Quentin Tarantino is preparing to make his final film. The title is The Movie Critic, and we’ve previously heard that it’s “set in late 1970s Los Angeles with a female lead at its center.” When that information was revealed, it stirred up speculation that the title character might be inspired by Pauline Kael, a highly respected critic that Tarantino is known to be a fan of. But in a new interview with Baz Bamigboye for Deadline, Tarantino revealed that Kael is not the inspiration for The Movie Critic. Instead, it’s inspired by the life of an unspecified man who wrote reviews for “a porno rag”!
Tarantino told Bamigboye that The Movie Critic is set in 1977 California and “is based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag.” Tarantino became aware of these reviews when he was a teenager and had a job that involved loading porn magazines into a vending machine. “All the other stuff was too skanky to read but then there was this porno rag that had a really interesting movie page. He wrote about mainstream movies and he was the second-string critic. I think he was a very good critic. He was as cynical as hell. His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what Travis Bickle [Robert DeNiro’s character in Taxi Driver] might be if he were a film critic. Think about Travis’s diary entries. But the porno rag critic was very, very funny. He was very rude, you know. He cursed. He used racial slurs. But his shit was really funny. He was as rude as hell. He wrote like he was 55 but he was only in his early to mid-30s. He died in his late thirties. It wasn’t clear for a while but now I’ve done some more research and I think it was it was complications due to alcoholism.” In the film, the “porno rag” the character writes for will be called The Popstar Pages.
Tarantino is looking to cast an actor who’s around 35 years old as the movie critic, so the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt are too old for the role. This one is going to have “a new leading man” as far as Tarantino movies go – and the actor is going to be American, not a British actor playing American. Tarantino said, “Obviously, nothing against the Brits, but we’re living in a really weird time now. I think when people look back on this era of cinema and it’s just all these British actors pretending to be Americans and all these Australian actors pretending to be Americans, it’s like phantoms. Nobody is acting in their own voice.“
During his conversation with Bamigboye, Tarantino also confirmed that the 1977 revenge thriller Rolling Thunder is going to be the movie shown at his “secret screening” at the Cannes Film Festival.
Tarantino will be heading to Los Angeles next month to begin “pre-pre-production” on The Movie Critic.
Are you looking forward to The Movie Critic? Who would you suggest Tarantino cast as this Travis Bickle-esque reviewer? Let us know by leaving a comment below.