30 Years Ago, Tony Scott Elevated Quentin Tarantino in a True Romance

Quentin Tarantino is the rare movie director who may be better-known for his screenwriting than his visual signatures, even as the latter are scribbled all over his work. For a brief period in the 1990s, it even seemed like we might get a steady stream of projects written by Tarantino but directed by others, remnants from his pre-Pulp Fiction years, re-interpreted by enterprising others. His lovers-on-the-run script for Natural Born Killers became a story-by credit on an incendiary Oliver Stone screed; his brothers-on-the-run script for From Dusk Till Dawn became a collaboration with his buddy Robert Rodriguez, perhaps one of the only directors who would allow Tarantino himself to co-star; and his other lovers-on-the-run script, True Romance, became a Tony Scott movie. Among the script-only Tarantino movies, it was first out of the gate in September 1993, preceded only by Reservoir Dogs. It flopped. 30 years later, with both its director and its writer enjoying a sizable fandom, True Romance is better-known and better-regarded – though in its way, it’s also become the most 1990s movie Tarantino ever wrote.
Maybe this seems counterintuitive, given the sheer number of dorm-wall acreage taken up by Pulp Fiction posters in the ’90s. But as heavily identified with that period as Pulp Fiction is, Tarantino’s attachment to his ’70s upbringing (refracted further by the movie’s iconically fake ’50s diner, a tribute to the premature nostalgia of another time) gives the movie a certain alternate-universe timelessness. The same is true, in a lower key, of his 1997 follow-up Jackie Brown. No, if you want a really ’90s Tarantino movie, look to True Romance; if Pulp Fiction takes place in an alternate universe, Tony Scott’s movie takes place in an alternate to that alternate, a sensational fantasy that feels like Tarantino’s dreams somehow transposed into Scott’s brain.
That’s a fancy way of saying that True Romance has a hilariously shameless level of fantastical self-insert in the character of Clarence Worley (Christian Slater), a gabby Elvis-worshipping retro-loner who works in a comic book store and spends his birthday taking in a Sonny Chiba triple feature. In a crucial distinction from real-life nerds everywhere, probably including Tarantino, Clarence near-instantly wins the love of a beautiful woman without needing to be a famous film director first (though he does have the very early-’90s charm of Christian Slater at his disposal). Granted, Alabama (Patricia Arquette) has been paid to bump into Clarence at his birthday kung-fu marathon (what age he’s turning goes unmentioned; Slater was 24 when the movie came out) by his boss who, we’re later told, also lends him money from time to time. But even these feel like fantasies of indulgence – wow, Clarence’s boss must really love him! – as does, of course, the fact that Alabama falls for Clarence, and fast. After a single night together, she’s ready to renounce her four-day-old career in sex work and run away with her new love.
This would play pretty unbearable (and for the committed Tarantino anti-fans, might anyway) if not for the combination of distance and affection provided by Tony Scott. Though Clarence reads as an obvious Tarantino stand-in – employment at a cult-y business, passionate about film, an Elvis man, kind of a bullshitter – Scott’s overlay of dark-fairy-tale style, replete with a tinkling xylophone theme imitating “Gassenhauer” (used in Terence Malick’s lovers-on-the-run debut Badlands) washes away the self-glorification. Clarence becomes half-naif, half-loser, or maybe 60-40 in favor of naif; Scott is just that generous. Slater is perfectly cast, in part because of his rep as a “cool” young actor biting some mannerisms and deliveries from Jack Nicholson. He’s a misfit-poseur, a perfect match for the starry-eyed but resilient Alabama, who fulfills a broader fantasy than just “pretty girl interested in goony guy.” Who wouldn’t pine for a partner capable of looking at us at our loneliest and geekiest and coming to the conclusion that we are, in fact, really cool? Clarence, meanwhile, at least has the good sense to scarcely believe his good luck, and marries her as soon as possible.
That’s not to say Tarantino himself lacks the self-awareness to recognize the insecurities behind Clarence attempting to boast about a job where he gets to read comics all day. (He’s been accused of self-glorification for casting himself in his own movies, ignoring how often he’s cast himself as the most annoying guy in the frame, or a loser who winds up dead, or both.) But what Scott teases out of the movie, and what’s hard to picture Tarantino vibing with as a director, is the cracked empowerment of true love. Clarence’s love for Alabama convinces him that he can confront her pimp Drexl (Gary Oldman), and somehow he turns out to be right, surviving a violent encounter that should not have gone his way. Later, when he realizes the suitcase he took from Drexl’s lair holds not Alabama’s possessions but a ton of cocaine, he believes that, naturally, he can sell it at a discount and abscond with his new wife, whose support of this scheme never wavers. The power of love.