Before Quentin Tarantino burst onto the scene with RESERVOIR DOGS, he had, by his own admission, a very unsuccessful acting career, but one of his very few acting successes was a guest appearance on The Golden Girls. Tarantino recently appeared on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon and revealed that his guest appearance on The Golden Girls had a big impact on RESERVOIR DOGS.
"One of the jobs I did get — and not because I did a wonderful audition but simply because they sent my picture in and they said, 'He's got it' — was for an Elvis impersonator on The Golden Girls," Tarantino said, adding that it worked because he "walked around dressed like Elvis in the '80s. I wore a pompadour all the time. I actually went to a rockabilly place to get my hair cut." The ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD director played one of many Elvis impersonators at Sophia's (Estelle Getty) wedding in a two-part episode of The Golden Girls, and it was the money he made from that gig which made it possible to get RESERVOIR DOGS off the ground.
For his appearance on the sitcom, Tarantino's Elvis impersonator performed at Sophia's wedding. "It became a two-part Golden Girls, so I got paid residuals for both parts. And it was so popular they put it on a best of The Golden Girls and I got residuals every time that showed. So I got paid maybe, I don't know, $650 for that episode, but by the time the residuals were over three years later, I made like $3,000. That kept me going during our pre-production time, trying to get Reservoir Dogs going.
Jimmy Fallon then played a quick clip from the episode in question, which features a young Quentin Tarantino belting out "I Want You, I Need You, I Love You." You can find that moment at 2:48 in the video below.