History serves those who write it. And if memories come from the conquerors—those who lived to tell the tale—then what’s bound and sold as fact is never the whole story. The crucial part is recalling who those conquerors were (or are): often white, straight men, resulting in the enshrined ideal of the Lone Male Survivor, from Moses to Odysseus.

A similar pattern has emerged on the big screen, manifesting itself as an inability to continue action after a man leaves the room. While this issue cuts across all genres of filmmaking (as well as many other modes of storytelling), this is especially true of the Western. These are stories of lone men on horseback who stoically fight their inner demons as well as bandits and racist caricatures of Native American people. Because the genre experienced a resurgence of popularity during the Cold War, the Western became a mode of storytelling that spoke to American ideals. All mainstream American films do this in some manner, but the stakes are higher with the Western, as the genre’s tales are based in “fact.” Winning the West, crossing the Oregon Trail, the genocide of Native American people—all these things really happened, and as Hollywood recast history, white men took possession of the stories.

So women and people of color have been forced to accept secondary roles, as they’ve been cast as lesser players in history, their contributions deemed too small to ever carry an epic story. Outside of Nicholas Ray’s female-centric 1954 masterpiece Johnny Guitar (and lesser efforts like 1994’s Bad Girls), Westerns generally suggest that women’s role in establishing the frontier only existed in relation to men with holsters, and either feeding or fucking them. Of course, in addition to Ray’s Vienna (Joan Crawford), some women stand out in the genre. But even when there’s a strong female sidekick, the narrative usually ends with the man who rides off into the sunset taking the story with him. What’s forgotten is the reverse shot and turning the camera 180 degrees away from the horizon to where life without that cowboy continues on.

Which is why watching a recent spurt of female-centric frontier stories has been so fascinating. After Ray’s Johnny Guitar, the most frequently cited female Westerns are Forty Guns (1957), Cat Ballou (1965), and McCabe And Mrs. Miller (1971). Sam Raimi did the genre justice with The Quick And The Dead (1995), casting Sharon Stone as a gunslinger, but this was more a transposition of iconic tropes in service of (fantastic) genre play. These are by no means bad films, but the small number does speak volumes. While female stars have made headway in action (another genre dominated by men going it alone), the Western is proving to be the last holdout.

The first sign of change arrived in 2010, with Kelly Reichardt’s Meek’s Cutoff, the film that best embodies an alternate, feminist history of the West. Based loosely on the 1845 ill-fated attempt to cross the Oregon Trail, Meek’s Cutoff isn’t shot from the real-life titular character’s perspective, but from the wives in the group: Emily (Michelle Williams), Glory (Shirley Henderson), and Millie (Zoe Kazan). The camera often stays with them as they observe, and critique, Meek’s inability to take them to safety.

Reichardt’s camera placement is entrenched with the women, and the dialogue among the female characters foregrounds the action that happens at the back of the caravan. At times frustratingly slow, Meek’s Cutoff evokes a mode of storytelling that comes from those who aren’t the leaders, those who are trapped and led to a destiny they want to refuse. It isn’t a conventional narrative pace, but it highlights that while there is a man up at the front, the stories at the back of the caravan are rich in human emotion too.

The critical success of Meek’s Cutoff might be a factor in the increasing number of female-centric Westerns that have been released since. Four years later, Tommy Lee Jones returned to directing with The Homesman. Based on Glendon Swarthout’s 1988 novel of the same name, the film is as deceptive as Johnny Guitar in its masculine title: the women are foregrounded from the outset, especially Mary Bee Cuddy (Hilary Swank). She is a plough-driving, practical, and self-sufficient woman, with no husband or children. Free of ties that bind, she agrees to escort a group of women who’ve lost their minds across the country from her small town. (This alone makes it a radical narrative, as the film journeys—literally and metaphorically—with those suffering from mental illness instead of locking them away.)

En route, Mary meets a grifter, George Briggs (Jones), who joins their group. Mary’s journey ends before the film’s conclusion, but she still haunts the film until the final moment. Briggs, drunk, accidentally knocks the tombstone he’s taking to her unmarked grave into a river. No one notices but the camera, which captures it disappearing into the dark waters. It’s a succinct and powerful image of how so many women’s stories go untold and forgotten.

The most recent addition to this growing subgenre is Daniel Barber’s The Keeping Room. Written by Julia Hart, the film toes the Western lines in subject matter—three women fight off two Yankee soldiers during the last days of the Civil War—but resonates in tone. Augusta (Brit Marling), her sister Louise (Hailee Steinfeld) and their enslaved worker Mad (Muna Otaru) live day-to-day, barely scraping by on what they can harvest from the land. After a raccoon bites Louise, Augusta searches for medicine, which takes her to the saloon in town. There, Moll (Amy Nuttall), the local prostitute, warns her of two Yankee men who are eyeing her with malicious intent.

It’s an important scene, as Hart’s script places the emphasis on a female perspective. Not only does Hart give voice to the normally silent figure of the prostitute, she also shifts the focus of the dangers of living on the frontier to realities specific to women. Moll directly acknowledges a certain male blindness to female experience when she grabs a shot of whiskey away from the bartender and gives it to Augusta, snapping at him: “Why don’t you save it for someone who needs it?”

