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Quick Links David Duchovny Auditioned to Play a Lead Role in Reservoir Dogs Tim Roth Held His Own in an Ensemble Cast Reservoir Dogs Was the First of Many Successes for Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino knows precisely what he's looking for when developing his movies. Stylized narratives and sets all point towards being part of the director's vision, and the right cast is tasked with following suit. Before his big break, he had worked on short films, including Love Birds in Bondage and My Best Friend's Birthday, but it was the 1992 crime-thriller Reservoir Dogs that launched his career into the spotlight. The dialogue-heavy plot focused on a heist-gone-wrong, leaving a group of criminals to work out, among whom was the "rat," and it was very well-received. Although it didn't win prestigious awards, Reservoir Dogs still ranks highly today, coming second in the Sundance Film Festival's All-Time Top 10 Films just last year.

Aubrey Plaza has been waiting to wade into John Waters’ filmography for decades, ever since she first watched his 1994 satirical film “Serial Mom.”

During a visit alongside director Sean Price Williams to Kim’s Video at Alamo Drafthouse in Downtown Manhattan for its web series, Plaza credited Waters for inspiring her comedy taste in film.

“John Waters blew my mind with ‘Serial Mom,'” she said, adding that working in a video store while in high school was how she “learned about independent films.”

The “Megalopolis” actress added, “I was getting really into John Waters. I was getting really into ‘Waiting for Guffman’ and Christopher Guest movies. [But] ‘Serial Mom’ for me was like, oh my god…I was laughing so much. I thought it was the funniest shit I’ve ever seen. Of course I watch all those other movies and I just think he just doesn’t care. It...

With the announcement that Quentin Tarantino is no longer proceeding with The Movie Critic, the film has now joined a fraternity of Tarantino films that will never see the light of day. Ever since he was a teenager, filmmaking has been his passion of his. He wrote one of his first screenplays, an adaptation of 1977’s Smokey and the Bandit, when he was just 14 years old, and he began his journey in Hollywood as a production assistant in 1986, when he was just 23 years old. A year later, Tarantino would co-write, co-produce, edit, and direct My Best Friend’s Birthday, a comedy shot in black-in-white that has remained unfinished for the past 37 years. The unfinished nature of that film has become sort of a hallmark for Tarantino. Although he has gone on to be the mastermind behind such classics as Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood thanks...

"The Movie Critic" will be Pitt and Tarantino's third collaboration, tying Tarantino with David Fincher and Steven Soderbergh for Pitt's most frequent director collaborators. If Tarantino actually retires as a director after "The Movie Critic," he is at risk of losing this record tie with Fincher and Soderbergh if either director ever works with Pitt again. Pitt is less likely to work with Soderbergh again since they only collaborated on the Ocean's franchise, which neither of them are a part of anymore.

Now that Brad Pitt has been cast in Quentin Tarantino's upcoming film The Movie Critic, the director is officially tied for a certain record pertaining to his frequent collaborator. Set in Los Angeles in the 1970s, Tarantino's The Movie Critic is based on a real-life film critic who wrote reviews for a porno magazine, which will be called "The Popstar Pages" in the movie. The...

Welcome to The B-Side, from The Film Stage. Here we talk about movie stars! Not the movies that made them famous or kept them famous, but the ones that they made in between. But sometimes we talk to filmmakers! About filmmakers!

Today we talk to up-and-coming writer/director Andrew Adams whose debut feature American Meltdown is making a robust festival run as we speak!

He joins us to spearhead our first incarnation of “The First Frame:” a B-Side segment in which we examine the first films of legendary filmmakers. The three pictures we focus on today are My Best Friend’s Birthday by Quentin Tarantino, Sour Grapes by Larry David, and Barking Dogs Never Bite by Bong Joon-ho.

We discuss our love for these three masters, the seeds of their genius in each of their debuts (as well as each piece’s shortcomings), and the strange connection between all three of them.

We may receive a commission on purchases made from links.

When "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" was released to theaters in 2019, it was promoted as "The 9th Film by Quentin Tarantino." Technically, this is true. Though "Kill Bill" was split into two volumes due to its 247-minute runtime, it is one complete story. Still, there is one intriguing what-if that could bump Tarantino up into 10 completed features -- one that presaged his pop-culture cuisinart sensibility while displaying, in the crudest of forms, his formal daring.

