Quentin Tarantino's Death Proof script reviewed

From scriptzone. forumculture.net,

"Draft: Final, Valentine's Day 2006.

Quentin Tarantino, America’s variation of French New Wave auteur Jean-Luc Godard, has begun production on his sixth production (not including his contributions to the horrendously uneven Four Rooms and directorial cameo for Sin City) Death Proof, his half of a double-billed drive-in homage picture entitled Grind House, which Tarantino is co-directing with Robert Rodriguez.

The script, like all of Tarantino’s work, is seeping with intertextuality and a strong thrust towards turning genre conventions on their head. Moving away from his three favorite genres (noir, revenge, and kung-fu), Tarantino takes on a variation of the road/horror film a la The Hitcher or Duel. However, the results, on paper, are mixed.

The basic plot follows a trio of young girls (Jungle Julia, Arlene, and Shanna) as they spend their night bar hopping, going after and teasing boys, and getting trashed. Meanwhile, a muscle car driving stuntman named Mike (Mickey Rouke is rumored to be in the role) with a unique sexual fetish stalks the girls and, ultimately, uses his car to terrorize them.

The problem with Tarantino’s script is his manipulation of genre conventions could very well backfire this time around simply because of the fact that Tarantino does not really supply the audience with a firm sense of one character. Granted, the audience is given a sense of the Stuntman Mike character and Tarantino’s manipulation of the audience regarding his character is wonderfully done. However, Stuntman Mike is the villain and, for the most part, is vaguely drawn for us.

Quite simply, what the audience lacks is a textual surrogate, a portal into the film’s narrative. ::SPOILERS AHEAD:: Well, Tarantino does supply the audience with one, but then he kills her off at the half way point. However, not only does he kill her, he kills off nearly all of his cast 70 pages into his 130 page screenplay, favoring a Kubrickian break in narrative which completely fractures the film into two parts, almost the same way Hitchcock did when he killed off Marion Crane in the first half of Psycho. However, whereas Hitchcock had Norman Bates to force the audience to relate to, Tarantino has Mike who, while not an un-interesting character, is close but ultimately not on par with Norman Bates.

Now, one can be relatively sure that Tarantino is aware of the limitations he has set for himself when he chose to structure his film in such a way and he could very well pull it off when the film hits the big screen. He specialties are dialogue and his playfulness with genre conventions and Death Proof, like Kill Bill is basically a genre exercise. Furthermore, his Kill Bill, which was a rather shallow read on paper, turned out nearly flawless on film.

Unlike Kill Bill however, the problem Tarantino is facing with Death Proof is that of length. As previously noted, the script is 130 pages and his segment of Grind House is only around 75 minutes. In order to accommodate the length of overall picture he would have to cut one-half of his screenplay and while the result would be entertaining genre picture, it would not be nearly as interesting due to the fact that it would pretty much have to abandon all of its playfulness. He may still be able to keep his intertextual nods to Kill Bill (one of the later characters, Zoe Bell, a stunt woman from the film, is rumored to be playing herself) and supply his horror film with a commentary on Hollywood and fame the film, by and large, would be completely without a focal point.

While any informed cinephile will be correct in his or her assumption that Death Proof will be death proof at the box office, Tarantino’s epic will not transfer to a smaller canvas without massive revising and it could cost him both some admirers and some clout."