Of note in Barber’s film is the space given to Mad. While white women are making gains in the Western genre, stories about women of color aren’t nearing the same numbers. In The Keeping Room, however, Mad’s character is given a rich (albeit tragic) backstory, which she relates in a long monologue to Augusta and Louise. She talks, they listen, and so does the audience. This is, in essence, why the re-writing of how the West was won, historically and on-screen, is so important: In telling women’s stories, women live on. As Augusta says to a bed-ridden Louise, while relating a version of the Scheherazade tale, the female storyteller of One Thousand And One Nights: “As long as her sister kept telling stories, she didn’t have to die.”

From surprising designer items to the ridiculous T-shirts and bathrobes.

We've seen some major pop culture anniversaries this year: "Mean Girls" turned 10, "Seinfeld" turned 25, and next month, Quentin Tarantino’s "Pulp Fiction" celebrates its twentieth anniversary. I’m going to date myself here, but back in 1994 when it was released, I was almost a fully formed adult, so my fondest ‘90s memories are less about the Spice Girls and baby butterfly clips and more about brown lipstick and Nirvana. And "Pulp Fiction", of course. This movie, which I saw in the theater twice upon its release and have seen countless times since, made a huge impression on me. The dialogue, the extreme violence which was somehow – to everyone’s discomfort -- made entertaining, and the stylized look of the characters was like nothing I’d ever seen before. I wanted to talk in Tarantino-isms. But mostly, I wanted to dress like Mia Wallace, played by Uma Thurman. I even dressed up as her for Halloween that year. (Yes, I have a picture and no, I'm not posting it.)

I was able, 20 years later, to hop on the phone with Betsy Heimann, who designed the costumes for "Pulp Fiction", as well as Tarantino’s "Reservoir Dogs" and other classics like "Jerry Maguire" and "Almost Famous." She's still a costume designer, and the Motion Picture Academy just featured her in a "Creative Sparks" video; she’s even designed a namesake bra for Cosabella. And she remembered a lot more from 1994 than I do, frankly. Here is Heimann’s take on how the most iconic looks from the movie came to be, as organized by my favorite quotes:

"Pilot? What's a pilot?"-Vincent "Well, you know the shows on TV?" -Jules "I don't watch TV." -Vincent "Yeah, but, you are aware that there's an invention called television, and on this invention they show shows, right?" -Jules

Heimann said she met with Tarantino in a Denny’s to plan out the looks in "Reservoir Dogs" and at classic LA haunt Barney’s Beanery to discuss the costumes for "Pulp Fiction." If you’ve seen both films, you probably noticed the carry-over of the black suits from "Reservoir Dogs" to Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) in "Pulp Fiction". They’re a sort of all-purpose bad guys’ uniform, but Heimann gave each character’s suit a special twist. “I felt that Jules was like a preacher and so I wanted to do a smaller, very tight-to-the neck collar on him. Quentin liked that idea,” Heimann says. “Then I thought that Vincent was more of a mess and so I suggested a linen suit so that it could get all wrinkled and rumpled and kind of add to the laissez-faire quality of his character.”

“Don’t you hate that?” -Mia “What?” -Vincent “Uncomfortable silences.” -Mia

The image of Uma Thurman in an unbuttoned white shirt, blunt cut bob, andChanel Vamp nail polish is classic at this point, and the whole ensemble still looks chic to this day. To Heimann, Mia was the female embodiment of a Reservoir Dog and a "bad girl," so she dressed her that way. The cropped boot cut pants Mia wore were a bit of an accident. “Uma is very tall. We had very little money to do the movie, and I couldn’t really find a pair of pants that fit her nicely that were long enough, and so I made an executive decision that since they were all too short I was going to make them really short,” Heimann says. “So I cut them off!” Since that made the shoes very visible, Heimann wanted an expensive shoe, as befits the wife of a gangster. The gold slippers Thurman wears in that scene, and later removes for the twist contest, are loaners from Chanel, which Heimann was thrilled to get. And what about that long, nipped-in white shirt, which is basically perfection in a garment? “A lot of people have claimed responsibility for that shirt, but in fact it was a homemade shirt. We made it!” Heimann says. She wanted Mia to wear a bustier underneath, which she found in a handkerchief print, because she “didn’t like the idea of Mia just having a bra on. I wanted her to be a little more covered up,” during the infamous OD scene.

“That's a pretty fucking good milkshake. I don't know if it's worth five dollars but it's pretty fucking good." -Vincent

For his big date with Mia, Vincent wore a suit coat with a velvet collar, courtesy of Agnes B, who also designed the cut velvet coat Mia briefly wears in the film. “Agnes B was a great friend to us. She came to us through Harvey Keitel, who wore her suit in 'Reservoir Dogs.' I had a relationship with Agnes that continues to this day and so I went to her when we were doing 'Pulp Fiction,'” Heimann says. “Agnes is a big supporter of independent film and she was very generous to us.”

