TRUE ROMANCE (1993) – A 30th Anniversary Retrospective

Introduction

In the Summer of 1993, most of the cinema-viewing world was fixated on dinosaurs, of the Jurassic kind. However, just a year earlier, another powerful force began to exert its dominance in the film industry. In 1991, thanks to the help and muscle of Harvey Keitel, Quentin Tarantino was able to go from working at the Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California to becoming the hottest young director in Hollywood. His neo-noir crime film Reservoir Dogs (1992) sent a seismic shock through the independent film world.

Tarantino made another splash that same year when he optioned off a second script to director Tony Scott. True Romance (1993) would firmly entrench Tarantino as one of the great screenwriters of his generation. Much like his characters Clarence and Alabama, the story of the film going from box-office bomb to cult classic is a bumpy one, replete with production mishaps, on-set romances, and changed endings. There’s also Floyd giving the mob directions to the Beverly Ambassador Hotel (go down Beechwood and drive a while). Buckle in, it’s going to be a wild ride.

Beginnings

After dropping out of high school in Harbor City, Los Angeles, Quentin Tarantino held numerous odd jobs. Most notably, the five informative years he spent at the Video Archives. It was here that he refined his encyclopedic knowledge of all things movies. In 1986, he was writing screenplays, taking acting classes, and becoming “known” in the local film and theater community. He also appeared as an Elvis impersonator in a Golden Girls episode that aired in 1988. The planets aligned for Tarantino when he met up-and-coming young producer Lawrence Bender at a friend’s barbecue.

Bender encouraged Tarantino to write the script that he had been talking to him about. It was a heist film called Reservoir Dogs and he cranked it out in three weeks. Bender liked it and got it into the hands of director Monte Hellman, who cleaned up and formatted the screenplay. While this was happening, Tarantino was also working on a massive 500-page SECOND script. This was inspired by long-time friend and collaborator Roger Avary’s unfinished treatment called ‘The Open Road.’ Tarantino took this and turned it into what would eventually become Natural Born Killers (1994) and True Romance.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tony Scott was one of the top action directors in the county, with a flair and style that was wholly unique. He also was coming off of multiple box-office hit films in Top Gun (1986), Beverly Hills Cop II (1987), and Days of Thunder (1990). Scott had first been introduced to Tarantino on the set of Scott’s new film The Last Boy Scout (1991). Scott would later speak to Maxim Magazine in 2008 about his first encounter with Tarantino:

“…When I was directing The Last Boy Scout, my assistant was hanging out with this quirky guy named Quentin Taran­tino, and he’d be around the set. She said, “You gotta read his script.” I said, “Yeah, right.”…He gave me two scripts: True Romance, which was his first script, and Reservoir Dogs. I’m a terrible reader, but I read them both on a flight to Europe. By the time I landed, I wanted to make both of them into movies. When I told Quentin, he said, “You can only do one…””

Pre-Production

The script that Tony Scott purchased from Tarantino for $50,000 was True Romance. It was QT’s first script. In fact, in the original version of it, Tarantino has Clarence writing Natural Born Killers while he’s on the road with Alabama. True Romance is the most personal and seemingly autobiographical thing that Tarantino has ever written. However, he turned it over to Scott so that he could focus his full attention on directing Reservoir Dogs. Scott had an uphill battle in bringing his vision of True Romance to the big screen. To start, Tarantino didn’t wholly agree with the casting choices that were being made. He also didn’t like the fact that the ending was being dramatically changed. Tarantino would later state to Maxim Magazine:

“…For most first-time writers, the lead character is your stand-in. Clarence was me. If you’d asked me then if Christian Slater was right for the part, I’d have said no—he was too handsome. I was thinking of Robert Carradine…When I wrote it, my ideal Alabama was Joan Cusack…”

When Reservoir Dogs premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 1992, the seismic shockwaves throughout the film industry were immediate. The film hadn’t even been commercially released yet, but all the talent in Hollywood who had read the script or seen the film knew that this was something special. No one had ever written characters like this before. Tarantino’s debut film was a game-changer. This, in turn, affected the pre-production of True Romance as all the popular young actors in Hollywood wanted to be a part of a Tarantino script.

