And that's what Killing Zoe takes from, more than anything. More importantly, he co-wrote The Open Road with his friend before Tarantino reworked the script into True Romance. You can't dismiss him as a Tarantino copycat if he was there from the start, working on the material other writers would rip off. Avary had written all of the Steven Wright radio dialogue in Reservoir Dogs and had come up with significant parts of Pulp Fiction. If a movie producer was ever to praise a bank to his friends, it would have to be like this one: decent-enough looking, with enough space that filming on location wouldn't be a pain.Īvary and Tarantino's relationship makes Killing Zoe's debt to the latter hard to define. It's spacious without looking like an office building, generic enough that you could film in Los Angeles and pretend it was almost anywhere in the world. It's a ridiculous story, something that would only happen in a movie, but it really is a great bank. With Bender's interest piqued, Avary banged out Killing Zoe's first draft. After hearing about the location, Avary lied to Bender, saying he had written a bank heist script that would fit it perfectly. Who knows how much of this is real, but Killing Zoe supposedly only exists because Tarantino and his one-time producer Lawrence Bender found an excellent bank while scouting locations for Reservoir Dogs. Before the falling out, Avary was poised to become as big as his friend. Today, the two men host a podcast about movies they loved in their video store days. Ten years later, Avary, presumably while holding a sign that said "Please don't ask me about this or I'll break my NDA," told Vanity Fair he didn't remember that happening. Tarantino Zuckerberg'd a few friends on the way to becoming so identifiable.įor years, Avary was publicly hurt by getting minimized in the creation of Pulp Fiction, openly discussing the slight in Peter Biskind's Sundance/Miramax book history Down and Dirty Pictures in 2004. "Written and Directed by Quentin Tarantino" is a lot more impressive without the "except for the third of the film co-written by Roger Avary" asterisk. It's easier to think about movies like novels than it is to acknowledge who actually did what. Burton, who had the basic idea and sketched designs for the film's characters, is the one who talks at Disney's press conferences. