Welcome to Harvey’s Hellhole, a monthly column devoted to spotlighting the movies that were poorly marketed, mishandled, reshaped, neglected or just straight-up destroyed by Harvey Weinstein during his reign as one of the most powerful studio chiefs in Hollywood. Let’s go back twenty-five years ago this month, when everyone was anticipating the new movie from a hot young filmmaker.
For the past couple years, I’ve toyed with the idea of doing a book on Jackie Brown.
Over the years, Quentin Tarantino’s 1997 follow-up to his second feature/pop-culture phenomenon Pulp Fiction has become my favorite film from the man. Since I’ve previously written about the movie and its soundtrack, I thought I could get my Glenn Kenny on and drop a book which detailed the making of the film, chronicled the careers of Tarantino and Pam Grier — Jackie Brown herself — and gave my thoughts on the Blaxploitation genre that inspired Tarantino and made Grier a leading lady. I had a first chapter written and everything. (If anyone wants to read it, DM me.)
But, due to some medical and financial problems I had last year, I wasn’t able to flesh it out. Since then, so many people have beaten me to the punch. Tarantino has just released his own memoir, Cinema Speculation. (I tried to get an interview with him while he was promoting his Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood paperback, but his PR people said he wasn’t doing much press. He was probably at home, working on this.) The latest season of Turner Classic Movies’ The Plot Thickens podcast is all about Grier and her years as a soulful screen goddess. Last Month, Netflix premiered Is That Black Enough for You?!?, veteran film critic Elvis Mitchell’s splendid, personal documentary on ‘70s-era Black cinema. And I know several colleagues who’ll be releasing books on Blaxploitation in the near-future.
Well, it was a nice dream. I just wanted to pay tribute to a movie that is usually considered, at best, a minor slip-up in Tarantino’s revered canon. If it wasn’t for that out-there killer-stuntman movie Death Proof (best known as one-half of the Grindhouse double feature he did with Robert Rodriguez) that even Tarantino has called his worst movie, Brown would still be seen as his biggest disappointment.
Then again, after making a movie that was a literal sensation, taking in universal acclaim, an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and $214 million worldwide — not to mention setting off a wave of knockoff crime yarns featuring hip, gun-toting lowlifes (Vanity Fair columnist James Wolcott once lumped them all together and called them “scuzz films”) — anything after that is gonna look inferior.
With Brown, Tarantino got to do a movie that combined two of his biggest influences: Blaxploitation films and Elmore Leonard novels. Ever since Tarantino made it known he was a longtime fan of the late crime writer, his novels were becoming hot properties in Tinseltown. With Get Shorty already adapted by Barry Sonnenfeld (starring Pulp player John Travolta) and Out of Sight about to become one of Steven Soderbergh’s masterpieces (with a surprise cameo by Pulp co-star Samuel L. Jackson), Tarantino set his sights on Rum Punch, Leonard’s 1992 tale of Jackie Burke, a middle-aged, white flight attendant and her plan to double-cross a gunrunner and the police.
Just as he revitalized the career of former ‘70s star Travolta when he cast him in Pulp, Tarantino saw Brown as a comeback vehicle for Blaxploitation queen Pam Grier. He made the flight attendant Black and gave her the titular name —an obvious nod to her 1974 hit Foxy Brown. Samuel L. Jackson, Robert De Niro, Bridget Fonda, Michael Keaton, and Robert Forster rounded out the heavyweight supporting cast.
Clocking in at two hours and 40 minutes (Pulp was 2:34), a length the Weinsteins tried to get him to trim, Brown was Miramax’s big, Christmas Day release. But after that opening weekend, it finished fifth at the box office. During the great winter of 1997, the multiplexes were cluttered with hits. As Good as It Gets came out on the same day and came in at third. Titanic and the Pierce Brosnan 007 installment Tomorrow Never Dies dropped a week earlier and whipped both of them. Even Miramax was already rolling in dough with Good Will Hunting and Scream 2.
Brown ended up making $74.7 million internationally. Critics were mostly underwhelmed. Entertainment Weekly’s Owen Gleiberman, who just a few years earlier called Pulp “the most exhilarating piece of filmmaking,” was thrown off by Brown’s lack of fizz. (“It’s like viewing Pulp Fiction through bulletproof glass.”) Tarantino also got criticized (mostly by longtime nemesis Spike Lee) for what was already becoming a constant in his movies — his excessive use of the N-word. (In fairness, unlike his previous films, it’s only used by Black folk in Brown.) Instead of a slew of Oscar nods, the only nomination it received was a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Forster. I’m still infuriated that Grier didn’t get the same welcome-back treatment Travolta got — yet another sad reminder of how little Black actresses were demanded and/or respected back in the day.
According to Peter Biskind’s indie-film tome Down and Dirty Pictures, Miramax’s resident enfant terrible didn’t take the whole thing well:
“Like Madonna, his antennae were always tuned to the twitches of the zeitgeist, aquiver with each ripple of the culture. Although he always claimed to be and behaved as if he were making his films exclusively for himself–refusing to tailor them to suit the Weinsteins’ wishes or the comments scrawled on preview cards–he felt he had let down his fans.”
It certainly made him stop doing book adaptations. Brown was just one of several Leonard stories Tarantino planned to adapt. (The 1989 novel Killshot was eventually made into a 2008 film — produced by longtime partner Lawrence Bender and directed by, of all people, Shakespeare in Love’s John Madden.) In Speculation, he reveals that he considered doing another version of Donald E. Westlake’s The Outfit, which would once again star Grier.
It’s unfortunate that people didn’t go batshit over Brown the same way they did Pulp. It did seem like his most adult film to date. While Pulp and his 1992 debut Reservoir Dogs were savvy, stylish crime tales fueled by bloodshed and pop-culture references, Brown is more of a dramedy about middle-aged losers on both sides of the law. Much like the book it’s based on, the movie is basically about grown-ass has-beens and never-weres who are literally out to get rich or die trying. It’s kinda fascinating that Tarantino was in his thirties when he made Brown, already doing a film that lays out how much of a bitch getting old is.
As Tarantino eventually went on to make grandiose, genre-film fantasias of violence, revisionist history and a shitload of movie references, Brown is practically a quaint character study. It was also his first attempt at a “hangout movie,” which he would perfect years later with Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. As he told a table of critics on Charlie Rose once, he wanted to do a movie where getting to know the characters was part of the plot — just like Rio Bravo, one of his favorite films.
Of course, since this year marks the film’s 25th-anniversary, it’s been getting a lot of ink as a misunderstood classic, an unsung masterpiece, etc. It’s good to know that people are finally coming around, finally appreciating the simple pleasures of Tarantino’s most mature — and most badass — work.
Jackie Brown is available to rent or buy.