Bard Pitt, who had lit up the screen in a small but memorable performance in Thelma & Louise (1991) was willing to play the stoner, Floyd, just to be a part of the QT universe. In only a few minutes of mostly improvised stoner dialogue, Pitt (and Tarantino) create one of the more memorable characters in the actor’s career. The two would reunite twice more, culminating in an Oscar for Pitt (for Best Supporting Actor) for portraying stuntman Cliff Booth in Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019).

Val Kilmer was a legitimate star in the early 1990s (Top Gun, The Doors, Tombstone) and was about to become Batman. Yet, after being rejected for the lead part of Clarance, he was willing to play Elvis Presley (credited as “the Mentor”). In the film, the Mentor is an unseen guiding force for Clarence. Kilmer is only onscreen for a few minutes and you can barely see his face. Still, he wanted in. Kilmer would even call Scott late at night singing Elvis songs to him over the phone. Other actors who wanted in were: Dennis Hopper. and Christopher Walken. Gary Oldman. Chris Penn. Tom Sizemore. James Gandolfini. Patricia Arquette. Samuel L. Jackson and many others. It was a loaded cast with a loaded script and everyone was dialing it up to eleven.

Filming

Despite Tony Scott changing Tarantino’s non-linear style of storytelling to a more standard style of narrative. Despite the ending being changed to be more uplifting. And despite Robert Carradine and Joan Cusack being swapped out for Christian Slater and Patrician Arquette, Tarantino was, for the most part, pleased with Scott’s vision. Scott had largely remained loyal to Tarantino’s original script, leaving the dialogue mostly unchanged. Patricia Arquette, however, struggled with the excessive violence in the film, as she stated to The Independent in 2022:

“I struggled with playing her…She’s so supportive, even of things that are kind of shocking. Her boyfriend murders someone and she’s still like…yeah! My acting coach told me, well, what are you going to say? ‘Don’t do that?’ ‘How dare you?’ So I treated it like it was a survival mechanism. I think her capacity to totally love without judgment is what people respond to. But it was really difficult to play that”

Tony Scott also had to deal with Christian Slater. His growing onset relationship with Arquette as well as not fully understanding the ‘character’ of Clarence was becoming an issue. To get Slater in the right frame of mind, Scott had Slater watch Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver (1976). The actor had never seen the film before. It seems that Robert De Niro’s portrayal of Travis Bickle must have had an effect on Slater as there are hints of De Niro’s murderous anti-hero in Clarence, sprinkled all throughout True Romance.

Tom Sizemore who plays Detective Nicholson was originally tagged to portray Virgil, a murderous psychotic who works for Christopher Walken’s Vincenzo Coccotti, consigliere for Detroit crime boss “Blue” Lou Boyle. In an ironic twist, Sizemore objected to the high levels of violence he had to commit, specifically toward Arquette’s Alabama. In turn, he reccomended the part of Virgil to friend and colleague, James Gandolfini. The future HBO mob boss is both electrifying and horrifying in his brief bathroom scenes with Arquette.

Tony Scott had originally wanted Drew Barrymore to play Alabama. In fact, for all intents and purposes, the director was infatuated with Barrymore. So much so that, according to Arquette, he had pictures of the actress in short outfits hanging all over his walls. Scott and Arquette, however, soon developed a rapport with each other. The pair got so close in terms of mutual trust that Arquette asked Scott to ‘slap’ her several times so that the actress could get her head in the right place during pivotal scenes throughout the production. Arquette spoke to Buzzfeed in 2015:

“He did slap me before the scene on the billboard. But he didn’t just run up and slap me! I was really frustrated about getting emotionally to where I wanted in that scene. He said, “What’s wrong?” I was saying, “I’m just pissed off at myself. I can’t get to where I want.” He was like, “Do you want me to smack you?” I said, “Yeah, maybe you should smack me!” So yeah. It was mutual and agreed upon”

The Scene

It’s perhaps the most famous use of the word ‘eggplant’ in the history of cinema. Over the last thirty years, the ‘Sicilian Scene’ in True Romance is one the most revered scenes of dialogue in film history. The back-and-forth soliloquies that Christopher Walken and Dennis Hopper deliver have been broken down, studied, analyzed, criticized, imitated, and become, forever, a part of meme and GIF culture. Tarantino has stated that until the opening scene of Inglorious Basterds (2009), it was the finest thing he’s ever written.