The huge overcoat Vince wears on the date, and stashes his heroin in, was actually envisioned for Mia, so Heimann had to work backwards. “I remember liking the idea of Mia wearing that old overcoat while she was dancing through the house,” Heimann says. “That was born more of the image of Uma wearing it, but how was I going to get there? By putting it on Vincent. It was vintage.”

“White people who know the difference between good shit and bad shit, this is the house they come to.” -Lance

Heimann didn’t plan for the bathrobe theme, but it just worked out that way. She had a very distinct vision for heroin dealer Lance’s (played by Eric Stoltz) look. “I thought, ‘This is a guy that never leaves his house. He doesn’t really need to get dressed,’” Heimann says. “Back then everybody wasn’t running around in their exercise gear like we do in LA now. To me, he was wearing shorts and a graphic t-shirt and an old funky robe.” The "Speed Racer" shirt is from Tarantino’s own extensive collection, and Heimann dyed the thrifted robe “that horrible green color” in her washing machine.

Jimmie, played by Tarantino, he was another character that Heimann felt didn’t really need actual clothes. “He’s a guy whose wife works nights, and he was waiting for her to come home,” Heimann says. “Maybe they were just going to get back into bed!”

“Dorks. They look like a couple of dorks.” -Jimmie “They’re your clothes, motherfucker.” -Jules

One of the best sight gags in the movie happens when Jules and Vincent have to remove their brain-splattered signature suits in favor of Jimmie’s T-shirts. The Santa Cruz Slugs t-shirt Vincent wears has some meaning. “I went to Santa Cruz briefly, and I forget what Quentin’s connection was, but we both had a connection to Santa Cruz,” Heimann says. “We had to get permission if we wanted to emblazon Santa Cruz on the screen. I got on the phone -- this is what I used to do -- I’d get on the phone and fast talk these people into giving me permission.I don’t know what I said, because once I get on a roll I really don’t know what I’m saying! But I talked them into giving us permission and sending us the T-shirt.”

“Bring out the Gimp.” - Zed

S&M dungeon scenes were not really a mainstay in American cinema at the time, and indeed, even Heimann was a bit uncomfortable with this part of the film. The Gimp’s costume came from the Pleasure Chest in LA. “I told my assistant to go over there and get that stuff. I didn’t even want to go in there!” Heimann laughs. “I was freaked out by that, me personally. Nobody else was, though.”

Finally, I had to ask her about what was in THE BRIEFCASE. Her reply: “I’m sorry, I can’t answer that question.”

Dutch scientists have unlocked the secret to the sci-fi phenomenon of teleportation, successfully causing an atom to vanish and reappear nearly 10 feet away.

The Irish Times reports that a team led by Professor Ronald Hanson of Delft University conducted a demonstration in which information encoded into sub-atomic particles was teleported between two points with 100 percent accuracy for the very first time.

Hanson says that, if a particle can be teleported, there’s no reason to believe the same cannot be done for a human being.

He explained,

"If you believe we are nothing more than a collection of atoms strung together in a particular way, then in principle it should be possible to teleport ourselves from one place to another. In practice it’s extremely unlikely, but to say it can never work is very dangerous. I would not rule it out because there’s no fundamental law of physics preventing it."

The technology used will be put towards creating a system of quantum computers that can process information at lightning speed compared even to today’s most advanced computers.

He said,

"The main application of quantum teleportation is a quantum version of the internet, extending a global network that we can use to send quantum information. We have shown that it’s possible to do this, and it works every time that you try."

Hanson’s team entangled three particles — a nitrogen atom and two electrons — and used them to transmit quantum information between pieces of diamond three meters apart.

This information is stored on “qubits,” the quantum equivalent of the digital bit. The teleportation was really just the two points linking together, with the second point filling a void the other had left.

The professor explained that the goal is to use teleportation to create a communication system impervious to hacks.

He said,

"The information is teleported to the other side, and there’s no way anyone can intercept that information. In principle it’s 100 percent secure."

The next experiment will attempt to teleport information from one building to another over 4,000 feet away.

Hanson said,

"I believe it will work, but it’s a huge technical challenge — there’s a reason why nobody has done it yet."

Hanson’s findings were published in the journal Science.

The last attempt to teleport quantum information, conducted in Maryland in 2009, did have a success rate but only once every 100 million tries.

Seth MacFarlane's “A Million Ways to Die in the West” does not have to be an international sensation to prove the Western is alive and well.

The Western should have died years ago. A vestige of an era before we had 50 states, it is a genre of stories about impolitic men in the age of the politically correct, about riding horses in a car culture and about traversing unsettled land that has long since urbanized.

A quintessentially American genre, the Western's commercial appeal should be limited now that other countries dominate the movie business.

So why did Media Rights Capital, Scott Stuber and Seth MacFarlane — the same savvy trio that made “Ted” — make a Western?

Because the genre is riding high commercially and artistically. And because MacFarlane wanted to make one.

Universal and Media Rights Capital the “Family Guy” creator the keys to the kingdom after his success in directing “Ted,” the second highest-grossing R-rated comedy in movie history.

