All right, this one is too weird even for me -- and anyone who has read these posts knows, I can find connections everywhere … at least in Hollywood. (Or, as my friend George says, it’s like being a character in that old game Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon, though I did make a movie with Kevin and had a deal with him and Gail Ann Hurd, another of Jim Cameron’s ex-wives while I lived near Jim on Point Dume in Malibu … oh, forget it!)
But, honestly, if it weren’t for Noah Baumbach, the director of the cult hit “The Squid and the Whale,” whose “Greenberg,” starring Ben Stiller, comes out this weekend, Quentin would likely still be a relatively unknown actor directing Showtime movies on the side.
And if you don’t believe me, well, as they say, you can look it up!
The story goes like this: In the early ‘90s I was finishing up four years helping Michael Douglas make seven movies for Columbia Pictures. You know those pictures, from “Flatliners” to “Radio Flyer,” etc.
Our deal was ending, not because our pictures weren’t hits (like everyone, we had some hits and misses) but rather because Sony had bought the studio and fired Michael’s friend Dawn Steel for former Universal head Frank Price. (You can look it up!)
Actually, I’m not sure Michael had any feelings about Frank -- but it is well known that Frank hated (let’s say “intensely disliked”) Michael for one reason: A half-dozen years earlier, Michael had convinced him to make “Starman,” which Michael produced starring Academy Award winner Jeff Bridges, instead of “E.T.,” which Price passed on. The assumption was that cost Price his career as head of Universal.
Now Price was back -- and the last thing he wanted to do was make any more Michael Douglas movies, good, bad or indifferent. (You can look it up in Variety, ‘91!)
So our deal was winding down. However, I’d gotten to know a young executive named Bruce Binkow, former editor of the Hollywood Reporter and one of the two first graduates of the Peter Stark Producing program at USC (you can look it up), and we decided to start our own company, Thunderbird Pictures.
Even before we could get running, Bruce called me urgently one day about a script called “Natural Born Killers.” It was by some weird guy named Quentin who worked at a video store in Huntington Beach. Bruce had gotten it because his friend was Quentin’s William Morris’ agent Morgan Mason, the husband of the Go-Go’s lead singer Belinda Carlyle and son of actor James Mason (you can look it up!)
He had given Bruce the script for one reason: He couldn’t get anyone to take this Quentin guy seriously. Quentin waved his arms when he talked, he was from Kentucky or Tennessee or some hillbilly place like that, you know how Hollywood can be ...
Well, of course, I immediately fell in love with the script and, with one meeting, had it set up with legendary “Dumb and Dumber” producer Brad Krevoy (you can look it up -- it’s in Jami Bernard’s 1995 book, “The Man and His Movies.”)
