias, since “Hare” was short for Harry, and he owned the shadow production company, Imperial Films. For several personal appearances, print and TV interviews, and cross-promotions, she was presented as the woman behind The Hare, which certainly carries ironic truth. Longtime adult director Bob Chinn, who was on the camera crew of the subsequent films credited to Palmer, described the arrangement in his memoir THE OTHER SIDE OF PARADISE, VOL. 2:

Their front person for company was Harry’s girlfriend at the time, an attractive and bright young lady named Gail Palmer, who had been credited as the director of a film they had made in Michigan [as] well as two of their subsequent features THE EROTIC ADVENTURES OF CANDY and CANDY GOES TO HOLLYWOOD. But the true credit for the direction of these films should probably go to Harry...the powers-that-be [firmly] believed that a sexy, attractive female filmmaker and producer would [bring] in a larger audience to their films and I found that I couldn’t fault their reasoning one bit so I cheerfully decided to go along with it...Our deal stipulated that Gail Palmer would be credited as the producer and, if they chose, as the director on all of the films that I did for [them]. It was an arrangement that sounded fine since credits on these films really didn’t mean all that much to me.

Quentin Tarantino’s fandom of HSITC became public knowledge shortly after a semi-clandestine screening during his 6th programming block at the original Austin, Texas Alamo Drafthouse on September 15, 2005; due to local blue laws, the film title was not advertised, and for legal purposes, was presented as a four-walled event by the Austin Film Society and not the theatre itself. A pseudonymous audience member in attendance wrote, “In his intro, QT talked about how he really didn't like porn at all. He got a job at the Pussycat theater when he was 16 and was an usher there for some time, not to mention his years at a video store putting him in constant contact with the stuff...He said he was such a non-fan that he couldn't even remember the few he ever saw which he didn't think were bad, which is really saying something because over the course of the week we've heard him remember the name of pretty much every movie that's ever existed and become obscure. BUT, he says, the box art of HOT SUMMER IN THE CITY finally won him over one night and the movie quickly became his by-far favorite [adult film].” 

In an essay for the Literary Hub offshoot website CrimeReads, writer Olivia Rutigliano observed:

[In] ONCE UPON A TIME, “childhood” is a deliberate theme. The film begins with an evocation of an audience of children, featuring an early-60s interview on the Bounty Law ranch set, with Rick and Cliff explaining how stunts work...The film’s two scariest, most ominous moments, ultimately reveal that this era’s entertainment, and corresponding childhood innocence, is effectively gone. The counterculture movement—which, for this film’s purpose, has turned teenagers into monsters and murderers—has fully overtaken the culture. Cliff goes to Spahn Movie Ranch (brought there by a hippie who insists that she is not a minor and can therefore have sex with him, though he won’t listen—this alternate Hollywood will not harm a child). Spahn Ranch is the defunct set where he and Rick used to film Bounty Law, but Cliff discovers it’s been taken over by the Manson family commune—a horde of squalid, unwashed adolescents, bedraggled and pretending to be self-sufficient in this sinister desert Neverland that was once a dream-factory...When the Manson family members pull up in their rattling old car to Cielo Drive to commit murder at the behest of Charles Manson, they are stopped in their tracks by Rick Dalton, himself...Remembering how much they used to love his show...it seems like they might climb out of their hypnotic detestation...But one of the young women doesn’t remember [his show], and she directs them back to the dark task at hand, with an anecdote about how they have been poisoned by this generation of television. “Let’s kill the people who taught us to kill,” she says...The conflict is a literalization of the culture war—with the counterculture actually turning against the mainstream. 

Thus, while Tarantino as an adult surely has a substantially nuanced understanding of the late ‘60s counterculture, it is easy to speculate how, as a child, witnessing this conflict without this context, while being presented the last vestiges of square-jawed heroism in the popular media, the battles of the Generation Gap looked frightening. After all, the cops, the cowboys, the Army men, they were the good guys, right? They look like all the dads I know. Why were all these people in the weird clothes angry at them?

In spiritual tandem, befitting an idea that was conceived in adolescence, and coming from someone who likely grew up not having any significant exposure to Black people in her formative years, while being raised by conservative Catholic parents who probably meant well but likely made disparaging remarks about minorities or told racist jokes or warned her not to go to certain parts of town where “dangerous” people congregated, Palmer’s emotional ingredients in the HSITC storyline help make the film feel appropriately like the kind of hyperbolic nightmare fantasy a sheltered young white girl living in a cultural bubble might conjure up after seeing the riots on TV or in the newspaper. At one point, during her captivity and abuse, she bleats, “I’ve tried to help...I marched and everything,” desperate to understand why these Black men seem to have a personal vendetta against her, as she believes has spent her formative years being a good, wholesome person. In further connectivity, Duke's gang exhibits the same sort of blind and almost listless groupthink of the Manson acolytes at the Spahn ranch, engaging in behavior explicitly forbidden when their leader Duke is around in the same way the Mansonites steal a look at television when Charlie is away.