MacFarlane's hankering for a Western comedy reflects the genre's lasting cultural resonance. Several of the most prominent and respected filmmakers in contemporary American cinema have made a Western in the past decade, including Joel and Ethan Coen, Ang Lee and Quentin Tarantino.

Critics have lauded every effort, while both Hollywood and moviegoers have rewarded the filmmakers with their highest respective honors — Oscars and dollars.

The Coen brothers made two Westerns in four years, winning their sole Best Picture statuette for “No Country for Old Men”; it and “True Grit” racked up 18 Oscar nominations together. Lee won his first Oscar for “Brokeback Mountain” while Tarantino won his first Oscar in 19 years for “Django Unchained.”

All four of those movies grossed more than $200 million at the global box office, adjusted for inflation.

The success of those movies, “Django” and “True Grit” in particular, was encouraging to Modi Wiczyk, whose MRC financed and produced “A Million Ways to Die in the West.”

If Harvey Weinstein wagered on Quentin Tarantino and Megan and David Ellison bet on the Coen brothers, why shouldn't he place his faith in MacFarlane?

“The way you test whether a genre or milieu has become problematic is if a good version of that movie didn't perform,” Wiczyk told TheWrap. “If the bias is so strong that quality doesn't speak to it.”

The Western has been written off many times before. Just last year Esquire ran a post with the headline “Quentin Tarantino Wants to Save the Western.” Two years before that Vulture asked ”Do People Still Care About Westerns?”

Esquire and Vulture must have missed “True Grit,” to say nothing of TV shows like “Hatfields & McCoys,” “Deadwood” and “Justified.”

The Western has been a dominant genre in American cinema since its inception. Edwin Porter's “The Great Train Robbery” was one of the first movies to employ cross-cutting, a now ubiquitous technique (it's when the filmmaker cuts between two scenes in different locations). D.W. Griffith, one of the most successful directors in early Hollywood, made a series of Westerns before his controversial epic “The Birth of a Nation.”

Griffith “helped to establish the Western film as a specific form of visual and narrative art,” write Mary Lea Bandy and Kevin Stoehr in “Ride, Boldly Ride,” a comprehensive study of the movie Western.

The film industry soon relocated to California, and it was not long before John Ford, a titan of early American cinema, would make several silent Westerns every year. He later introduced viewers to the now iconic landscape of Monument Valley, Utah, in “Stagecoach.”

The Western flourished in the postwar period, as filmmakers offered Americans two distinct visions: the patriot vanquishing his enemies and the more complex tale of an antihero fighting injustice and his own demons at the same time.

Howard Hawks made “Red River,” Fred Zinnemann made “High Noon” and Ford unleashed a string of movies that remain required viewing for any aspiring filmmaker.

“Americans loved Westerns in the 1950s and '60s,” Ray Merlock, a professor at the University of South Carolina Upstate, told TheWrap. “In the 1940s, almost 40 percent of movies Americans watched in theaters were Westerns.”

The 1960s and early 1970s were fertile ground for new kinds of Western, from Sam Peckinpah's bloody “The Wild Bunch” to Mel Brooks’ uproarious “Blazing Saddles.” That movie delivered the most famous fart scene in movie history, which clearly inspired the scatological musings in “Million Ways.”

That's to say nothing of the spaghetti Westerns, of which Sergio Leone's operatic “Once Upon a Time in the West” is easily the most popular.

Yet this creative breakthrough would not last long. The Western, like the rest of America, was shaken by Vietnam, Watergate, the civil rights movement and feminism.

“Broadly, the Western was seen as imperialistic,” Merlock said. “People saw the Western as a justification for Americans crossing the country and exterminating the Indians, taking whatever land they wanted. Women typically did not fare well in Westerns, where they were the schoolmarm and the prostitute.  There are not very many examples of African-Americans in Westerns either.

“A lot of books came out condemning the Western, putting it in a macho-violent context.”

A couple of fiascos, none more notable than Michael Cimino's “Heaven's Gate,” hindered the genre as well. Sexism and racism are one thing, but commercial failure is something Hollywood cannot abide.

Though the greed of Wall Street, Michael Jackson and the Cold War dominated culture in the 1980s, the Western resurfaced in another form: the science fiction movie. As Westerners ran out of new territory to conquer, they looked to space as the next frontier. George Lucas initiallyconceived “Star Wars” as a Western set in outer space.

Spaceships replaced horses and aliens replaced Indians.

“Some people say ‘Avatar’ could have been Western,” Jason Clark, a producer of “Million Ways,” told TheWrap. “If you strip away and take the story, it is a bunch of people taking advantage of natives and the mismanagement of resources.

“The mythology based around the West is too powerful to completely disappear.”

Westerns set in the actual West resurfaced in the early 1990s with a pair of Oscar winners: Kevin Costner's “Dances With Wolves” and Clint Eastwood's “Unforgiven.” They soon gave way to a series of popular Western comedies, “City Slickers,” “Maverick” and “Shanghai Noon” chief among them.

