CANNES, France — Quentin Tarantino confirmed Thursday that his next project, “The Movie Critic,” will be based on the story of a little-known second-string film reviewer for a 1970s porn magazine.
Tarantino spoke to Deadline’s Baz Bamigboye while attending the Cannes Film Festival. It was the first time the cult director described at length the topic of his upcoming, yet-to-be-shot film.
“It is based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag,” Tarantino told Deadline.
Tarantino explained that when he was a teen, one of his jobs was restocking vending machines that sold porn magazines.
“All the other stuff was too skanky to read but then there was this porno rag that had a really interesting movie page,” he explained.
In “The Movie Critic,” the porn magazine will be given a fictional name: The Popstar Pages.
Tarantino said that while the real critic behind his new movie’s protagonist, who wrote about mainstream movies, was not known to the general public, “He was known if you read ‘The Popstar Pages’!”
“I think he was a very good critic,” Tarantino elaborated. “He was as cynical as hell. His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what Travis Bickle might be if he were a film critic. Think about Travis’s diary entries. But the porno rag critic was very, very funny. He was very rude, you know. He cursed. He used racial slurs. But his shit was really funny.”
Tarantino added that the reviewer “wrote like he was 55 but he was only in his early to mid-30s. He died in his late thirties. It wasn’t clear for a while but now I’ve done some more research and I think it was complications due to alcoholism.”
The film has yet to be cast, with the director now looking for “somebody in the 35 year-old ball park.”
“It’ll definitely be a new leading man for me,” he added.