While the movie does not take the enormous liberties with the history of July 1967 that OUATIH employs with August 9th, 1969, it does engage in a certain amount of fancy with those events. When the gang arrive at the cabin, idle conversation conveys that it is a Wednesday night, and that their planned uprising is to take place on Friday, which would put it ahead of when it actually arose, in the morning hours of Sunday, July 23rd. Some viewers may be confused when characters talk about “last summer’s war,” which is referencing the lesser-remembered “Kercheval Incident” of August 11, 1966, when a group at the corner of Kercheval and Pennsylvania refused a police order to disperse, leading to three days of rioting. “The Man” that employs Duke and his gang describes for them how they are to create a distraction at the corner of Woodward and Clairmount. There’s no documentation that any agent provocateurs were involved with any incidents during the week of riots. A night spot called the Clair Wood Bar had stood at that intersection, but that was not the after-hours bar raided by the police, which was a block away at Clairmount and 12th St. Ultimately, Debbie's presence is not intended to alter any of the events that will take place during that intense week of clashes; instead it sets her up as a Cassandra to them, her blank demeanor at film’s end suggesting she knows that these men who snatched her in a fit of pique will not survive this incident, and her personal feeling of bleak revelation is going to be the reaction for thousands more as it unfolds in real history.

A particularly piercing feature of HSITC that has made it stand apart from other adult movies, and provides it uncanny kinship with OUATIH, is its prominent use of Top 40 hits of the 1960s, bracketed by what appear to be actual d.j. introductions and back-announcements by Steve Hunter, Mike Rivers, and other personalities from Detroit/Windsor radio station CKLW 800 AM, in its heyday referred to as "The blackest white station in America." Besides the expectedly jarring sensation of hearing recognizable songs underscoring sexually explicit material, there are some deep cut tracks in play – The Five Americans’ “Zip Code” and Martha and the Vandellas “Love Bug Leave Me Alone”- that were regional more than national favorites, and the diegetic placements are often used for mordant commentary - “Light My Fire” plays as Debbie rebuffs her fiancee’s advances, “Everlasting Love” is heard while she is experiencing the exact opposite of such a thing, and in a juxtaposition too grim to not be intentional, as she is being whipped with a belt, a d.j. declares, “The hits just keep on comin’!” When “The Man” appears in the second half and the radio stays off, the music shifts to non-diegetic instrumental cues, many of which appear to also be lifted from mainstream films – one of them is Quincy Jones’ main titles theme for the 1970 Peter Yates drama JOHN AND MARY. While this music supervision was never addressed in any press for HSITC, Tarantino offers a fair equivalent insight about how these choices can be made in his Kim Morgan interview for OUATIH, particularly apropos since both KHJ and CKLW used the “Boss Radio” format:

But one of the things that was interesting to me in listening to the KHJ recordings was the fact that KHJ had a sound, the way the 80s KROQ had a sound, and then other radio stations tried to buy that sound, they tried to take that format and do it in other cities...their Top 40 wasn’t just exactly based on Billboard. It was a mixture of Billboard, it was a mixture of what people called up and would request, it was a mixture of what the DJs liked, and just a mixture of what they thought was good for the KHJ sound...And I realized there’s a whole lot of songs [like] the Buchanan Brothers’ “Son of a Lovin’ Man” – it didn’t go national, but it did really well in Los Angeles and probably a few other markets...I wanted to play [The Box Tops’] “Sweet Cream Ladies” so much but the only place that I figured it could work – but it’s just too obvious – is when the Manson girls walk in front of their windshield. OK, but I might as well be playing “Baby Elephant Walk” at that point – I don’t like songs being on the money.

Adding one more bit of serendipity between the two films is that Mohney commissioned an expanded novelization of the final HSITC screenplay (again credited to “The Hare,” authorship currently unknown but probably “T. James Write” as well), which was “on sale at bookstores everywhere” concurrently with the film’s release, and Tarantino, spurred by his own love of the characters and by fan speculations during OUATIH’s first run, wrote an expanded novelization of his screenplay, just published in this summer of 2021. Granted, plenty of movies of all types have novelizations, but it is generally rare to have the actual creators of those films actively taking a role in the making of what would generally have been considered a mere supplementary marketing product.

There has not been any discussion or other overt indication by Tarantino in any of the press before or after the release of OUATIH that he included HSITC among the dozens of films and other cultural totems that influenced his writing of the screenplay or his execution of the finished feature. However, the surprising number of parallels between the two films -- their inspiration from childhood memory of sociopolitical turmoil, their extrapolation of that naiveté into their stories, their authors unusual early introduction to the adult entertainment business, the use of period music and radio airchecks as dramatic counterpoint, some rewriting of the past, and the controversial reception of those films after their release -- nonetheless makes for one of the unlikeliest and fascinating instances of innovative minds thinking alike.

In the benefit of hindsight, since before the Cyndee Summers stunt and meeting Harry Mohney, as Gail Palmer told a Courier-Journal reporter in 1978, “I’d never had any sexual experiences or anything,” HSITC further functions as a metaphor for the disputed creator's complicated feelings about becoming intimate with this older, worldlier man with questionable ethics, with the shifting behavior of Duke from aggressor to protector standing in for her mentor and lover. Much like Debbie's shock and disgust at the hypocrisy of her upbringing, where her mother is practicing a “do as I say not as I do” stance about sexual behavior, Palmer was a metaphorical babe in the woods when she was swept up into his world, albeit more willingly than her onscreen surrogate. In Palmer’s early interviews, she expounds about her fascination with adult movies and recognition of what benefits others draw from them, while admitting to not enjoying the majority of them herself, and to an extent, Debbie’s frightening initiation into the rough and callous attitudes of her captors can be read as a creative reinterpretation of her real-life discoveries in Mohney's enterprise. And while they were happily bonded during filming and for several years after, her early screenplay eerily predicts the bleak end of that relationship: much like the end of the film, where Duke leaves Debbie behind to live an uncertain future, Palmer and Mohney acrimoniously split in 1984, with Palmer losing all career momentum, and at one point applying for welfare while her name was still being used in advertising as a sales point.

The Palmer/Mohney union was not only a mixed blessing on a personal level, but has forever complicated her legacy in the years since its dissolution, with the turning point being the moment when, as a witness for the IRS against her estranged partner in his trial for tax fraud (and a concurrent palimony case seeking half the revenue earned from the projects they did together), she testified under oath that she did not direct the movies that, for years in the press, she had been credited with, including HSITC. (Let the record show she was never asked about her writing contributions.) From this, many, including her would-be ghostwriter, have used this to dismiss her as nothing more than an empty vessel front for her rich boyfriend. A more nuanced assessment would be that during their relationship, Mohney wanted to make more films, Palmer came up with stories for them, and people such as Bob Chinn were brought in to do the actual blocking of actors and shot plotting. Mohney likely encouraged Palmer to call herself the director not just for promotional window dressing, but also to envelope his young and impressionable paramour into co-dependency, The subterfuge would not just help him keep a low profile, but by alternately financing her ventures and boosting her ego, while insuring that as she’d never actually done an according-to-Hoyle directing job, she’d be unprepared to work independent of him, the arrangement would also keep her bound to him. Palmer detailed for Gannett Newspapers in 1990 that, “Officially [Harry] was a non-person. He never wanted his name on anything – no credit cards, no bank accounts...That’s why I never thought seriously about getting paid for the movies. It would entail agreements, paperwork. I knew how he was about records.”   

In the specific circumstances of determining who did what on HSITC...Palmer talks in enough detail about the genesis of the movie on several occasions, in different ways, that one can reason that this is not data she was “coached” on by anyone. Moreover, “T. James White” and Palmer would collaborate on the screenplay for CANDY GOES TO HOLLYWOOD, thus it is a plausible scenario that the final shooting script for HSITC was a joint effort as well. In the 1990 Gannett interview, it is mentioned that a local TV cameraman was brought onto the production to handle the film stock, so the cinematographer hiding as “R. Leonard Hughes a.s.p.” is probably responsible for the staging. Palmer’s short-lived second career as a rock-n-roll performer, with documented performances with the band “Fourplay,” suggests that she is significantly responsible for the song choices and their placement in the film; Mohney had creative goals, but would have been more practical business-minded than to hijack major label pop songs, that kind of brazen moxie is akin to a younger person like his girlfriend. Again, rather than adhere to an all-or-nothing ethos in the matter of Gail Palmer, a “little of column A, little of column B” conclusion in determining how much can be rightfully assigned to her is the best resolution.

While both Gail Palmer and Harry Mohney, and possibly most of the anonymous individuals who participated in the making of HOT SUMMER IN THE CITY, are still alive, none of them have come forward to talk at length about the film since Mohney’s four year imprisonment for tax fraud, and Palmer’s abandoned attempts at publishing an autobiography. And unlike the Detroit riots of 1967 or the Tate-LaBianca murders of 1969, the true story may never be known for sure.

What is known and verifiable is that two children of the late ‘60s, each unable to fully grasp the magnitude of the events they witnessed in their youth, went on to work in adult theatres in the last years of their adolescence, wrote stories based on those experiences, integrated the songs and radio personalities of that time into those tales, played with the facts for dramatic effect, and saw them turned into impactful films (and books) that will continue to be hotly debated years after their release.

(Huge thanks to Joe Rubin, Martin Brooks, and Ashley West for providing valuable insider information on the production history and personal details of the talent involved with HOT SUMMER IN THE CITY.)

The Three-Night-Five-Ratings-Points-Palm-Exploding-Heart Technique

For as much as there have been thousands of words written in regard to the lifetime of hours that Quentin Tarantino has spent in a cinema seat, there should also be a significant amount of discussion about how many hours in his youth were spent with television, and his ability to distinguish and appreciate the details unique to that medium that would otherwise be in conflict with the theatrical experience. In multiple interviews, when discussing laudable moments of actors, he has frequently cited guest star roles on television on an equal level of praise as film appearances. His occasional forays into directing for TV, helming episodes of "E.R." and "C.S.I.," resulted in strong ratings and are cited as standouts of those series. And his recent blockbuster ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD spends more time addressing how it has been television rather than the movies that has made and could break Rick Dalton's career, as well as provide shaky foundation for the Manson acolytes' violent behavior. Most importantly, over-the-air television contributed to the budding cineaste's education long before VHS tapes and video stores were a viable option. In a 1992 interview with Michel Ciment & Hubert Niogret, he stated, "I just watched TV in my childhood all the time...during the weekend in Los Angeles, these old movies constantly played on TV all day long..."

