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JACKIE BROWN, Tarantino's first script adapted from a novel, marks an evolutionary
development in Tarantino's thinking about character and conflict. PULP FICTION
fans will recognize the writer-director's trademark salty dialogue and his
deft handling of a complex narrative, but as Tarantino puts it, "the
film is as much about what motivates these characters as about what happens
next." Producer Lawrence Bender points out, "Quentin is doing
something different. You still have all this great dialogue, these great
characters and great circumstances between people and there's the way he
shoots, but with all these things, you have this extra element. There's
real sweetness amongst all this other craziness. In a certain aspect, this
movie's a romance."
"It's a quiet film," Tarantino says, "but my idea of quiet
may not be anyone else's."
Tarantino relished the challenge of adapting Leonard. "I wanted to
keep his dry sense of humor without getting too 'joky'. That's very much
the kind of balance I was after in JACKIE BROWN." The result is a seamless
blending of Tarantino's sensibility with Leonard's.
Tarantino made several significant changes in the course of creating a screenplay
out of the book. First, he shifted the locale from Elmore Leonard's home
turf to his own from South Florida to the South Bay region of Los Angeles
-- El Segundo, Torrance, Hawthorne and the adjacent beach communities. For
him, the change was crucial; a way to retain the story's fine-tuned sense
of lived-in reality in its transition from an Elmore Leonard novel to a
Quentin Tarantino film.
"I don't know Miami at all," Tarantino explains, "but I know
South Bay like the back of my hand. This was a way for me to make this movie
personal to myself and to be confident that I could keep it real. In a South
Bay context I knew exactly where each of these people would live, how they
would dress, what their apartments would look like. Shooting in Miami I
would not have come to those things as naturally."
He decided to cast '70's icon Pam Grier as the protagonist Jackie Brown,
a role which in RUM PUNCH was a white woman named Jackie Burke. Notes producer
Lawrence Bender, "Quentin has been a Pam Grier fan forever ...and she
was just perfect for the role. She's got something extra no one else could
have really brought to it; she embodies the essence of the character. Jackie's
a gorgeous woman in her mid-40's who's had a tough life and has her back
up against the wall. She's very vulnerable, and by making her black instead
of white puts her that much more into jeopardy."
By casting Grier, Tarantino was able to blend in something of the mood of
the blaxploitation movies of the '60's an '70' of which he is a fan. Topical,
full of wildly colorful characters and outrageous situations, the urban
action movies captured something of the political and social climate of
the times. More importantly to the droves of teenagers, (like Tarantino)
who fueled this industry, they kicked ass. JACKIE BROWN, although not directly
inspired by the movies, shows their influence in subtle touches such as
set design and a soundtrack influenced by soul hits of the '70's.
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