![[Trending News] How Quentin Tarantino's career was launched out of pure spite](https://i3.wp.com/faroutmagazine.co.uk/static/uploads/1/2023/12/Quentin-Tarantino-Director-1980s-Far-Out-Magazine.jpg?w=1200&resize=1200,0&ssl=1 "[Trending News] How Quentin Tarantino's career was launched out of pure spite")
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These days, the notion of movie novelisations seems quaint and retrograde. After all, while there are still spinoff novels written within the IP of major franchises like Star Wars, Alien, and Marvel, the idea of someone wanting to read a book version of The Brutalist, Trap, or Gladiator II seems bizarre. However, there was a time when movie novelisations were big business, and all kinds of films would be adapted into mass-market paperback form.
Amazingly, Quentin Tarantino‘s interest in writing screenplays can be directly traced back to one of these novelisations – because he thought it was so much better than the movie itself.
When Tarantino was a budding young movie enthusiast in the 1970s, he voraciously watched as many films as possible. After seeing something in the cinema, though, it would be several years before it reached television, and VHS wasn’t a viable option until the ‘80s. So, unless he caught a ‘making of’ special, he wouldn’t be able to visually experience the movie again until it aired on TV. There was also no internet to read about films, so he had to hope a magazine like Fangoria covered the movie in question.
In truth, the only way to live with a movie a little bit longer in those days was to read the novelisation. These products were at their most popular in the 1970s, and Tarantino has admitted, “Movie novelisations were the first adult books I grew up reading. And to this day, I have a tremendous amount of affection for the genre.” Every major film of the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s received a novelisation, along with some genuinely obscure titles whose books now seem absurd in hindsight.
Naturally, because Tarantino is a man who loves movies of all shapes and sizes, he was a fan of many novelisations based on films that have largely been lost to history. Fascinatingly, these novelisations were often based on early versions of a film’s script, meaning they had every chance of being significantly different from the finished movie in terms of character and plot. This is where the novelisation of a 1975 comedy directed by Rocky’s John G Avildsen comes in.
“When I saw movies I liked, I would go to the 7-11, and I would find the novelisation,” Tarantino told The New York Times in 2003. “That’s where I found WW and the Dixie Dancekings.”
He smiled, “I still have the same paperback that I bought way back when.”
Little QT was astonished when he read the book because it was hugely different from the film and much better overall. He later found out that screenwriter Thomas Rickman was so dismayed by the movie that he specifically asked to pen the novelisation himself so he could at least convey his intentions for the film to a small number of readers. Tarantino joked, “I’m that one person.”
Tarantino didn’t just lament how Hollywood botched a good story when it made WW and the Dixie Dancekings and then forget about it, though. Instead, he got mad, and he held a grudge. “When I saw the movie, a few years after I’d first read the book, I was like, ‘What the hell is this?’” Tarantino raged. “I mean, I was offended. I was literally offended.” This feeling of anger and injustice meant that he kept going back to the book, even confessing, “To this day, I reread it every three years.”
Even more amazingly, though, Tarantino draws a direct line between feeling upset about WW and the Dirty Dancekings and his initial forays into screenwriting. The disparity between the film and the novelisation had aggravated him so much that he began writing his own material out of spite. “The novelisation was pure,” he explained. “But this was Hollywood garbage. So, that’s why I started writing screenplays – because I was so outraged.”
So, there you have it. Without WW and the Dirty Dancekings and the fad of movie novelisations, the world may have never gotten Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, or Kill Bill.
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