Thus it's an irony that while his catalog has enjoyed plenty of cable and on-demand play, only one of Tarantino's feature films has ever been aired on free broadcast TV. Granted, the amount of language and violence contained within any of his stories would be a nightmare for the average editor trying to create an edition suitable for the FCC; when Miramax and Disney prepared such a cut in 1997 for a first-run barter syndication premiere, the Los Angeles Times' news story headline literally asked, "PULP on TV?" Their reedit eliminated most of the curse words, several lines of dialogue, and even eliminated The Gimp as a character, using strategic cropping of the 2.35 image to keep him offscreen. Not an optimum way to watch one of the most important films of a decade, to be sure. The whole situation likely was a love/hate moment for Tarantino - on one hand, appreciating seeing his own movie on TV the same way he consumed movies for years, but also having to see it severely altered the same way Jackie Gleason may have reacted to seeing himself confoundingly scream, "Scum bum," with someone else's voice in the 1979 NBC network premiere of SMOKEY AND THE BANDIT.

A year ago, a slow ripple of shock made its way through several fandoms when Netflix began airing an expanded edition of Tarantino's 70mm epic THE HATEFUL EIGHT, broken into 4 episodes of roughly 50 minutes each. Talking to SlashFilm after its stealth debut, he detailed how the platform approached him about this alternate idea, and why he accepted. "[I] thought, wow, that’s really intriguing. I mean, the movie exists as a movie, but if I were to use all the footage we shot, and see if I could put it together in episode form, I was game to give that a shot....We didn’t re-edit the whole thing from scratch, but we did a whole lot of re-editing, and it plays differently...It has a different feeling that I actually really like a lot. And there was [already] a literary aspect to the film anyway, so it definitely has this 'chapters unfolding' quality." He further elaborated, "Well if you like the movie, the movie is a movie, and I worked really hard [on it]. So even if I come out with a version that has more stuff in it, that doesn’t invalidate the first version...But now if you’ve seen that, and you like that, and you want more, this version gives you more…and it gives you more in a slightly different format...if you’re just watching it like a chapter at a [time], which is basically 50 minutes at a time, then you’re able to absorb it. And in a fun way, you’re able to look at it slightly differently. Do you want to keep watching it? You can, but you don’t have to. Each episode ends it an emotional place and you’re also able to see the whole original narrative complexity of the whole piece." Naturally, the question was raised if his other films would be revisited in a similar fashion, and while there were frequent musings that ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD could see an expanded episodic revision in the future, he stated that, "in the case of KILL BILL: THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR, KILL BILL is the one movie I’ve made where everything I shot is in the movie..."

More than one critic observed the similarity between this reconfiguration, and the 1977 NBC presentation of THE GODFATHER SAGA. Seeking additional revenue to fund his expansive APOCALYPSE NOW, Francis Ford Coppola made a deal with Paramount and the network to create this hybrid blend of his two Academy Award-winning films, reedited in chronological order by editor Barry Malkin, and also including scenes that had been removed from each film. The four-night event was a ratings smash, and even drew rave reviews from those who had not cared for the theatrical editions: TV Guide's Judith Crist, who had panned THE GODFATHER in New York magazine saying, "The film is as ‘good’ as the novel; essentially immoral and therefore far more dangerous," said of the reconstructed miniseries, "[It's] a knockout...a brilliant editing job by Barry Malkin...he has come up with a gangster-oriented 'ROOTS'...the 'charms' of the Corleone family have been de-emphasized; we have instead a chronological study of the blood bond of the Mafia and, most particularly, of the father-to-son or don-to-heir transmission of character." The four-night event was a ratings smash, with NBC re-airing it in 1980, and holding onto the rights until 1987. Variations of this linear version were created for home video and other cable channels; more recently, AMC aired a slightly more violent edition in HD in 2012, and HBO offered a full-strength R-level edit for streaming in 2016. Generally all fans of Coppola's films, in direct rebuke to Crist, will always caution the first-timer to watch each GODFATHER film as its own separate film experience, but after that is done, many also enjoy the alternate miniseries option, and Paramount's multiple solicitations of such are testament to its enduring appeal.