The most successful Westerns of the past decade were an animated action comedy about a chameleon named “Rango,” a gay love story and a slave's revenge fantasy — subject matter that would make John Wayne fall out of his saddle. More conventional TV Westerns like “Justified” and “Deadwood” have received sterling reviews and strong ratings.

“I don't think the Western has ever gone away,” Merlock said. “It resurfaces in ways that are exciting to people that are fans of the Western, even if you have a movie that makes fun of the Western.”

That was the vision of MacFarlane, who has made a movie about a man transported back into the American West. He wanted to see how today's nerd would survive in that world; MRC and Universal, having made millions off MacFarlane's “Ted,” were willing to walk out on a ledge with the horse that brought them.

The odds are pretty good: Six of the 11 Westerns released by major studios since 2005 have grossed more than $200 million, again, adjusted for inflation. And four of them made more money overseas than in the United States. The two notable failures, “Cowboys & Aliens” and “The Lone Ranger” suffered from a similar affliction: cost. They both grossed large sums, but not enough to cover their hefty price tags.

“Million Ways” is expected to open to $20 to $25 million this weekend — a solid start for a movie that cost $40 million to produce, but not enough to launch a global blockbuster.

Rest assured we'll read a headline Monday about the struggles of the Western only to watch a new one next year.

It’s been three years since Microsoft acquired Skype for a staggering $8.5 billion, but the investment didn’t end there. Microsoft isn’t just pushing Skype as the text, voice, and video communication service to use, it has set its sights on emulating Star Trek.

Yesterday at the Code Conference in California, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Skype corporate vice president Gurdeep Pall, introduced Skype Translator. It’s the first time that this new feature has been demonstrated publicly, and involved a Skype conversation between Pall speaking English in California and Diana Heinrichs speaking German in London.

As you can see from the VIDEO, the conversation happens in near real-time with each person’s voice translated for the receiver’s preferred language. I’ve seen comments stating the translations happening here were only passable at best, but the fact this conversation flows at all is impressive.

Microsoft isn’t talking specifics yet. We don’t know how many languages Skype Translator supports right now or even when it will launch beyond “2014 on Windows 8.” But it has brought together a decade of work from Microsoft Research and the Microsoft Translator team.

With 300 million people around the world connecting to Skype every month it makes a lot of sense to remove the language barriers between them. For business users especially, it’s going to make Skype look very desirable for those international calls and video meetings, and eventually much cheaper than actually hiring a translator.

We’re still a long way off clipping a Universal Translator to our shirts, but Microsoft is working hard to ensure that when we do, it has the Skype logo on it.

In 1994, director Quentin Tarantino premiered a instant-classic film, Pulp Fiction. The crime movie did several unexpected things that year: it revitalized the careers of John Travolta,Bruce Willis, and Samuel L Jackson, launched long-standing accolades for Tarantino, and helped cultivate an extended Easter Egg of pop culture references that would appear in not only Tarantino films but also in TV, music and other films alike. As the film celebrates the 20th anniversary of the film’s debut at the Cannes Film Festival, VH1 digs up all the fun facts that fans may have not known about the landmark Tarantino film.

1. Steve Buscemi has an un-credited cameo as the waiter in the diner of the dance scene. He shares a scene with Mia Wallace—played by Uma Thurman—who orders a milkshake.

2. Ellen DeGeneres read for the role of Jody, the wife of Lance (Eric Stoltz), which ultimately went to Rosanna Arquette.

3. Speaking of Arquette, Alexis is one of the men killed by Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vincent (John Travolta) in the scene at Brett’s. The scene took place during “The Bonnie Situation” sequence. Meanwhile, Alexis’s role in the film was one of the few, including The Wedding Singerand She’s All That, as a man before he transitioned to a woman.

4. While Amanda Plummer—who played Honey Bunny—had numerous roles following Pulp Fiction, her most notable was as Wiress in The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.

5. The McDonald’s Quarter Pounder, which Vincent says is called a Royale with Cheese in France, is actually called Royal Cheese. A minor difference but inaccurate all the same.

6. The Fox Force Five, a show that Mia’s (Uma Thurman) character starred in a TV pilot for is later referenced in Kill Bill. The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad is a reference the Five Deadly Venoms, a group of Hong Kong action actors that starred in several martial arts films.

7. In Kill Bill, Thurman’s character, the Bride, makes reference to her dance by tracing a square in the air. It was similarly animated the way it was in Pulp Fiction.

8. Michelle Pfeiffer, Meg Ryan, Holly Hunter, R. Arquette, and Alfre Woodard were all reportedly considered for the role of Mia Wallace. However Tarantino only met with Thurman and opted on her. Though, she initially turned down the role.

9. While Thurman is often associated with Tarantino and thought of as his muse, she’s only appeared in two films: Pulp Fiction and Kill Bill (combined). Samuel L Jackson has appeared in the most with five recurring appearances (Pulp Fiction, Jackie Brown, Kill Bill, Inglorious Basterds, and Django Unchained).