The film is called "My Best Friend's Birthday," and only 36 minutes remain of what was once a 70-minute shoestring-budget indie comedy that, had Tarantino had been able to splice his footage into a coherent story, might've been able to land a competition slot at the Sundance Film Festival. Because, despite its ultra lo-fi aesthetic, it's got a hyper-referential swagger that plays like Jean-Luc Godard on a cocaine binge.

Stars: Joe Cornet, Natalie Denise Sperl, Eileen Dietz, Eric Roberts | Written by Craig Hamann | Directed by Joe Cornet

Night of the Caregiver sounds like a Lifetime movie about a psycho home health aid. It’s actually a new supernatural horror film from producer Alexander Nevsky and director/co-star Joe Cornet two men better known for Westerns and action films than scary stuff. Can they successfully make the switch?

Julia Rowe has been taken an assignment as an in-home caregiver for Lillian Gresham, a sweet old lady who, of course, lives in the middle of nowhere. It’s Friday night but, “It pays really well, more for one night than I make in a week”, which should also be a red flag.

And we know something isn’t right due to the prologue that gives way to a scene from “13 hours earlier” where Detective Roman Eckhart (Joe Cornet), of the NYPD,...

Few directors have had their filmography dissected and lauded more than Quentin Tarantino. He is often a gateway for budding cinephiles when learning what a film director is. Tarantino has the name recognition of a global celebrity, and his collection of idiosyncratic films exists in their own expansive universe, well before Marvel did. While anyone with a breath of film knowledge can name his entire filmography, what if you were told that there exists a lost Tarantino film — one that happened to be the first expression of his tastes and artistic sensibilities put to film? Step aside, Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino's first film was actually My Best Friend's Birthday, but you wouldn't have seen it or known of it because it was lost in a fire.. or was it?...

Quentin Tarantino's directorial debut, "Reservoir Dogs," is an awe-inspiring film, primarily because of how engaging it is while featuring hardly any action, despite its genre and premise. The film tells the story of anonymous criminals, using colors as codenames, who stage a jewelry heist that goes terribly wrong. Fearing the presence of a rat among them, what follows is a tense and concise 90-minute thriller filled to the brim with powerhouse performances that carry the film. One of the most fascinating things about "Reservoir Dogs" is that the audience never gets to see the actual heist happen. Only the events leading up to it and the disastrous aftermath are shown.

The fact that "Reservoir Dogs" is mainly comprised of characters standing or sitting around talking to each other was a factor that undoubtedly played into the struggle Tarantino went through to get his first feature film made. Perhaps even...

Few filmmakers could — and even fewer should — attempt what writer-director Quentin Tarantino has accomplished across his three decades of movie-making magic. Armed with an appetite for ultra-violent action, a knack for crafting dialogue sharper than a samurai sword, an infectious appreciation for the art of filmmaking, and, yes, a bit of a thing for feet, the two-time Oscar winner famously said: “You don’t have to know how to make a movie. If you truly love cinema with all your heart and with enough passion, you can’t help but make a good movie.”

Though he was born in Knoxville, Tennessee and spent some years living in Austin, Texas (where the legendary director hosted an annual movie festival called “Qt Fest” from 1996 to 2007), Tarantino grew up mainly in Los Angeles, California. As a young man, Tarantino was a staple of the now-closed Video Archives rental store in Manhattan Beach, where he worked while writing,...

Can you imagine Reservoir Dogs without Michael Madsen as Mr. Blonde? That almost happened, when Michael Madsen very seriously considered walking away from the classic gangster pic, which also happens to mark the official directorial debut of Quentin Tarantino. The actor didn't want to die on screen at the hands of an unknown, which happened at the time to be a young Tim Roth. He wanted his character to be killed by seasoned actor and Martin Scorsese alum Harvey Keitel.

Mr. Blonde eventually meets his ultimate demise at the hands of Tom Roth's undercover cop Mr. Orange, during the thrilling climax of Reservoir Dogs. But Michael Madsen had decided he was ready to walk if he didn't have it a different way. This new info comes courtesy of the new documentary QT8: The First Eight, which chronicles the first 8 movies in Tarantino's filmography as a director. Madsen says this...