KILL BILL has always held a special place to me in the Tarantino canon, because even though it has been described by its creator as a story that exists in a stylized "movie world" as opposed to the slightly more realish "Tarantinoverse," (to borrow from its originally intended male lead Warren Beatty, it is DICK TRACY versus BULWORTH) it's that stylization that speaks to me as a early film devotee. I can't really point to one single moment or screening from my childhood that pounded in the Golden Spike to make me a lifelong obsessive, but somewhere in 1976 the switch flipped and I started poring over Friday newspaper ads and drawing studio logos in my notebook. And as all this was developing in me...my parents had a very acrimonious divorce, an event that put a wedge between my mother and I that's never fully healed. Like, I call her every Sunday and check up on her and pray for her health, but as Nick Nolte softly growled in THE PRINCE OF TIDES, she's done a lot to piss me off, and I don't know when my parents began their war against each other - but I do know the only prisoners they took were their children. In those early months when my dad moved out of the house, and they were hashing out property divisions and visitation access, in some ways, I can understand how she would have identified with The Bride: feeling like her true love and all their friends had abandoned her and left her for dead, and her in turn making sure they would viscerally know her pain long after everyone else had ostensibly moved on. And yes, I know she loved me, in her own Conroy-esque hardness, and would have fought against anyone who tried to keep me from her. But I won't associate her with The Bride. For starters, she would not have appreciated the significance of falling asleep with SHOGUN ASSASSIN playing in the background. While she found my found my film addiction cute, she never took it seriously - she kept referring to it with the "H" word, and if you've ever heard someone use that word to describe the only thing that gives you elevation and a sense of purpose in the world, then you know why it's an epithet. More importantly, The Bride, even in her righteous fury, exercised an enormous amount of nuance in how she regarded her ostensible enemies list, and everyone else that was in the path; my mom was much more binary in her thinking. Basically, middle school was me devouring TV, teaching myself how movies work, and trying not to stir up more trouble between the folks so I could have some peace. And while I had a rollicking time watching KILL BILL as an adult, I would have downright plotzed if such a film existed in my tweens.

The rub is that if KILL BILL had existed in my tweens, I would have had no way to see it at the cinema. Definitely neither of my parents would have taken me: my mom can't even abide the word "damn" in her presence, and my father, who to his credit loved INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS and ONCE UPON A TIME  IN HOLLYWOOD, wasn't a fan of "low" culture. Even with the rise of cable and videocassettes, it would have been too hard to sneak something like that past them. And I did not yet have any cool friends or relatives who could drive and were willing to take me to movies like it. So, yes, I would have to wait until some ridiculous edited version showed up on one of the Big 3 in prime time, or if I was lucky, on the local pre-Fox independent station where they often got uncut 16mm prints and sometimes ran them in the late night hours. Sure, it would have been sanitized and full of commercials and not the high-octane experience I deserved, but in light of my options then, I would have been satiated. I knew there'd be opportunity to see the "real" thing when I was older and on my own.

Thus, as an enthusiastic fan, an incurable collector of movies in multiple edits and formats, an empath to the less-digitally-advanced, and a hopeless nostalgic for the era before media overload where there was a thrill of catching movies on free analog television, with the broadcast to millions at once and the pageantry of the network intros, much like the alternate history proposed by ONCE UPON A TIME..., I have envisioned my own divergent timeline:

It's 2007. To shake up the February "Sweeps Week" programming, and in anticipation of the highly-touted GRINDHOUSE, NBC approaches Disney's now-brothersless Miramax, and expresses their interest in having the network television premiere of KILL BILL. In the retro spirit of the drive-in double feature that has yet to open in theatres, they're even going to revert to the old '70s "Big N" logo and their old "THE BIG EVENT" imprimatur to promote it. However, rather than simply air KILL BILL VOL. 1 one night and KILL BILL VOL. 2 a following night, they make the unusual proposal to present the unified story over three nights as a miniseries!  Their argument is that VOL 2 is too long to air in one night anyway, this will allow them to sell more commercial time for this unique premiere, and besides, they're not going to completely yield the schedule over because there's no way they're giving up those sweet hour-long ratings that "DEAL OR NO DEAL" and "TO CATCH A PREDATOR" have been delivering. Bucking conventional wisdom, Tarantino and Disney agree to the proposition, and thus comes...

The terrific art repurposed here is by Joshua Budich, see it in full color at his website!

In order to accommodate this three-evening structure, and agreeing in this fantasy that most but not all of the inherent carnage will be allowed to remain in the film and still be acceptable to run on the public airwaves opposite "7TH HEAVEN," "TWO AND A HALF MEN," and "DANCING WITH THE STARS," there will indeed be some radical rearrangement of the scenes. Indeed, the whole chaptering of the film will be different than any theatrical presentation.

I can already hear thousands of Hattori Hanzo swords being unsheathed at this point, ready to cut me down for speaking this kind of heretical idea in public. As your admittedly hubristic correspondent, I often anticipate, and indeed encourage you from time to time, and always in a respectful manner, to question my logic. If you're unconvinced that a particular opinion I've espoused is the wisest, tell me so, but allow me to convince you and I promise you right here and now, no subject will ever be taboo. Now, back to our program.

If you think very deeply about the emotional arc of the film, while there are five people on The Bride's kill list, there are three characters that are of the most paramount significance in her quest for bloody satisfaction. So, each evening's installment allows those three confrontations to be their respective climax. Remember the quote regarding the segmenting of THE HATEFUL EIGHT: "a slightly different format...a chapter at a [time]...look at it slightly differently...Each episode ends it an emotional place." 

