LA: Open on an early ‘90s rental store sitting on a busy Santa Monica street. Palm trees line the road into the distance, mixed with the traffic lights and bright sun. Because it’s the 90s, the world looks garish to modern eyes: Neon, lime green, tinted sunglasses, short shirts, baggy jeans, and boxy silhouettes. The words, VIDEO WORLD, is emblazoned on the building.
Inside, a balding video store clerk, with hair grown out and combed forward, meticulously arranges the recommended picks shelf alone. It is his only means of artistic expression, one he takes very seriously. Each week, the shelf becomes a final judgment on what is good in the world of film.
This being Kung Fu Fighting Week, the man-child has a cart full of treasured selects with him. There are the obvious picks for anyone trying to assemble a collection of martial arts’ greatest hits: Sonny Chiba’s The Street Fighter, Tsui Hark’s bloody ballets, Five Fingers of Death for its historical significance as one of the first initiations for American moviegoers into the genre, and even some early Jackie Chan films for his homages to Buster Keaton. Then there are a couple of odd additions: Kung Fu starring David Carradine, not because it’s particularly good, but because it seemed good to a kid starved of kung fu flare for whom this was the closest America could get. Next to this is The Wrecking Crew, starring Sharon Tate. Hardly a martial arts flick, but one of the first onscreen instances of a martial arts stunt by Hollywood (young Quentin explained his justification for its inclusion in detail in the little index card he filled out and taped below the video).
Then, Quentin, the video clerk in his bowling shirt-Esque uniform, pulls out The Chinese Connection and stops.
His prodigious brow furrows and wrinkles crease his oversized forehead as he peers down at the intense wife-beater-sporting young phenom on the box art. A black-and-white photo of a traditional qipao-wearing young strawberry blonde flashes through his head.
It was Linda, smiling next to her husband, the star of this accidental entry into his domain: Bruce Lee. Quent’s breathing grows shallow as he recalls the injustice of all that went on after Bruce’s death. How those Hong Kong bastards Shanghai’d Linda out of the riches owed to her by her unfaithful, pseudo-mystic-turned-silver-screen-superstar husband, Bruce. And because he had only just forced Sharon Tate’s last film into the martial arts canon, his blood began to boil at the effects Bruce the charlatan’s kung fu had for his pupil Sharon when a band of straggly hippies calling themselves the Manson Family turned up to murder her and everyone in her home that night in 1969: absolutely nothing. As Quentin the video store clerk would one day write when he had become Quentin Tarantino, author of the novelization of his ninth film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: men like Bruce Lee and Charles Manson had no intention of being real spiritual leaders. To them, all this talk of emptying your mind and ascending to higher consciousness was just a gimmick to help them break into Hollywood. Gimmicks that got the vulnerable white girls they manipulated killed. At least, that’s how Quentin, the only child with a soft spot for his Irish single mom, saw it.
This explains why, due to Dennis Wilson’s association with Charlie, he never listened to the Beach Boys. And it’s why, after a couple of furtive glances over his shoulder, young Quentin Tarantino performs his first in a career-long series of underhanded acts of revenge against the most successful Asian American film star of all time: He takes the video off the shelf and out of its box, slams it against the floor until it shatters. Wild-eyed and wheezing, he gathers the pieces together.
The trashcan opens, and Quentin the video nerd, is just about to toss the film history he’s smashed away when a spark brightens his shifty eyes. Smirking conspiratorially, he hides the box and video pieces under his shirt, then slinks out of the store’s back exit.
Behind the building, he opens the dumpster and pushes the contents of his shirt in. Then, with much huffing and several failed attempts, he gets one dirty shoe over the closed half of the dumpster’s lid. He climbs up onto the edge and unzips his jeans. Taking careful aim at the martial artist’s visage now gazing angrily out at him from among the refuse, young Quentin lets loose.
A stream of urine lands on the box below, and the clerk lets out his high-pitched cackle. His mind travels. Not far away–little more than a 20-minute drive on a good day, in fact. But with the traffic and the industry barriers he has yet to overcome in this town, Hollywood might as well be another star system removed from Santa Monica. Nonetheless, he is now there, arm wrapped around Sharon and Linda (or whichever starlets could reasonably pass for them) in his classic blue Carmen Gia convertible as it speeds to the premiere of his big debut at Grauman’s Chinese Theater.
An Asian doorman, dressed in a black driver’s uniform and mask, opens his car door. It’s in Quentin’s rider list for his appearance tonight that a Bruce Lee impersonator be at this premiere to greet him, dressed in his iconic first role as the Green Hornet’s sidekick.
The little chink punk bows low as Quentin steps out, and the smiling filmmaker shifts his weight onto one cowboy-booted-foot to soccer kick his obsequious little head with the other…
Except real-life Quentin isn’t wearing expensive leather-soled cowboy boots. He has on cheap plastic dress shoes whose soles have been worn smooth and thin from forty-hour weeks of minimum-wage shelving at Video World. Lost in his fantasy, Quentin doesn’t notice his own number one pooling by his shoes. So when the future director’s foot shoots out to knock the imaginary teeth from his imaginary nemesis’s head, the Video World employee slips back and lands in the slick golden ammonia puddle of his own creation. Two loud CLANGs are heard in quick succession: one when Quentin lands against the metal dumpster and slides into the trash he’s made, and another after the impact jostles the dumpster’s open lid with such force that it slams shut on the entire mess within.
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Leaving aside Quentin Tarrantino as a person and just concentrating on your story, didn't he end up doing the same thing as he accused Bruce Lee and Charles Manson of doing? (Although few should be said to equal Manson in depravity.) And isn't there a pathetic aspect to all these men? They didn't really stand up to actual danger in real life, and therefore, any pretense of heroism—or true significance—is diminished.
Superb: deserves to be expanded into a full post!
"…the ancients wanted to be known for their actions, today we just want to be wanted."