Tarantino Art by Ken Taylor
Miramax are now selling the art Ken Taylor created for the Tarantino XX DVD/Blu-ray set as a series of limited edition silkscreened prints. They have released five prints in all which span Quentin Tarantino‘s Miramax film career. Each print is silkscreened on 24 x 35 130lb acid free paper stock using archival quality inks, and is individually hand numbered edition of only 500. Get them HERE
Roger Avary
Roger Avary (born Roger d’Avary; August 23, 1965) is a Canadian film and television producer, screenwriter and director. He worked on the screenplays for Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, the latter of which earned both him and Quentin Tarantino an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay at the 67th Academy Awards. He also directed the cult films Killing Zoe and the excellent The Rules of Attraction among other film and television projects.
When in 1981, Video Out-Takes co-owner Lance Lawson (a name that comes up repeatedly in Avary and Tarantino’s films) left to open the now famous Video Archives, Avary went along, writing the store’s database program. Under the vision of Lawson, Video Archives became a gathering place for a group of cinephiles, who became known as “Archivists”. Among this group, Avary met an odd and brilliant film enthusiast, Quentin Tarantino. The two became friends, introducing each other to their favorite films.
Early in his career, Avary made a number of contributions to some of Quentin Tarantino’s movies. He worked as a cinematographer on Tarantino’s unfinished first film, My Best Friend’s Birthday. He had written a script called “The Open Road” which Tarantino rewrote. Avary took on the producer’s role, and he and Tarantino tried unsuccessfully for several years to get funding so that Tarantino could direct the script himself. Eventually, the script was sold to French producer Samuel Hadida and became the movie True Romance.
Avery and Tarantino worked together on Natural Born Killers, directed by Oliver Stone; Avary also co-wrote the background radio dialogue in Reservoir Dogs (1992), and designed the “Dog Eat Dog” logo which appeared in the end credits.
Most notably however, Avary contributed material which, combined with Tarantino’s, formed the basis of Pulp Fiction (1994) for which he and Tarantino won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. Avary’s bizarre 1994 Oscar speech (for Best Original Screenplay) consisted of “I want to thank my beautiful wife, Gretchen, who I love more than anyone else in the world… I’m gonna go now ’cause I really got to take a pee.” The “pee comment” was a reference to all five films nominated in 1994 for Best Picture having a key scene where a character excuses themselves to use the bathroom.
Avary also wrote and directed the neo-noir cult thriller Killing Zoe (1994) which Tarantino executive produced. Avary had initially intended to write a screenplay completely devoted to his travelling experience through Europe, for which Tarantino suggested the ironic title Roger Takes a Trip. But when producer Lawrence Bender called Avary during location scouting on Reservoir Dogs asking if he had a screenplay that took place entirely in a bank so that they could take advantage of an inexpensive location they had no use for, Avary told Bender that he had such a script—and quickly wrote Killing Zoe in under a week, using elements of his European trip as inspiration. The film was honored with le Prix très spécial à Cannes 1994, the very same year that Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’Or.
From 1985 to 1986, Avary attended Menlo College, in Atherton, California. The school, “a West coast Bennington”, laid the foundations for his film adaptation of the Bret Easton Ellis novel The Rules of Attraction. In 2002, Avary directed his adaptation of the novel, which he also executive produced. His film from within the film, Glitterati (2004), used elements of Victor’s European trip and was shot on digital video. In 2005, he purchased the rights to another Bret Easton Ellis novel Glamorama, and is currently developing it for himself to direct.
In 2006, Avary wrote a screenplay adaptation to the hit videogame, Silent Hill (2006), with French director and friend, Christophe Gans, and Killing Zoe producer Samuel Hadida.
According to Avary’s biography on the American “Killing Zoe” DVD, Avary directed a small, independent musical production of “Beowulf” for the stage in Paris in 1993. Beowulf seems to have been a lifelong obsession with Avary.
In the late 1990s, Avary was hired by Warner Bros studio to adapt Neil Gaiman’s comic series The Sandman to the big screen. After he was fired, Gaiman and Avary started work together writing an adaptation of the epic poem Beowulf. The film was finally produced in 2007 with Robert Zemeckis directing, utilizing performance capture technology.