This was something already understood in the theatrical releases. We see The Bride fight Vernita Green first even though she is second on the kill list. Why? Because the O-Ren fight is a larger battle in all senses, there's no way to top it, so Volume 1 has to end shortly after it's done. But it's going to be a while to get to that point, so in order for the captive cinema audience to not be left like Milhouse van Houten waiting for Itchy & Scratchy to get to the explosives factory, you get to see The Bride in action early in another nicely-staged fight, and once that's done, now you're ready to learn how she came back from a bullet in the prologue. It's like Ed Sullivan in 1964 knowing that the teens in his studio are chomping at the bit to see The Beatles, so it's better to let them go up front and then promise they'll come back later than make them wait through Topo Gigio and get restless.  A TV miniseries, conversely, can be a little more deliberate with allocating story elements. "TWIN PEAKS" opens with Laura Palmer found dead, the viewer is willing to start meeting all the suspects because they know something important's going to happen later.

So, here is how the story would play out under the auspices of the Sheinhardt Wig Company:

Night 1: ROAR

The episode opens as V1 does, with its ShawScope and Astro Dater teases, the black-and-white prologue of The Bride in her "final" moments as Bill sends her off with a gunshot, and the mournful "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" credit sequence. However, after that, the broadcast goes directly into "The Blood-Spattered Bride," which now becomes Chapter One, and everything from there unfolds as it did in the V1 theatrical edition, albeit with each subsequent chapter within ("The O-Rigin of O-Ren," "The MAN from OKINAWA," and "Showdown at the House of Blue Leaves") being bumped up a digit. The teases of V2 from the end of V1, which were not included in THE WHOLE BLOODY AFFAIR, are retained, but Bill's cliffhanger final line is not uttered at the end of the episode, to help further the surprises to come later on.

In this incarnation, the initial two-hour installment becomes even more focused on The Bride's recovery, and her appointment with O-Ren Ishii. Even though it would ostensibly be easier to find and kill Vernita and Budd first, since they don't command a literal army like O-Ren does, The Bride has chosen this path precisely because if she can take out a now world-famous criminal warlord, it's mostly downhill from there. It'll put a little more fear into the rest of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. And most importantly, besides Bill, O-Ren is the squad member that she loved most. It is why she is given an entire chapter for her backstory - O-Ren's rise from trauma to a level of untouchability to rival Bill himself is something The Bride respects. It is also why, after having the kind of friendship where they finished each others sentences, it hurts the hardest that she willingly agreed to betray her. By decimating all of her lackeys, to the point where they must fight one to one, O-Ren will now have to respect what damage she did to her former friend. And by killing someone she still carries fondness for, The Bride will be better prepared for her confrontation with Bill.

Night 2: RAMPAGE

The episode opens with a reprise of The Bride's trunkside warning to Sofie Fatale, then after fading to black on "They'll all be as dead as O-Ren," goes straight into "2," the chapter which previously opened V1 but has now been moved here to start this evening's installment, making it Chapter Five. That is followed by the "We deserve to die" conversation between Bill and Budd, and the remainder unfolds as it did in the V2 theatrical edition, up to the finish of the "Elle and I" chapter, upon which the episode ends.

By delaying the prologue and chapter which would otherwise open the theatrical version of V2, this installment is all about delivering retribution to the remaining members of the Squad, but most importantly to Elle. If O-Ren was The Bride's best friend, Elle is her worst enemy and emotional antithesis. Besides her general misanthropy, Elle particularly fumes over the fact that she is always in the shadow of The Bride, as a fellow student of Pai Mei, as the rebound girl for Bill's affections. The only reason she even utters a single sentence of respect for The Bride, saying that she deserved better than Budd getting a lucky ambush on her, is because she knows the only witness to that statement will soon be dead. Elle knows that no matter how skilled and fearsome she is, she will always be compared to The Bride, and The Bride knows Elle's been starving for her head before she showed up at the church. Vernita and Budd certainly put up a significant challenge, but Elle as the anti-Bride is the climax to this group vendetta, and closing the night's broadcast on the finish to their feud is a clean breaking point to stop and breathe before the final showdown.

Night 3: REVENGE

The episode opens with The Bride's driver's seat address which previously opened V2, followed by the chapter "Massacre at Two Pines," and then going into the final chapter "Face to Face." Again, when watching in a theatrical setting, the Massacre is put at the front of V2 so that it is always in the back of your mind as the Vipers are dispatched and the march to meeting Bill advances, but in a TV setting, reshuffling to put the final episode entirely on the fall and finish of The Bride and Bill's relationship fulfills the same concept as the HATEFUL EIGHT Netflix edition, to look at the story slightly differently and put it in its own emotional space. And in these final two hours, concentrating all their history together and estranged, when all the secrets Bill and The Bride hid from each other come out on the table, it's a conclusion that, while perhaps forgone at the start, the TV audience would still excitedly anticipate the way they did Meggie Cleary and Father Ralph hooking up in "THE THORN BIRDS," which, oddly enough had its ABC network premiere on Tarantino's birthday, March 27, 1983.

Which is as good a time as any to break for some commercials from that broadcast date. Even fight master Pai Mei himself would agree with Sheer Elegance's proposition that nothing beats a great pair of legs.

No, if this alternate 2007 had happened, it would not be any proper way to discover KILL BILL for the first time viewer. It would have at best been an interesting experiment like THE GODFATHER SAGA or THE HATEFUL EIGHT series, or at worst a mutation excoriated by fans yet still coveted by tape traders and torrentors alongside NBC's two-night stretch re-edit of EARTHQUAKE in 1976.

But that's the thing with artists of any discipline - it's not enough to behold the perfectly assembled watch, there's always the desire to look at its parts and attempt to assemble it another way...

So happy birthday to Mr. Tarantino, one of the best watchmakers in the business.

And here's to any sheltered child today who doesn't have cool parents and/or easy access to cinemas or streaming or DVDs, that is still fending for themselves with what constitutes "free" TV: may they find something that, even in a family-friendly edit, blows their mind and spurs their own creative fancy.

Inconceivable Baster

Though it's hard to believe for all of us arrested adolescents who have eagerly followed that legendary Sundance "Class of '92", just as all of us have gotten older, today, so is the de facto Big Man on Campus of that collective. Today is the 50th birthday of the world's favorite directorial lightning rod of all things uplifting and unseemly about modern film culture, a man both championed and castigated (sometimes by the same critic) but impossible to cast aside, Quentin Tarantino. I've been an eager follower of his work for so long, I can remember when Film Threat magazine wasn't at war with him, and in the thirteen years I've been immersed in the Los Angeles film lovers community, I've had the privilege of having more than one lengthy conversation with the man, and also more than one alcoholic beverage. As such, yes, I am not only in the tank for the man, but have been tanked as well.

There is a really fascinating through line in all of his movies that as yet, almost no critics have openly explored. It's been a theme on which I have long contemplated writing an entire book; I already have the title. I don't want to divulge either element, because in all likelihood if I do, some other guy who isn't shackled by a $14/hour retail job in a $1000/month city will just usurp it and run with it, and kill the market for my version when it finally gets done in Godard knows how many years.

However, as a small gift on his birthday, I'm presenting a sidebar sliver from what will be my INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS chapter. I don't expect the big man to read this, or even agree with any of it, since that would be imposing a singular reading on a work that contains multitudes. But for those of you like me, who see such interesting threads in the tapestry you begin to worry if Paul Bettany is going to materialize in the room, I think you will enjoy this. I published an earlier version during the glory days of MySpace, so I apologize if there's 23 or so of you who already saw this piece.


A frustrating aftereffect from watching INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is that, since with any Tarantino production, the viewer develops a substantial interest to see films subreferenced within it, sadly, many of them also prove to be among the hardest ones of the near dozens of homages within. And two in particular for me are the most fascinating, because of what they unconsciously lend to reading the film.

The first, Andrew L. Stone's HI DIDDLE DIDDLE is a light madcap musical comedy of romance, chicanery, and schemes within schemes, that features one of the few successful sound performances by silent great Pola Negri. Besides's Pola's mention in the "celebrity" game in the basement pub, the film is directly, if briefly referenced, through a phonograph playing the standout number from the film, "The Man with the Big Sombrero," originally performed by June Havoc, rerecorded in French by Samantha Shelton. A promo clip, directed by music video veteran Meiert Avis, even digitally inserts Shelton into the exact scene from the film, where she mimics Havoc's choreography to a T, as you will see in the clips below. I was always dismayed that this neat little item was not included as a bonus element on the soundtrack album or on the home video releases of BASTERDS.

 

The Man With The Big Sombrero

But what makes things interesting about how this film has its place in the stew of influences is that HI DIDDLE DIDDLE is one of the few American films that had even a whiff of being not 100% enthusiastic about U.S. involvement in World War II. Let's say the typical American sentiment of participation can be approximated in Eddie Izzard's observation of English war movies of the period, where the otherwise-looked-down-upon proletariat were suddenly made to appear noble because they were going off to fight and die..."We as East Enders, we as people from the East End of London, the working class of London, we must go with our strange accents, go to the war, I must do it." (I always wondered if unconsciously this played a part in Tarantino's plotting of the Basterds' modus operandi, considering that the punchline of this bit is the soldier promising his children, "I'll bring you back a Nazi, with real hair!") By contrast then, as detailed by critic and historian David Gasten, HI DIDDLE DIDDLE gently but firmly suggests that "the war" has so overtaken every aspect of American life that nobody can concentrate on anything else, that the screwball events and complications that occur in the story would never take place if everyone weren't obsessed with doing their ostensible patriotic duty. And as all these events interfere directly with a young hero with only 48 hours of shore leave to marry, and more importantly consummate said marriage, it's also rather daring in depicting the otherwise taboo subject of wartime cockblocking. 
Tarantino has cited his love for HI DIDDLE DIDDLE on multiple occaions, though its politics seem to be less important to him as its relentless pile-on of HELLZAPOPPIN'-style gags, so perhaps any sort of statement on patriotism is not intended on his part. But over the span of BASTERDS, as our normal emotional responses to wartime tropes are questioned and subverted - the steely, ignoble nobility of the German major who chooses death at the hand of the Bear Jew; being in a theatre watching and cheering the massacre of Nazis who are in a theatre watching and cheering the massacre of Americans; - it is entirely plausible that amidst what looks like a rah-rah-America movie about kickin' Nazi ass, that very notion would be tweaked by referencing one small occasion when Hollywood did not swallow the "Good War" pill. 

