Great storytelling from Tarantino here:
"The first movie is sort of a message-y movie... and the crowd hated it" — Bill Maher prompts.
Listen to the whole story, and you may be curious about this movie the audience jeered at, "The Bus Is Coming" (1971).
I went looking for something about it and easily stumbled into the entire movie:
I've only watched the first 3 minutes, and I won't presume to know what the crowd back then found worth shouting down for the entire length of the movie. Maybe it's just that it's slow-moving and un-slick, or maybe it's that it was just much more fun to talk back to the movie. Tarantino makes it sound very fun.
I take it the mother's boyfriend — who, we're told, was an L.A. Rams football player — thought the "message-y" movie would be good for the boy, but Tarantino, like the rest of the audience, greatly preferred the second movie, a slickly entertaining film starring Jim Brown. Or maybe the football-player boyfriend wanted the Hollywood movie featuring a man like him to win young Tarantino's admiration.
The anecdote comes from Tarantino's new book "Cinema Speculation." The link goes to Amazon, and I think I'll buy it. I'd like to hear the rest of the story. I'm guessing the "speculation" is about why the commercial Jim Brown movie is superior to the the earnestly arty "The Bus Is Coming."
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I'm not surprised that people never liked message movies. If only Hollywood could take the hint...
I'm also not surprised that it's fun to talk back to movies. Although whitey don't do it and we're often annoyed by people who do, who didn't love Rocky Horror when they were 20? It's a terrible movie; what makes it great is the audience participation.
I've always liked Tarantino's movies, though...they used to seem better to me a few years ago than they have on second (or third?) viewing. He does make entertaining movies. But I've never enjoyed listening to him talk about most any topic. I found this discussion to be cringey at times. Almost pandering. But that's him. He does pander to race topics.
Still...when there's a new Tarantino movie out, it will get my attention. Some directors just know how to make a great movie, and/or how to entertain.
It's pretty easy to imagine that Tarantino has put together a few reels of pr*n inspired by his young impressions of his mother, her black boyfriend, and the L.A. Rams.
A kind of therapy, really, shared with only the closest of friends.
Best fun I ever had at the movies was with a mostly black crowd seeing "Poltergeist."
IMDB beats Wikipedia by giving a plot summary, albeit only two sentences.
The poster says "The Man Can't Stop It! Don't Miss It!"
One of the roles is "Militant With Big Afro."
I liked Tarantino's earlier work. He paired up his style, a new style, with his material very well. Later on, he got too over the top. "Self-indulgent" might be one way to put it. I never got the martial arts thing either. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was better. It recreated a plausible real world.
What was the other movie?
IMDB doesn't list any Jim Brown movies for 1971, but Tick, Tick, Tick was released in 1970 and may have still been in theaters. Jim Brown was in several other movies in 1970 and 1972, but they are either X-rated or weren't about black people.
Tick, Tick, Tick description from IMDB, "Racial tensions threaten to explode when a black man is elected Sheriff of a small, racially divided town in the deep south."
Is that a message movie also?
Based on the IMDB listing for Tick, Tick, Tick, it looks like an engaging and memorable movie.
About 6 minutes or so into "The Bus Is Coming" a preacher at a funeral gives a sermon about the iniquity of evil-doers that sounds a lot like Samuel Jackson's biblical rant in Pulp Fiction. Hmmm...
Anyway, the movie seems pretty well written and acted, but the music soundtrack is a ridiculous mismatch. It's like something out of a Ken Burns documentary, overlaid on top of a Black Power! exploitation picture. Baaad, and not in a good way. Maybe they ran out of money and just grabbed some generic Hallmark Hall of Fame music cues.
If there's anything Tarantino does right, it's getting the music to fit the scene, not fight against it.
I saw "Jaws" at a downtown Chicago theater with a mostly Black audience in 1975 or so.
It was quite the experience because the audience constantly interacted with the movie. My wife told me that I was so into it that I stood up and screamed at one of the scary points in the movie.
To hear him talk, you'd never know that Quentin Tarantino is some kind of genius. Alfred Hitchcock looked like the kind of guy who would make Alfred Hitchcock movies. Quentin looks more like the kind of guy who would make Chuck Jones cartoons...I remember that the back story with Raquel Welch and Jim Brown was that they hated each other. Jim Brown, no doubt, was born in an era when Black men had it tough, but, on the plus side, his career wouldn't have survived five minutes in the "metoo" era....."Black fist nursery school". I think that's an allusion to the Black Panthers who were then in the business of running nursery schools. Some Black people of my acquaintance expressed reservations about having their kids looked after by Black Panthers. I wonder if it would be possible to make a feature film that features the Black Panthers in a bad light?