10. Tarantino hired a former heroin addict (and friend) to make sure all the drug scenes were authentic.

11. Michael Madsen—who has starred in Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill—turned down the starring role of Vincent to appear in Kevin Costner’s flop, Wyatt Earp. #SoManyRegrets

12. Before she was famous, Kathy Griffin had a couple lines as a bystander to Marsellus Wallace’s (Ving Rhames) car accident and shoot out with Butch Coolidge (Bruce Willis).

13. The 666 briefcase was originally filled with diamonds. However, that was deemed to be too mundane. Ultimately, Tarantino used the allure of the briefcase as a plot device and nothing else.

14. Stephen Hibbert played the gimp. The masked actor eventually landed a recurring role on Nickelodeon’s True Jackson, VP starring Keke Palmer.

15. Danny DeVito is one of the producers of Pulp Fiction. He met Tarantino in 1991 and offered to produce his next movie, which turned out to be PF. DeVito has also produced a number of critically acclaimed films, such as Erin Brockovich and Garden State.

Why Do People Still Care About True Romance? Let Us Count The Reasons…

I recently attended the first annual True Romance Fest in Burbank, and I’ll have more on that soon, but first, I thought it was worth trying to explain: what is it about a movie that makes people love it enough to devote an entire festival to it, two decades after the fact, especially one that doesn’t involve aliens or ray guns like the usual cult cosplay fodder? I can’t speak for everyone, but I can tell you why I went, and what I learned from re-watching it three or four times in the course of a weekend.

Some Context

Released a little less than 21 years ago, True Romance was the first script Quentin Tarantino wrote to end up getting made (Reservoir Dogs came out earlier, but Tarantino had written the script for True Romance first), and one of the few films he wrote that he didn’t direct (Tony Scott apparently loved both scripts, and Tarantino told Scott he could direct one). As a budding film nerd turned on by Pulp Fiction, I remember buying a double book of the scripts for True Romance and Reservoir Dogs at Tower Records, my all-time favorite junior high hang spot.

It was probably the first time I thought about a movie beyond “awesome!” or “meh,” and seeing it on the page laid bare all of those odd Tarantino-isms I might otherwise have missed. Stuff like “everything from a diddle-eyed Joe to a damned if a I know,” and guys named “Toothpick Vic” (a henchmen inTrue Romance and a nickname for Mr. Blonde in Reservoir Dogs) and “Lance” (Eric Stoltz in Pulp Fiction and Clarence’s unseen boss in True Romance).

Rough Draft Tarantino

What jumped out at me most and still does now is how strongly Tarantino the writer comes through without Tarantino the director there to soften him. Have you ever written something, thought it was finished, and then, just when you were about to send it out, ended up re-writing it 10 more times? Just putting yourself in the brain space of someone experiencing your work for the first time forces you to imagine yourself how others might see you. Even if you’ve already spent weeks working and reworking something, you find yourself ironing out all the rough edges that were, strangely, invisible until five seconds earlier. I imagine directing your own script is like that. Tarantino the director normally gets to keep tweaking Tarantino the writer. While Tony Scott certainly had some tweaks of his own (making the non-linear narrative linear, giving it a happier ending), more so than any other Tarantino movie,True Romance feels like rough draft Tarantino, his tics and urges and idiosyncrasies on screen with the least filtering. Even without trunk shots or the camera lingering on women’s feet, it’s hard not to feel like you know way too much about Quentin Tarantino after seeing True Romance.

Clarence Worley, Tarantino’s Idealized Id

True Romance is so much more bizarrely fascinating when you realize that Clarence Worley is all of Quentin’s favorite things about himself cranked up to 11, like Jim Carrey in The Mask. It’s not a wild assertion here, by the way, it’d be obvious that Clarence Worley is QT’s stand-in, even if Tarantino hadn’t confirmed as much himself (“Clarence was me,” he says here).

What Tarantino did with Clarence Worley is a lot like what Hunter S. Thompson did with Kemp in The Rum Diary. Two 20-something outsiders who hadn’t quite found their life’s direction or their voice as writers yet dreamt up protagonists that were avatars for everything they wanted to be – the uncompromising journalist who spoke truth to power, whatever the cost; the pop culture freak who becomes the hero simply by talking a good game, not taking shit from anyone, and being so cool. The idea seems a bit silly and childish, but if you take a step back from the fictional worlds, you realize that it totally worked. Thompson and Tarantino both sort of grew into their own avatars, through sheer will power and the clarity of their visions.

It sounds a little like The Secret, but they’re both the kind of works that, especially if you experience them at the right time, you develop an extreme attachment to. Nothing’s better in your early twenties than a work that tells you that you don’t have to apologize for being hopelessly idealistic and more than a little bit self-centered.

Once you acknowledge that Clarence Worley is a superhero based on Quentin Tarantino, it’s worth examining what his powers are:

Motor-mouthed conversationalist, especially with blonde chicks at bars. Clarence uses some of the same lines on Alabama as he does on Anna Thomson in the first scene, a seemingly oft-rehearsed shtick about Elvis (“I’d f*ck Elvis”). A friend of mine, on seeing it for the first time, describedTrue Romance as “a feast of bizarre idioms.” Quentin’s idea of cool clearly involves having a series of slickster one-liners locked and loaded and ready to fire at any given time. They’re in almost every scene, lines like “Am I beautiful blonde with big tits and an ass that tastes like French vanilla ice cream?”

They somehow sound like lines you’ve never heard before and something your weird uncle would say, all at the same time. True Romance is sort of like living inside this reverse Truman Show, where everyone casually drops these figures of speech as if they’re common usage, even though Quentin invented them all.

Knowing more about movies than you. In his climactic showdown with Drexel Spivey, Drexel, epically portrayed by Gary Oldman in dreads and a leather beret, explains how he knows Clarence is scared, saying “On that TV there, since you been in the room, is a woman with her breasteses hangin’ out, and you ain’t even bothered to look. You just been starin’ at me.”

Interesting sidenote on that:

OLDMAN: I heard this gang of black kids outside my trailer and thought, That’s Drexl. I showed this kid my lines and said, “Does this seem authentic?” He changed some words. He said, “That don’t fly. Drexl wouldn’t say ‘titties’; he’d say ‘breasteses.’”

TARANTINO: Those kids were clowning him, and he believed them because he didn’t know any better. Because he’s British.

Anyway, Clarence’s big retort to Drexel is, in part, “I’m not lookin’ at the movie ’cause I saw it seven years ago! It’s The Mack with Max Julien, Carol Speed, and Richard Pryor.”

You know that scene in movies where the protagonist tells someone off and everyone in the audience cheers in vicarious glee? Like Matt Damon telling off the NSA guy in Good Will Hunting, or Sandra Bullock giving the racist southern yentas what fer in The Blind Side? (If only you’d been so articulate with that dirty guac-shorting Chipotle cashier! Yay Sandy!) Consider how perfect it is that the Tarantino version of this scene is “Oh yeah? Well I already saw that movie, motherf*cker!”

How many life and death situations have you been in where the deciding factor was knowledge of obscure movies? Quentin invented one, like his version of a daydream about saving your crush from a car crash.

Being able to schmooze people from all walks of life. Be they drug dealers, whores, Hollywood producers, or cops, pretty much every character in the whole movie’s reaction to Clarence is “This kid’s crazy! I love him!”

It’s never hard to imagine how Tarantino wants to see himself or how he wants you to react, because he had a stand-in for you the audience member in almost every scene — the cops at the Beverly Ambassador, the random guy at the burger stand. You’re supposed to think he’s crazy and cool! Clarence’s unmatched film and pop-culture literacy has given him a preternatural understanding of human psychology and how to manipulate it. It’s basically the film nut’s version of every pretentious actor’s dream, where being good at pretending (or in this case, watching) gives you a super-human grasp of the human condition.

Street smarts, and anti-intellectualism. Quentin doesn’t seem like a guy who’d say things like “I ain’t no fag, but…” like Clarence does when he’s explaining why he’d f*ck Elvis. Tarantino exaggerates his avatar’s blue collar background, making Clarence the Detroit son of a security guard, rather than the LA-raised son of a musician. Even as a high school dropout and virtual nobody, Quentin still felt the need to make the cinematic version of himself even more of an outsider in Hollywood. It’s easy to see Quentin Tarantino as an idiot savant, and I’m sure it’s partly true, but its also an image that has been highly cultivated by Tarantino himself. Clarence’s ain’t-book-smart affectations are perfectly fitting for a guy who’d go on to write a multi-Oscar-winning film with misspellings in the title.

Incidentally, late in the film, Clarence Worley says of the Oscars, “Most movies win a lot of Oscars I can’t stand – safe, geriatric coffee table dog shit.” Now that seems like something Tarantino would say.

He’s cool. The chief and most obvious of Clarence Worley’s superpowers is that he’s cool. Not a particularly difficult analysis when the film ends with Alabama repeating “You’re so cool. You’re so cool. You’re so cool.”

The classic bar ice breaker question is whether a person would choose to be able to fly or be invisible. People that choose flight are thought to be less sneaky, to want to be the guileless hero, rather than bank thieves and locker room masturbators like the invisibility folks. It says a lot about Tarantino that his go-to superpower is that he’s really f*ckin’ cool. Just the coolest guy at the dive bar. He knows everything about every movie and can bullshit anyone about anything. Flight? Invisibility? Super strength? Nah, man, just give me the wisest opinion about Elvis.

Alabama Worley, World’s Cutest Love Interest

I re-fall in love with 25-year-old Patricia Arquette every time I watch True Romance, and I’m not sure the movie works if you don’t.

Coming at True Romance from the perspective of a Tarantino fan and having read the script before seeing it, there’s a tendency to assume everything good about it came from Quentin and to blame everything bad on Tony Scott (except the casual racism, that was all QT). I have my quibbles. The Hans Zimmer score sounds totally bizarre and overbearing and out of place in the beginning of the movie (why are we listening to calypso music when there’s a guy driving through Detroit on his way to murder a pimp?) and I have to think the entire action sequence in Drexel’s club would’ve had a much better spacial awareness with Tarantino blocking it.