The second film in my sights, ALLONSANFAN is a bitter epic satire by Paolo & Vittorio Taviani, arthouse darlings from the late '70's lauded for films like PADRE PADRONE and NIGHT OF THE SHOOTING STARS, and still making waves today with their just-released neo-realist tale of prison lifers staging Shakespeare, CAESAR MUST DIE. Taking place post-Napoleon in Italy, a former Jacobin revolutionary named Fulvio (Marcello Mastroianni) jailed for his rebellion, has been freed and just wants to go back to his former life of comfort. However, he is dragged back into the fruitless struggle against the powers that be by his former comrades, no matter how many times he secretly betrays them and tries to escape to "normalcy." There are complications along the way due to immediate family, sexual escapades, illegitimate children, and other surprises. And his venality is especially brought into contrast by a naively doggedly young buck named "Allonsanfan" his name a comical malaprop of "Allons enfants," the first words of the French Marseillaise, indicating his status as a true believer in the revolution, versus Mastroianni's status as an opportunist at best. Made in the early '70's, it got a belated U.S. release in the early '80's, but has been long unavailable in any licensed form domestically (though I've seen it bootlegged to YouTube and torrents are likely out there). Thus I suspect Tarantino never saw this film - likely he just had the soundtrack as a Morricone fan and thought the score was cool. Nonetheless, there is definitely ground for homage deeper than just music.
Spoilers here, but you're not likely to see this movie anytime soon, so ya might as well keep reading...
The striking music that is featured in the ending and credits of BASTERDS, and as such has become synonymous to the movie in the same way Fukasaku's theme to BATTLES WITHOUT HONOR OR HUMANITY will be thought of as "the KILL BILL theme," is especially crucial to the ending of ALLONSANFAN. After all the Jacobins but Allonsanfan have been massacred by the very peasants they claimed to be fighting for, Allonsanfan finds Fulvio, and lies to him, saying the mission has succeeded, and the people have joined the soldiers. Fulvio in turn hallucinates, in a vivid touch of surrealism which uncannily also suggests some of the imagery later used by John Landis in his video for Michael Jackson's "Thriller" (though of course nobody in that project saw this film either), the living mixing with the dead whom we have seen perish throughout the course of the film, in a last dance of defiance; the composition is called "Rabbia e Tarantella," or "Rage and Dance." While Fulvio dismisses Allonsanfan's claim as ludicrous, he gives in to the fantasy, and dons his betrayed comrade's red color jacket, which causes himself to be killed shortly after by the forces he sold out to. Symbolizing the old maxim of Hell's greatest torment is for traitors, since he has spent the entire movie being torn between the camps of rebellion and bourgeoisie, he dies being a member of neither.
Fast-forward this to about 6:20:
Once you have processed this imagery and information, it's easy to find parallel when in BASTERDS, Col. Landa, who has betrayed the Germans for his own comfort, is himself double-crossed by Raine and marked for good with the swastika. Though there is no "dance of the dead" in this scene, if indeed Tarantino saw ALLONSANFAN, then perhaps by hearing this "raging tarantella" over this sequence, we are to imagine the dead souls of the Jews he killed, the Americans claimed in combat, and the Germans he has turned his back on, all stomping in anticipation of the ultimate traitor getting his comeuppance. Knowing his appreciation for Russ Meyer, as this scene played, I was truly expecting to hear the words of Z-Man Barzell stabbing Martin Bormann in the climax of BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS..."You beg for mercy, while the cries of six million innocents still ring in your ears? They are waiting for you!"

Again, all of this is mere speculation and opinionation. Even if it any of what I suggested were true, Tarantino would likely never admit to any of this, as he has widely held that to reveal what "his truth" is would ruin the creative interpretations that the viewer creates for themselves, which is ultimately his real interest; whatever you got from the movie, you should be allowed to keep that reading if it helped you enjoy it. But subterranean concepts like these demonstrate his skill at not only reassembling diverse influences into a new exciting work, in the same manner that the best hip-hop artists took existing samples to create new musical statements, but also creating interest in the viewer to investigate and experience those very works of influence. And in a climate where most people's idea of classics originate from the '80's, something that makes anyone want to check out anything in Black and White or in a foreign language is a most welcome item.

So while I don't know whether this 50th will find him in the midst of a celluloid orgy, or perhaps abstaining from the cinema to enjoy close friends and heavy cultural discourse, but I hope Mr. Tarantino will derive happiness today not just from a well-lived life, but also from the millions of kindred souls who through his example have discovered many of their new favorite movies have been waiting for them a long time. On behalf of those millions, thank you, Quentin, for introducing us to each other.