Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #492386 in Books
• Published on: 2000-08-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Customer Reviews

Much better than what Oliver Stone turned it into!
Quentin Tarantino bought everything out to write this thriller romance. Only for Oliver Stone to ruin his perfect screenplay. It's a good read for any Tarantino fan, it is much better if you have not seen the finished film as you can use your imaginenation.A very good buy at a great price thanks to Amazon!

Poor screenplay.
This screenplay was issued at the height of Tarantino's popularity- this is the original QT- version of NBK that he failed to get finance for. It's easy to see why- there are some choice quotes, but for the most part it's a mixture of Cops, Network & the Lover's on the Run thing QT did with True Romance- which means that it milks prior works like Wild at Heart, Badlands, Thieves Like Us, Gun Crazy and of course, Bonnie & Clyde.

Anyone who has seen the Oliver Stone film- Stone having purchased the screenplay & changed it for his own purposes (as 100% of directors do!)- made it a thing of of substance, rather than an exercise in style & movie reference. Sure, Tarantino describes some shots- such as the knife-throwing through the window- but what Stone added was of far more interest- the Rodney Dangerfield Sitcom section, the Drug Zone sequence, the insane credit sequence/the credits within the credits, the cutting in of contemporary images (OJ Simpson, Tonya Harding, Waco)- which made this more than a genre piece or a lame reading of celebrity. Here we get the usual Mexican Stand-Off, which QT repeats in True Romance, Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, From Dusk Till Dawn, Desperado etc. Yawn.

As this screenplay demonstrates, Tarantino appears to have a problem with the linear, added to this this work is apolitical- it says nothing about the real world- see also Reservoir Dogs, True Romance & Pulp Fiction. Why this was published?- I suspect it was to back up Tarantino's megalomania (see the book Killer Instinct)- who also had From Dusk Till Dawn released as his screenplay (when this came from a story by Robert Kurtzman that had been lying around unproduced for years- then again the title of NBK comes from the awful Past Midnight- which QT did some rewriting on). The price of this book & what you get is also poor- probably cos if anything turned up relating to NBK, it would reveal that QT was just nixed cos he sold NBK before he accrued enough power to make it himself. And then he didn't like what Stone did with it; so why did he sell it? Sad also that he had to insert an NBK style scene featuring Kelly Preston into the risible From Dusk Till Dawn.

This screenplay is poor value, low grade and merely the blueprint from which Oliver Stone made one messed-up film- a work that seems more classic as time marches on (unlike QT's work, that comes across as rather quaint). Avoid.