I’ve read a trunk-load of screenplays in my hari-kari, roller coaster, stop/start/GO adventure through screenwriting. I can tell you with full authority, 99% of them are gArBagE!
Garbage, no plot, not direction, no love for character, or for the audience intended to endure the garbage. They aren’t about you. They are about something else, an ego trip or a bank account or whatever.
Tarantino is different. Now, I’m not a big fan of Tarantino, I like romance over graphic violence and prefer kindness to brutality, but I’ve seen everything he’s made and I’ve loved it.
The article below explains very well why his screenplays are masterpieces and they win every time. It’s because they are well written. It’s because Tarantino LOVES his story. He loves his characters deeply. On some sadistic level, in some self serving way, he loves his audience or at least the part of the audience that loves him. He’s sick that way, whatta ya do, at least he puts it on paper and doesn’t bring it to my house. But, he wants to show you something, YOU, like you’re his best friend in Kindergarten and EVERYTHING is cool and worthy of being explored.
I have a new writing partner, she a literary studies professor and a longtime writer, but she’d never written a screenplay. I continue to guide her to Tarantino as a reference among a long list of other great resources and screenplays. I know she ignores the Tarantino references, because this first project is a Romantic Comedy, but, she needs to get it (she’s smart, she will and this blog is written for her anyway! Lol). No one writes with the commitment to deliver a beat or a moment like Tarantino. For his films to work, EVERY beat MUST land because his dialogue is layered and referential and is the icing on a truck-load of unbelievably juicy subtext. And there is no EGO in his dialogue, it may seem like it’s all ego, it’s not. It’s written so grandiose and pompous so that… you… will hear him. He is saying something to YOU. Listen.
A great screenplay may deliver that sort of subtext once, maybe twice in a film, but Tarantino will deliver it two or twenty times, he’ll deliver for however many of those moments it takes for you to get what he’s trying to say. And, he does NOT miss. You may walk out of the theater, but he delivered.
It’s hot. A good screenplay is hot. It makes you feel, think and breathe things you didn’t come to the theater to feel, think and breathe. I mean you came for the popcorn and to get the hell out of your life for a minute, or for a fantastical to massive adrenaline or dopamine rush, depending on the movies you like to see. Tarantino isn’t just about the rush, altho he’s definitely an adrenaline junky. He’s about the art. Art delivers the message. This man always has a message, even if the message is (finger pointing at you) “ha-ha… jackass!!”
Here’s an article on writing great web content that made this post mandatory. The guy is a web content guru and he uses Resevoir Dog‘s Mr. Orange to illustrate the idea that if you’re going be in the business of crafting and selling collections of words, deliver something. It’s like a tax accountant in tax season. You pay them money they deliver you a 500 page tax document. It’s called a deliverable. You didn’t know it was gonna be 500 pages, but they did, that’s why they charged you so much freaking money.
http://www.copyblogger.com/quentin-tarantino/
“…There are few writers like Tarantino, and though his verbal carpet bombs and kinetic escalation of violence aren’t for everyone, there is no doubt that the dude follows his muse. Those who love him will eagerly wait in lines wrapped around the block to show their support.
In short, Tarantino sells it every time. And by it, I mean an ironclad belief in the worlds he’s created.
On Larry’s post, a great conversation continued downstairs in the comments, where a second Tarantino clip was referenced, the “Sicilian Scene” from True Romance. Though I love both movies, I was inspired to write this post by a scene from Tarantino’s earliest feature, Reservoir Dogs.
Selling it
In Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino assembles a marvelous scene, on the surface about gaining the confidence of the men the protagonist plans to double cross. Closer inspection reveals the scene for what it really is, a seven-and-a-half-minute love letter to the art of storytelling.
The film itself is about a bank robbery gone bad, though Tarantino manages to turn the adage, “show not tell” upside down by showing only a few seconds of the robbery, while his characters sit around for the rest of the film swapping one slice of story at a time…”
Screenwriting Junky 