Jessica Fisher
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Quentin Tarantino has been pretty tight-lipped about his tenth, and possibly final film since announcing it a few months ago. The director previously said that The Movie Critic will follow a real life film critic. This was all we knew previously, but now Tarantino has divulged a bit more. In a recent interview with Deadline, he explained that The Movie Critic takes place in California in 1977 “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.”
One of Tarantino’s jobs when he was a teen was loading porn magazines into a vending machine and emptying quarters out of the cash dispenser. “All the other stuff was too skanky to read but then there was this porno rag that had a really interesting movie page.”
The filmmaker did not want to reveal the name of the magazine, but for The Movie Critic it’ll be called “The Popstar Pages.” I ask if the critic in question was “known.” Tarantino throws his head back: “Well, he was known if you read the Popstar Pages!!”
He explained:
“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.”
Sipping his juice, he added:
“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.”
Tarantino did research into the reviewer’s life.
“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.”
No one has been cast. He acknowledged that there aren’t any actors in his repertory company in that age range. Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, he conceded, are too old for the part.
“I haven’t decided yet but it’s going to be somebody in the 35 year-old ball park. It’ll definitely be a new leading man for me.”
When pushed on who it could be, he refused to tell, saying, “I do have an idea of somebody I can imagine doing it really well,” but he’s unsure whether to give it to that person.
The film heads into pre-pre-production next month, and it doesn’t have a release date yet, but it will probably get a 2024 theatrical release.