Several of Walken’s lines were improvised. This was to add realism to the tension between the two veteran actors. Walken also requested that he be able to read his lines first so that he could listen to the recordings and imagine Hopper’s response. Also, Hopper was having issues with the prop gun being used and that it was being fired too close to his head. The actor had bad memories of prop guns in all the Westerns he did in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Scott, to appease Hopper, held the prop gun to his head and fired. The gun misfired and Scott fell to the ground, injured and bleeding from his forehead. Hopper was not convinced.

Tony Scott had tried to rehearse this legendary scene with his actors. However, Hopper and Walken continuously broke out into laughter every time. Thus making it almost impossible. The actors largely rehearsed the scene alone, which gave the scene an ‘improvised’ feel. Some (but not all) of these rehearsals can be found as part of the supplemental materials on the DVD and Blu-ray releases of the film. Tarantino has stated he felt the scene is almost ‘too good’ and he doesn’t really like the improvised use of the word ‘cantaloupe’ by Walken.

Release and Legacy

True Romance is a classic example of not knowing how to properly market a film. Slater, at the time of post-production, was a post-teen bad boy heartthrob with such hits as Heathers (1989), and Young Guns II (1990). As per Tarantino, Warner Brothers even considered changing the name of the film to Reckless Hearts. The director hated this idea and proposed going to press junkets to complain about the title change. Ultimately, the film bombed, earning back its budget, of approximately $12.5 million.

It also didn’t help to have Senator Bob Dole and other members of Congress and the Senate (on both sides of the aisle) complaining about the film’s over-the-top violence. Dole, who ran for President of the United States in 1995, called the film an example of movies that “revel in mindless violence and loveless sex.” Despite strong reviews by such critics as Janet Maslin of the New York Times, the political hit job and poor marketing choices doomed the film from the start. Maslin predicted the fake outrage in her review of the film:

“…True Romance, a vibrant, grisly, gleefully amoral road movie directed by Tony Scott and dominated by the machismo of Quentin Tarantino (who wrote this screenplay before he directed Reservoir Dogs), is sure to offend a good-sized segment of the moviegoing population…”

The ensuing thirty years have been kind to True Romance. Numerous publications have the film ranked in their top one hundred greatest films of all time. The film has also become a cult classic. This is partly thanks to the memorable and over-the-top performances of its cast. Saul Rubinek’s iconic performance as slimy film producer ‘Lee Donowitz’ stands among the most revered performances. This is in a film that is absolutely loaded with them. Not to be outdone is Gary Oldman’s turn as Drexel, a murderous pimp and drug dealer who’s white but thinks he’s black. In just a few minutes of screen time, the actor delivers a mesmerizing performance.

Judd Apatow has also stated publicly that Brad Pitt’s stoner character, Floyd, was the influence for Apatow’s now cult-classic film, Pineapple Express (2008). Perhaps most incredible of all is that the late James Gandolfini was invited to audition for the role of Tony Soprano after the upcoming HBO series Casting Direct saw his performance in True Romance. The rest, as we say, is history. Almost thirty years to the day (September 10) after its initial theatrical release, the film remains one of the definitive films of the 90s. If you haven’t seen it, do yourself a favor. Watch it. If only just to watch Floyd try and give directions.

Scholars’ Spotlight: Val Kilmer – Part One (Click Here)

The Making of ONCE UPON A TIME…IN HOLLYWOOD (2019) (Click Here)

JACKIE BROWN 25 Years Later – A Cinema Scholars Oral History (Click Here)

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