But you can't depend on a train from Washington
That is 100 years overdue
The Train from Washington
During reconstruction time, there were folks
Who had been promised 40 acres and a mule
And they were told that a man with their legal papers
Could be expected on a train from Washington
There were folks who waited for him
And there are folks who are still waiting for him
But you can't depend on a train from Washington
That is 100 years overdue
DC is hollywood for ugly people. But looking at that clip, it looks like Hollywood is for ugly people too.
I always found Tarintino a bit of a weirdo, but he's talented, so its OK. Maybe his Mom's black boyfriend explains his Bromance with Samual Jackson.
Seeing a movie, that isn't serious, with a crowd that talks back is always fun. Seeing "Superman" with a college student crowd was one of my better movie theater experiences.
John Holland makes the point I came here to make- I have seen the movie, and Holland is right- Tarantino almost certainly used that part of film as inspiration for Jackson's tirade in "Pulp Fiction".
I once had the extreme pleasure of watching "The Shining" in a small mall dollar movie venue - maybe 100 seats - on a Saturday afternoon in Atlanta. My friend and I were the only adults there, among about 98 black kids aged 6 to 16.
It was an interactive movie experience, which included much very good audience advice yelled to the actors on screen, and small kids leaping to hide behind their seats at particularly scary parts. Screaming was not frequent, it was nonstop. The blood elevators just about resulted in the roof coming off the place.
The crowd of enthusiastic kids made a college midnight showing of Rocky Horror look like a screening of Bambi in comparison, and made the movie 100x better.
My first year at Berkeley (I'm nearly the same age as our hostess), I went to the Berkeley Jazz Festival held at the school's outdoor amphitheater, because I was a jazz fan. The crowd, almost entirely black, kept talking throughout, as if having a convo with the musicians...whose music was being obscured.
I asked several people near me to be quiet, and was informed by my white date that I was taking my life in my hands. "This is their music."
Well, I didn't think it was THEIR music; I thought it was music, and because I couldn't hear it the way I could at home, I left.
Trepidatious, you say?
That's the longest thing I've ever watched that has anything to do with Tarantino, including his movies.
Besides, jeering at movies is cheap--I wonder what would happen if the audience started jeering at the local B/black theatre productions?
Besides, jeering at movies is cheap-
No its not cheap. Movie tickets are almost 20 dollars.
If it was LA, it was probably the old Baldwin Hills theater.
The other day, I saw a video (Tik tok, I presume) of some black chick telling white folks that they should stay home and not come to the theater to watch "Wakanda Forever" because it would "ruin" the experience for black and other Bipoc people (apparently her warning doesn't apply to "hispanic" white people) to have to sit in the same room with "white" people.
Somehow, I'm thinking that the movie's producers wouldn't be too happy with her promotion of segregated theaters.
I'm old enough to remember when jeering at movies was cheap, is what I should have said.
Q is looking healthy, vital, fit and trim. Good for him. Staying ready to kick ass and take the names. Can't wait to see his next film.
I dare any white person to attend the movie "Till" when it comes out, and shout interactively at the screen. "Don't leave Chicago!" "Don't whistle!" "Close that damn coffin!" Suicide by movie.
How touching. Now let's talk about the film scenes where he violently validates black on white rape. Ann. Not that you had the credibility to research it before feeling all warm about it.
Jesus. How many excuses can you attribute to chosen ignorance?
About 6 minutes or so into "The Bus Is Coming" a preacher at a funeral gives a sermon about the iniquity of evil-doers that sounds a lot like Samuel Jackson's biblical rant in Pulp Fiction. Hmmm...
Unless he’s misremembering this is impossible. He says they showed up with something like 45 minutes left in the bus movie because that wasn’t the one they were there to see (so Althouse is very likely correct about why they were there which is more or less what Tarantino says about the excursion). Tarantino on Rogan is worth a listen if you enjoy him as I do.
Temujin
I've seen most of his stuff. I know people !like rave about Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. But I like Jackie Brown and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. They are both nearly perfect movies. Not one line of unneeded dialog or action. Add anything and it detracts from the movie. Subtract dialog or action and it isn't the movie.
The plot to The Bus is Coming sounda a little like the plot to the comedy film, Black Dynamite.
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