A couple of months ago, I posted a blog in this space “Is it a Wrap for Quentin Tarantino?”
To be modest, it inspired a firestorm of, shall we say, misplaced controversy.
In it, I mentioned that I had been one of Quentin’s earliest supporters, thought that he had directed two of the three best movies of the ‘90s, and what I was furious about was the mendacities of the Weinstein Company which, in a desperate attempt to save itself, was trying to turn a good movie into some sort of godsend.
To that end, they began an attack campaign on the press (me included) that this was Quentin’s “biggest movie ever” when, in fact, as TheWrap pointed out, that if you took ticket-price inflation into consideration, only half as many people saw “Inglorious Basterds” as had seen “Pulp Fiction.”
My concern was what would happen to Quentin. The question I asked was, with the Weinsteins’ in a downward spiral and Miramax having laid off 90 percent of its employees, where was he going to go?
Beyond Universal, Disney won’t work with him (they fired the studio head who had overseen “Pulp”), Warner’s isn’t into auteurs, MGM is out of business, Sony has frozen development for the next six months (meaning they couldn’t pay him even his $900,000 fee for “Pulp,” let alone the 25 percent of the gross he reportedly got for “Basterds”) and Fox passed on what he himself says was his best movie ever. That was my concern --where does Quentin turn now?
I mean, I’m worried.
So I decided to look at the careers of a couple other “auteurs” -- John Ford, Stanley Kubrick, Steven Spielberg and Michael Mann.
Unfortunately, it seems that true auteurs have a limited life span. That doesn’t apply to hacks -- heck, even Alan Arkush, who directed a “talking horse” movie for Steve Tisch in the ‘80s, is still directing “Melrose Place” episodes. But true auteurs like Quentin, John, Stanley, Steven and Michael have limited lifespans or -- as my old professor at Columbia, Andrew Sarris, the American avatar of the auteur theory, used to put it, “arcs.”
In short, they labor for years before they break through -- then have a brief period of fame before fading into the limelight. Take John Ford, the first acclaimed “auteur” (a word Truffaut made up back in the “Cahiers du Cinema” days of the ‘50s.) As Sarris translated, it meant that more than the producer, writer, studio or stars, the real “author” (hence, “auteur”) of a movie was the director. And like any artist, their career would go through an “arc.”
Obscurity, fame, failure.
In Ford’s case, he directed his first movie in 1916, but it was 1924 before he made one anyone remembers, “The Iron Horse.” He perfected his craft in ‘39’s “Stagecoach,” hit his stride with “Grapes of Wrath,” ‘41’s “How Green Was My Valley” and ‘56’s “The Searchers,” the template of the “film school” generation of Spielberg, Coppola, Lucas.