Quentin Tarantino is many things. Above all of them he is one of America's most important living directors. In a day and age when everything is a prequel, sequel or part of some tentpole, popcorn extravaganza, Tarantino is someone who has created his own tentpole extravaganza from scratch. He has his own genre: Quentin Tarantino movies. That he is able to make them personal and a piece of art in the process, is further testament to just how special this director is.

Apparently, we aren't going to have him around making movies for too much longer. This isn't some hard and fast rule he's putting out there (if the right project comes along he's not going to not do it), he just seems to feel that 10 is a nice round number and it would be a good place to stop. While it might not make much sense to even announce you're quitting,...

Quentin Tarantino held a masterclass during the Lumière Festival in Lyon, France where he revealed tidbits about his new project that he’s been researching for four years. The subject is the 1970s and how that decade marked a turning point for American and international cinema. Calling it a “work in progress,” the director told the crowd he’s still figuring out what it will be.

“Am I going to write a book? Maybe. Is it going to be a six-part podcast? Maybe. A feature documentary? Maybe. I’m figuring it out,” he said, via Deadline.

Tarantino was joined by Cannes Film Festival director Thierry Fremau, who also runs this event. This year “The Hateful Eight” helmer curated a handful of films from the ‘70s that will be presented throughout the week. Some of the movies that will be screened include Arthur Hiller’s “Love Story,” Dario Argento’s “The Bird With The Crystal Plumage,...

The writer/director has one of Hollywood’s most distinguished bodies of work over the last two decades. Here it is in poster form.

Related storiesSamuel L. Jackson Reveals the Similarities Between Quentin Tarantino and Tim Burton's Directing Styles'My Best Friend's Birthday': Watch Quentin Tarantino's First Film -- or What's Left of ItOliver Stone Reveals 'Natural Born Killer' Secrets, From Working with Tarantino's Script to Bob Dole's Angry Reaction...

Before she was a three-time Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize winner, as well as an Oscar winner, Andrea Arnold was captivated with depicting reckless behavior and the subsequent consequences, as proven by her debut short film, “Milk.” With a shoestring cast and a ten-minute runtime, “Milk” cuts straight to the core without wasting a breath.

Read More: Review: ‘American Honey’ Proves Andrea Arnold is One of the Best Working Filmmakers and Finds a Breakout Star in Sasha Lane

Following a miscarriage, Hetty (Lynda Steadman) decides not to attend the funeral for her child, despite her husband’s (Stephen McGann) pleading. After wandering around town, she meets Martin (Lee Oakes), and together they embark on an impulsive, drunk joyride in his car. Unconventional and uncompromising, Arnold’s debut short packs the emotional wallop critics audiences have come to admire in her work.

“Milk” was followed by two more short films, “Dog” and “Wasp,...

Samuel L. Jackson has worked with almost everyone at this point in his career. He most recently added Tim Burton to that list with “Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children,” an adaptation of the young-adult novel by Ransom Riggs. The actor’s unexpected takeaway from the experience is that the “Beetlejuice,” “Edward Scissorhands” and “Ed Wood” director is “very Quentin [Tarantino]-like” in his approach to filmmaking.

Read More: ‘Miss Peregrine’s Home For Peculiar Children’ Review: X-Men Meets Harry Potter In Tim Burton’s Painfully Clichéd Ya Saga

“It’s incumbent on you to come in there as precise and as sure as you want to do as [he is],” Jackson eleborated during the “Miss Peregrine” premiere on Monday night. “But still he expects you to come and create something that’s as unique and visual as what he’s doing.” The actor has worked with Tarantino a number of times,...

Ryan Lambie Aug 9, 2016

From 2001 and Metropolis, to The Wicker Man and Event Horizon: a look at nine films with scenes we may never see...

There are some movies whose images and ideas are so indelible, it's difficult to imagine a world without them. Yet films are by their nature delicate things; they're the end-product of months or even years of craftsmanship, and whether they're stored on celluloid or captured digitally, they're as vulnerable to the ravages of time or acts of god as any other artform.