But as much as you want to imagine everything good about True Romance happened because of Tarantino, and as much as Tarantino is frequently hailed as a genius for his casting decisions, the casting was Tony Scott, and it’s a big reason people love the film. Sam Jackson, James Gandolfini, Brad Pitt, all cast when they were the cheapest they’d ever be. Saul Rubinek is so perfect as Lee Donowitz that I honestly think “Saul Rubinek” would’ve been a better name for the character.

Still, you could switch all of them around, mix and match this role or that actor and it’d still be great, but none of, NONE of it works without Patricia Arquette. Tarantino says he wrote the role thinking of Joan Cusack, and envisioned Clarence as Robert Carradine, who in 1993 was between Revenge of the Nerds III: The Next Generation and Revenge of the Nerds IV: Nerds In Love. That makes me queasy to even think about.

Tony Scott: We met with Patricia, and Christian had a woody from the first time he saw her. That made my life a lot easier. The viewer believing they’re in love comes from their chemistry. Patricia fell in love with Christian, and he with her.

Alabama is the lynchpin of the whole thing. Is it possible we have Christian Slater’s boner to thank for this entire thing?

As written, Alabama Worley is sort of hooker with a heart of gold and quirky dreamgirl all rolled up into one. There’s nothing funnier and more telling to me than the part where Alabama is biting her lip and falling hopelessly in love with Clarence as tinkling piano plays, because of how passionate he’s explaining a Spider-Man comic. Nothing moistens lady parts like a man who can handle a comic book. He’s explaining the art work on some webbing and she’s thinking, “I. LOVE. THIS. MAN!” You could never, ever communicate Tarantino’s pathos more clearly and succinctly than that one little moment.

My point is, it’s a tough role to humanize, but incredibly, Patricia Arquette makes you forget that her character is essentially a dude fantasy. It’s all so subtle – the look on her face when she finds James Gandolfini in her hotel room, the way her voice breaks when she tells Clarence how romantic she thinks he is (…for shooting her wigger pimp in the dick). And of course, her huge blue eyes and pouty lips and adorable overbite don’t hurt either. The role requires her to be totally innocent and worldly at the same time, and I can’t imagine Alabama as any other actress.

Mythos

There’s an odd formula for enduring, cult popularity that I don’t think anyone has ever been able to quite figure out, but surely one of the most important elements is the ability of a work to create its own mythology. It works best if there are elements that you can’t quite explain on first watch, but where there are enough hints that you end up creating your own, like hearing a really good punchline and having to fill in the joke.

True Romance is full of these odd, “Rectum? Damn near killed ‘em!” relationships between characters. You end up creating a lot of your own backstories. There’s the gangster guys – “What happened?” “He said Sicilians were spawned by n*ggers so Don Vincenzo shot him,” – who all seem to have this rich back story that we never find out about. Why did they send the one guy outside? Who is the weird, preening one, why did he only show up before the shootout, and why is he quoting Taxi Driver? Chris Penn and Tom Sizemore as the cops are barely in the movie, but even in a couple minutes you get these rich, provocative hints at their personal lives – Sizemore correcting Penn when he says “me and Nicholson” instead of “Nicholson and I” like an old married couple. Not to mention that they could be fraternal twins. I’ve seen the movie probably 50 times, and it wasn’t until the most recent watch that I noticed that Dennis Hopper’s dog, Rommel, runs off right before the Italians show up to chase down a female dog that had passed in front of the camera about five seconds earlier. Of course! The dog ran off to get some dog pussy! Makes total sense now!

There’s another moment, what I like to think of as True Romance‘s version of the end of Lost in Translation. The gang is about to head off to the Beverly Ambassador when Michael Rapaport’s Dick Richie (another brilliant casting choice) gets a phone call telling him got the part in the remake of TJ Hooker. He looks at Clarence and says “Hey, Clarence…” “What?” There’s a dramatic pause, and they stare at each other, but then he just smiles and says “Nothing.”

What was he about to say? I’m not one of those people who creates elaborate theories for every ambiguous plot point in the things I love (and I kind of hate that mentality), but I do love a movie that leaves those spaces for them.

And of course, True Romance wouldn’t be True Romance if not for the sheer, bold silliness of the whole thing. It doesn’t get much better than a vision of Elvis coming to you in a day dream to tell you that the cops won’t care if you shoot a pimp in the face.

(or the dick)

After everything that Tarantino has written, I’m not sure he’s ever topped that moment. Also, why are Lee Donowitz’s body guards so psychotic? They seem like Die Hard villains stuck in the wrong movie. And in the midst of the stand off, with everyone screaming at each other holding guns, would the match to the fuse really be the movie producer tossing coffee in the assistant’s face? And why would anyone shoot the briefcase full of cocaine? You’re in the middle of a fire fight but suddenly there’s a flying briefcase and it’s skeet shooting time?

People who love True Romance would have ten different answers for all these questions, I’m sure, but the reason that they bother thinking about it at all is that the film is such a glorious whatsit. Part dark comedy, part pulp, part romance, part gangster movie, part Hollywood satire, part superhero origin, and part 80s action film. It’s at once completely bizarre and intensely familiar. It’s that scab you can’t stop picking at, and that’s why I love it.