It’s OK to slice off a character’s ear, and hilarious to spray a room full of bad guys with bullets.
But as far as Quentin Tarantino is concerned, Macaws and parrots are over the line.
Tarantino, the director and Oscar-winning writer known for “Pulp Fiction,” “True Romance,” “Reservoir Dogs,” and others, is suing his neighbor Alan Ball – the Oscar-winning screenwriter of “American Beauty” and creator of "True Blood" – over “blood-curdling screams” coming from Ball’s house.
It’s not Ball screaming. It’s his birds.
In a lawsuit filed in Los Angeles County Superior Court, Tarantino complains about “obnoxious pterodactyl-like screams” from Ball’s “exotic bird menagerie.”
Read the full filing here.
The shrieks, Tarantino’s lawyer, Marty Singer, wrote, “have seriously disrupted (Tarantino's) ability to work as a writer.”
Singer wrote that Ball and his partner “know that their birds issue blood-curdling, pre-historic sounding screams,” and thus “do not maintain the Macaws in their residence, but place them in the outdoor aviary. Though one might assume that, as a fellow writer, Mr. Ball would understand and respect a writer’s need for peace and quiet while he is working, that assumption would be wrong.”
According to the lawsuit, Tarantino “began hearing ear-splitting shrieks and screams” beginning in late 2009.
“By February 2010, the noise from the exotic birds became unbearable,” the lawsuit says.
“Defendants stated that they would be building a soundproofed outdoor aviary for the birds in order to try to reduce the noise.”
Now Tarantino wants a judge to order Ball to shut the birds up.
And if Tarantino is looking for a remake, we suggest – you guessed it – “The Birds.”
Pamela Chelin contributed to this article.