Cinema history is littered with stories of lost and damaged movies. Back in the 1920s, eminent director Erich von Stroheim made Greed, an expensive, nine-and-a-half hour epic that was repeatedly cut until only 140 minutes of its original footage remained. Legend has it that a janitor accidentally threw out the removed footage and, just like that, years of work were gone - seemingly forever.

The Hollywood archives are packed with movies that, for myriad reasons, have somehow slipped between the cracks, never to be heard from again.

No film sums up that unfortunate group more than 1994's The Fantastic Four, a property now getting rebooted for a second time with a lavish budget and inescapable marketing campaign. We look back at seven movies the industry (and the filmmakers behind them) wants to sweep under the carpet.

1. The Fantastic Four

Bernd Eichinger snapped up the film rights to Marvel's first family in the '80s for a pittance, and with the clock ticking down on his ownership he teamed up with B-movie specialist Roger Corman to produce a $1 million picture in less than a month. With a cast of unknowns and music video director Oley Sassone at the helm, The Fantastic Four ended up getting buried by Marvel in a bid for brand protection.

Avi Arad,...

'My Best Friend's Birthday' is a black and white amateur film written by Craig Hamann and Quentin Tarantino and directed by Quentin Tarantino, while he was working at the now shuttered Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California.

The project started in 1984, when Hamann wrote a short 30-40 page script about a young man who continually tries to do something nice for his friend's birthday, only to have his efforts backfire.

Tarantino became attached to the project as co-writer and director, and he and Hamann expanded the short script into an 80 page script. On an estimated budget of $5,000, they shot the film on 16mm over the course of the next four years. Hamann and Tarantino starred in the film, along with several video store and acting class buddies.

The original cut was about 70 minutes long but due to a fire only 36 minutes of the film survived.

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Reservoir Dogs is obviously the Quentin Tarantino film we all pretty much consider his "first" film, but if you want to get technical the director that has since brought us the Kill Bill duology, Inglourious Basterds, Django Unchained and, of course, Pulp Fiction actually kicked things off with a film called My Best Friend's Birthday. The 1987 feature is considered a 1987 film, though it was never released. Co-written by Craig Hamann and Tarantino and made for something like $5,000, the film was originally around 70 minutes long, but only 36 minutes survived a fire at the processing lab. In the film Tarantino plays Clarence who sets out to show his best friend Mickey (Hamann) a birthday he'll never forget after his girlfriend just left him. Featured below is the original Hamann and Tarantino screenplay (via Cinephile Archive) along with the surviving 36 minutes of the film. Some of the dialogue from the film would eventually...

This isn't quite fair -- it's a bit like shooting fish in a barrel. No one's amateur/college-made first directorial effort is good. Hell, no one's independently-funded first effort is generally very good (see PTA's "Cigarettes & Coffee" or what's left of Quentin Tarantino's "My Best Friend's Birthday"). But for a slow President's Day, here's something to occupy you for fifteen minutes: Ben Affleck's directorial debut, the 1993 short "I Killed My Lesbian Wife, Ηung Ηer on a Μeathook & Νow I Have a Three-Picture Deal with Disney." The short in Affleck's own words? "It's horrible. It's atrocious. I knew I wanted to be a director, and I did a couple of short films, and this is the only one that haunts me. I'm not proud of it. It looks like it was made by someone who has no prospects, no promise." And yes, it's not very good, but again, what first short made.

Most people know that Quentin Tarantino's first feature film Reservoir Dogs debuted at Sundance in 1992, but five years earlier he actually directed a black and white film called My Best Friend's Birthday which was co-written by his friend Craig Hamann. It was never officially released, partially due to the fact that over half of the film was lost in a fire, but some of the ideas would later resurface in his screenplay for Tony Scott's True Romance. A surviving 36 minute cut of the film screened at a few film festivals, and has since made its way onto YouTube. Interested in seeing where Tarantino got his start? Check out the video after the jump!

For More Daily Movie Goodness, Visit Filmjunk.Com!

Dangerous Minds has unearthed the first 36 minutes of My Best Friend's Birthday, Quentin Tarantino's first film, which was made in 1984 with a budget of just $5000. Tarantino stars in it along with people he knew from his acting class and his job at a video store.

