First Films by Famous Directors: Quentin Tarantino

Before the mega-budgets and A-list talent, some of the biggest directors in Hollywood started out making little films with friends and family. Others made student films. But however the filmmaker started, these are the movies that launched their careers.

From video store clerk to Oscar nominated director, Quentin Tarantino's rocketed to fame in the early 1990's - first as a screenwriter, then as director, ushering the age of the indies. Known for his rapid fire, pop culture referenced dialogue, Tarantino's style was distinctive and unmistakable. From the mid-90s on, it was endlessly copied. But the origins of Tarantino's writing style go back to his first film.

Quentin Tarantino
Born on March 27, 1963 in Knoxville, Tennessee, his family moved to El Segundo just south of Los Angeles in 1971. Los Angeles was the place to be in the early 70s. The Movie Brats were conquering Hollywood. The studio system was in its death throes. And American cinema was experiencing a Renaissance of new ideas and a new-found relevance. It's somehow fitting that Tarantino would have come to California during this time in Hollywood history. Twenty years later, he would be leading a new pack of independent young filmmakers who would once again revitalize movies.

A high school dropout, Tarantino wrote his first script, Captain Peachfuzz and the Anchovy Bandit, when he was 14. By 16, he'd left school. In 1984 he was working at Video Archives, a video rental store. There he met Roger Avary, a fellow employee. Within ten years both would be accepting Oscars for Best Original Screenplay.

In 1984 though, while working at the video store, Tarantino began working on a film that he wrote and would direct called My Best Friend's Birthday. This film, which would become the basis for True Romance, was shot over a three years. Completed in 1987, the film was crude, poorly executed, awkward, but was unmistakably Tarantino. The dialogue, the content, the pop culture references, everything that Tarantino would bring to later films is here in his first movie. Unfortunately a lab fire broke out during editing and destroyed the final third of the film. However the first two-thirds are still fun to watch.

You can watch the surviving portions of the film HERE.

While most people believe that 1991's Reservoir Dogs is Tarantino's first movie as director, My Best Friend's Birthday predates that by four years. All right, now granted, My Best Friend's Birthday didn't go to Sundance. It didn't win the Palme D'Or or get nominated for any Academy Awards. It didn't resurrect John Travolta's career. But it did mark the emergence of one of the most important directors of the Independent Era of filmmaking, and that, in and of itself, makes it a historically important work. Okay, maybe that's a bit much. But at least the film is fun, which is more than can be said about some of Tarantino's much larger budgeted films.