On January 13, 2008, Avary was arrested under suspicion of manslaughter and DUI, following a car crash in Ojai, California where a passenger, Andreas Zini, was killed. In December 2008, he was charged with, and pleaded not guilty to, gross vehicular manslaughter and two felony counts of causing bodily injury while intoxicated. He later changed his plea to guilty on August 18, 2009.
On September 29, 2009, he was sentenced to 1 year in work furlough, (allowing him to go to his job during the day and then report back to the furlough facility at night), and 5 years of probation. However, after making several tweets about the conditions of his stay on Twitter, Avary was sent to Ventura County Jail to serve out the remainder of his term. On July 10, 2010, after spending eight months in jail, Avary was released.
Tim Roth
Simon Timothy “Tim” Roth (born 14 May 1961) is an English film actor and director. He is best known for his roles in the films Made in Britain, Legend of 1900, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, Four Rooms, Planet of the Apes, The Incredible Hulk and Rob Roy, receiving an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor for his scene-stealing role in the latter.
Roth was born in London, England, the son of Ann, a painter and teacher, and Ernie, a Fleet Street journalist, and painter. Roth’s father was born under the surname “Smith” in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, New York, to a British immigrant family of Irish descent. He changed his surname to “Roth” after World War II “partly through solidarity with the victims of the Holocaust, partly because the British were far from welcome in some of the countries to which his job took him”. As a young man, he wanted to be a sculptor and studied at London’s Camberwell College of Art.
Roth made his acting debut at the age of 21 playing a racist skinhead in the Alan Clarke TV film Made in Britain (1982). In contrast to his Made in Britain role, Roth then played a desperately shy and introverted character in the Mike Leigh film Meantime (1983). In 1984 he co-starred with Terence Stamp and John Hurt in Stephen Frear’s The Hit, in which he played Myron (Tim Roth) a hot-blooded apprentice to John Hurts Braddock, a world weary veteran hit man. The role earned him an “Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Newcomer”.
In 1985, he appeared in the television film Murder with Mirrors opposite the legendary Bette Davis and John Mills. With that recognition, he appeared in several other films during the end of the decade. Roth starred in King of the Ghetto which was made by the BBC. This four-part drama was shown in 1986 on national television, based on a novel by Farukh Dhondy. Partly set in Brick Lane, the drama caused a sensation among the public, especially amongst the Bengali community.
In 1989, he had a memorable supporting role as the buffoonish lackey Mitchell in Peter Greenaway’s controversial, The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover. In 1990, Roth began to enjoy international attention with starring roles as Vincent van Gogh in Robert Altman’s Vincent & Theo and as Guildenstern in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead. Roth and other young British actors who were becoming established film actors such as Gary Oldman, Colin Firth and Paul McGann were dubbed the Brit Pack, a nickname based on the US Brat Pack of the mid-80’s.
Roth impressed director Quentin Tarantino and was cast as Mr. Orange in his 1992 ensemble piece Reservoir Dogs (1992). This film paved the way for more work in Hollywood. In 1994, Tarantino cast him again as a robber in the acclaimed Pulp Fiction. and they worked again in the 1995 film Four Rooms, where Roth played the extremely physically animated role of Ted the Bellhop. Roth was very successful playing viciously evil English nobleman Archibald Cunningham in Rob Roy opposite Liam Neeson; for which he earned an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor, a Golden Globe nomination and won a BAFTA.
In 1996, he went a different way, starring in Woody Allen’s musical comedy Everyone Says I Love You. He also starred as Danny Boodman T.D. Lemon 1900 (or just “1900”) in The Legend of 1900, and in the same year co-starred with Tupac Shakur in the drama Gridlock’d. He made a critically acclaimed debut as a director in 1999 with The War Zone, a bleak and uncompromising look at incest starring Ray Winstone and Tilda Swinton.
In 2001, he portrayed General Thade in Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes reboot. Roth was the original choice for the role of Severus Snape in the Harry Potter film series, but he turned it down for the Planet of the Apes job, although he was the best thing in the ‘Apes’ movie, you have to say that it was a bad choice. He was also considered for the part of Hannibal Lecter in the 2001 Ridley Scott film Hannibal before Anthony Hopkins returned to reclaim the role. Roth has more recently appeared in Francis Ford Coppola’s Youth Without Youth and Michael Haneke’s remake of Funny Bones, before starring opposite Edward Norton in The Incredible Hulk.