According to Dangerous Minds, the movie was originally 70 minutes long, but the rest of the film was destroyed in a fire at the processing lab. As a result, My Best Friend's Birthday was never officially released.

After the jump, we have the surviving 36 minutes for you ...

Get ready to watch a rare piece of cinema as Vulture has come across the only remaining footage of Quentin Tarantino's early film My Best Friend's Birthday on YouTube.

I have not watched it yet, but did watch the opening to see what kind of quality we're talking about and it is pretty good considering you can't buy this anywhere. The YouTube description of it reads as follows: It's Mickey's Birthday and his girlfriend just left him, so that's when his friend Clarence shows him a birthday he'll never forget.

The film was completed, but the final reel was destroyed in a lab fire that broke out during editing. The surviving part of the film was shown in part to a small crowd in early 1987.

Actor Allen Garfield was teaching Quentin Tarantino acting at the time, and that is how he also became involved in the project. Filmed over three years,...

Scott Beale of Laughing Squid points out that the surviving 36 minutes (the original 70 minute rough cut was damaged in a fire) of "My Best Friend's Birthday," Quentin Tarantino's first film, are on YouTube, below. The black and white film was shot on 16mm over several years and finished in 1987 -- Tarantino directed and stars in the film alongside his co-writer Craig Hamann.

Back in 1984, Quentin Tarantino began filming his very first movie while working at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, CA. The movie, called My Best Friend's Birthday, was created by him and a group of his fellow video store co-workers (including Roger Avary, who photographed the film) and classmates from his drama school on a budget of about $5,000. Shooting was finally completed in 1987. Eventually, a 70-minute rough cut would come into existence, though sadly a fire at the processing...

All Quentin Tarantino fans should bypass this opening paragraph and skip right to the jump so as to check out the opening 36 minutes of his first movie, My Best Friend's Birthday. Completed in 1987, the film has never been officially released and has only been shown at film festivals every once in a great while. However, thanks to the wonders of space-age technology, you can now watch over half of it online! (We’d love to show you the last 34 minutes of the film, but they were lost in an editing room fire.) For more, hit the jump to check out the video as well as some plot details from the film. The 36 minute clip found below displays the quirks of Tarantino films we’ve come to know and love. From the snappy dialogue to the chopped-up storytelling, it's all there. Though it's the most slapstick and comedic of his films,...

Here's one of those difficult to find pieces of film history that was once a sort of holy grail but is now wonderfully easy to see thanks to the internet. Before Reservoir Dogs, Quentin Tarantino spent a couple years working piecemeal on his first film, called My Best Friend's Birthday. Some of the 16mm film was reportedly destroyed, so all that remains is thirty-six minutes. But that chunk is now available on YouTube, and you can watch it below. Really, this is a must-see for any Tarantino fan, because it has all the elements of what has become his signature style. He co-wrote the film with friend Craig Hamann (who really began the project -- Qt came on later) but all the pop-culture references, long dialogue passages and even signature elements of his own fictional universe are there. K-billy, the radio station heard in Reservoir Dogs, is a part of the film,...

Back in the late 80's (as so many good stories start), Quentin Tarantino made a 70-minute film called My Best Friend's Birthday while still shocking shelves at a Manhattan Beach video shop. As legend has it (as so many other good stories start), a fire destroyed half of the black and white picture -- in which Tarantino played a disc jockey named Clarence who tries to do a few nice things for his buddy's birthday -- leaving just 36 minutes of the Pulp Fiction director's first feature. And now, for what it's worth, you can watch the entire project after the jump.

Quentin Tarantino on the set of Inglourious Basterds

Photo: The Weinstein Co. After my not-to-difficult-to-figure-out clues in my What I Watched column yesterday here we have my personal ranking of Quentin Tarantino's first six films. I am excluding his 1987 feature My Best Friend's Birthday for lack of availability and I am not including this weekend's release of Inglourious Basterds because I am not yet ready to weigh in with an official opinion on that one just yet and plan on catching a midnight screening this Thursday before even writing my review. Also, since you guys haven't seen it yet what fun is it really in including it? So, after re-watching all of Tarantino's movies this weekend, here we have my personal ranking of his films with a favorite clip or two from each for your enjoyment. Hope you enjoy and hope you are ready for a week that will...