Film director Quentin Tarantino has repeatedly bragged in interviews that he served eight days in jail on outstanding traffic warrants.
Is it true…or just a romance?
A Tarantino biographer even claimed that the movie mogul incorporated overheard inmate conversations into the dialogue for True Romance and Reservoir Dogs .
Earning only about $10,000 a year as a video rental clerk at the time, the now-successful director insisted that he simply couldn’t afford to pay the tickets.
“Back when I was in my 20s and broke, I was a little scared of the cops, all right? And oftentimes, I had warrants out on me for traffic stuff that I never took care of and everything.?.?. I’d get stopped, and I’d have to do eight days in county jail, because I couldn’t pay for it,” Tarantino recently told Bill Maher on HBO’s Real Time .
Tarantino added that he dealt with that experience in Jackie Brown , the Pam Greer comeback vehicle which parenthetically is one of his better, although far less touted, movies.
Earlier in his career, Tarantino told Jay Leno that he was locked up three different times, which might or might not be a form of channeling the kind of discredited anecdotes pedaled by ex- NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams .
“This supposed first-hand experience has been a key defense for Tarantino as he defends his criticism of police during his promotional tour of his upcoming movie The Hateful Eight ,” Daily Mail explained .
It turns out that the director, who is currently promoting The Hateful Eight on various media platforms , may never have seen the inside of a jail cell, according to the New York Post, and the story could have been just a way to burnish his credentials for helming his various crime and violence opuses.
“The LA County Sheriff’s Department has no record of the filmmaker ever being in its system. At The Post ‘s request, the department searched its files back through the 1980s, when, according to Tarantino, he would have been incarcerated.”
No one in Tarantino’s camp has responded thus far to a request for comment about what the Post quipped may have been “Pulp” or “Perp” Fiction.
As far as any actual brushes with law, court records apparently disclose only that Tarantino paid an $800 fine in August 2000 for driving without a license and failing to appear. In fact, he coughed up the fine to avoid going to jail on the citation, the Post noted.
Tarantino’s people have declined to provide a comment on the Post allegation to the Daily Mail, as well .
As alluded to above, Tarantino prompted controversy when he referred to cops as murderers while making a speech at the #RiseUpOctober anti-police brutality march in New York City’s Washington Square Park. Tarantino now says his remarks were taken out of context and that in no way is he anti-police or a cop hater.
Many police unions across the country have vowed to boycott The Hateful Eight , however, in addition to the NYPD.
Some Tarantino critics have argued that the director of excessively violent content may have only showed up at the march for PR purposes to offset criticismfrom some African-Americans, including fellow director Spike Lee,over the extensive use of the N-word in Tarantino’s movie scripts.
Separately, outspoken police defender and Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke dismissed Quentin Tarantino as a wealthy, limousine liberal dilettante for his incendiary comments at the NYC protest.
Do you think that it is plausible Quentin Tarantino is trying to pose as a fake tough guy for movie marketing reasons? Will such an allegation have any effect on the box office for The Hateful Eightor the popularity of his other films in general?
[Photo by Jordan Strauss, Invision/AP]