From 2009 to 2011, he starred in a series on Fox called Lie To Me, wherein he played Dr. Cal Lightman, an expert on body language who assists local and federal law organisations in the investigations of crimes. In early 2012, Roth was announced as the President of the Jury for the Un Certain Regard section at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival.
Harvey Keitel
Harvey Keitel (born May 13, 1939) is an American actor. Some of his most notable starring roles were in Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets and Taxi Driver, Ridley Scott’s The Duellists and Thelma & Louise, Quentin Tarantino’s Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, Jane Campion’s The Piano, Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, James Mangold’s Cop Land, and Nicolas Roeg’s Bad Timing.
Keitel grew up in the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, with his sister, Renee, and brother, Jerry. At the age of sixteen, he decided to join the United States Marine Corps, a decision that took him to Lebanon, during Operation Blue Hat (to bolster the pro-Western Lebanese government of President Camille Chamoun against internal opposition and threats from Syria and Egypt). After his return to the United States, he was a court reporter for several years and was able to support himself before beginning his acting career.
Keitel studied under both Stella Adler and Lee Strasberg, eventually landing roles in Off-Broadway productions. During this time, Keitel auditioned for filmmaker Martin Scorsese and gained a part in Scorsese’s student production, Who’s That Knocking at My Door? Since then, Scorsese and Keitel have worked together on several projects. Keitel had the starring role in Scorsese’s Mean Streets, which also proved to be Robert De Niro’s breakthrough film. He later appeared with De Niro in Taxi Driver, playing the role of Jodie Foster’s pimp ‘Sport’.
Originally cast as Captain Willard in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, Keitel was involved with the first week of principal photography in the Philippines. Coppola was not happy with Keitel’s take on Willard, stating that the actor “found it difficult to play him a passive onlooker”. After viewing the first week’s footage, Coppola made the difficult decision to replace Keitel with a casting session favourite, Martin Sheen.
Keitel drifted into obscurity through most of the 1980s, taking mainly supporting roles in some good movies such as Bad Timing (1981) by Nicolas Roeg, The Border (1982) by Tony Richardson and Falling in Love (1984) with Robert De Niro and Meryl Streep. He continued to do work on both stage and screen, but usually in the stereotypical thug roles. In 1987 he again worked with Scorsese as Judas in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988). Another supporting role to Jack Nicolson in The Two Jakes (1990) before Ridley Scott cast Keitel as the sympathetic policeman in Thelma & Louise in 1991. That same year, he landed a role in Bugsy, for which he received an Academy Award nomination for Best Supporting Actor.
Keitel’s career revival continued when he starred in Quentin Tarantino’s debut Reservoir Dogs (which he co-produced) in 1992, where his performance as “Mr. White” took his career to a different level. Since then, Keitel has chosen his roles with care, seeking to change his image and show off a broader acting range. One of those roles was the title character in Abel Ferarra’s Bad Lieutenant (1992), about a self-loathing, drug- addicted police lieutenant trying to redeem himself. He also appeared in the movie The Piano in 1993, and played an efficient clean-up expert Winston “The Wolf” Wolfe in Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994).
Keitel was back in a big way, he starred in Smoke and Clockers (both 1995), then in 1996 he had a major role in Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez’s film, From Dusk Till Dawn, as the religious father of two, whose camper van is hijacked by Seth (George Clooney) and his twisted brother Richard (Quentin Tarantino). In 1997 he starred in the excellent crime drama Cop Land, which also starred Sylvester Stallone, Ray Liotta, and long-time collaborator Robert De Niro.
He’s been incredibly busy through the last decade, featuring in a lot of movies… can someone please give him another gritty leading role to get his teeth in to..?
Quentin Tarantino – Poster Art Part 3
Last post featuring more poster art inspired by the films of Quentin Tarantino.
Quentin Tarantino – Poster Art Part 1
The first of a few random postings of poster art from Quentin Tarantino films…
socialpsychol 