While Murphy's lawyers got busy preparing the $5 million suit, Tarantino returned to the relative comforts of Jackie Brown, a project that's long occupied his mind. In fact, he first contemplated making it before Pulp. "I read [Rum Punch] in galleys," he recalls, "and it just kind of presented itself to me as a low-budget anti-Hollywood action picture." But film history beckoned, and Jackie went into turnaround while Tarantino taught the world what they call Quarter Pounders in France. Then, last year, he picked up Punch again and got that old familiar feeling. "That same movie I saw years before came back in my head."
Of course, the director has tinkered a tad with Leonard's original text. For starters, he changed Jackie's race from white to black--mostly, he says, because he's always wanted to work with Grier and wrote the screenplay with her in mind. Sam Jackson, though, offers another insight that could explain the switch: "Quentin wants to be black," says the actor. "He watched a lot of black exploitation flicks growing up. He has a lot of black friends. He has an affinity for black culture. And he likes to write black characters. He's like my daughters' little white hip-hop friends. They're basically black kids with white skin."
In any case, the rest of the casting required no further race changes. De Niro and Keaton took salary cuts for the chance to work with Tarantino, who made Jackie for a mere $12 million, while Fonda was chosen partly because she looks the age of her character ("You know, around 33, living off guys her whole life, starting to get kinda old," elaborates Tarantino). Forster, meanwhile, still can't believe he got the part. "If I can just get 10 percent of what Travolta got out of Pulp Fiction..." he prays.
Filming started last summer around L.A. (another change from the book, which is set in Florida). The shoot was intense (Tarantino sometimes gets so excited during a scene, he can't help shouting out verbal high fives in the middle of a shot) but exceptionally social. Many cast parties were thrown, many Mira sightings reported. "He was more confident in what he was doing than he was during Pulp," says Jackson. "But it was basically the same old Quentin."
Question is, will Quentin generate the same old box office? Frankly, probably not. Although Miramax has been running trailers for Jackie before Scream 2--and plastering New York and L.A. with cool black-and-white billboards of each of its cast members--there's been surprisingly little buzz over the film. Part of the problem is that so few people were allowed to see it before Tarantino finished editing on Dec. 4; for a while, there was even some doubt whether it would be ready in time for the New York Film Critics Circle Awards this month. "We felt like, if we can get it done in time for the critics, great," he says of the last-minute crunch (he ultimately met the critics' deadline). "But if we can't, they can have their little contest without us."
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