In the script for ‘Reservoir Dogs’ we see a few peculiarities.
Peculiarities such as precise descriptions of the movement of the camera and instead of generic terms like ‘music plays’ we have Stealer’s Wheel’s hit ‘Stuck in the middle with you’ plays over the speaker.
It is a level of specificity that Tarantino does not repeat in his later scripts.
So why did he do it for Reservoir Dogs?
Because he was not the same investment back then.
Today studios would be clambering over each other, dying to get his business.
They probably wouldn’t even read the script, he is such a bankable commodity.
But pre Reservoir Dogs he was no such thing.
He was a young, unproven filmmaker indistinguishable from the rest.
The tagline ‘Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino’ carried no weight at all.
Studios saw him as a risky investment.
Tarantino knew this and so the specific nature of his script shows his attempt to mitigate the risk for those with the money.
He was trying to remove the uncertainty, help the studios imagine the finished product and show them exactly what he was going to do with their money.
Now I wouldn’t attribute the entirety of his movie getting funded to just a few more descriptive words but this idea of risk mitigation as an unproven entity could help with anyone else looking to get funded or published.
Thomas Duggan 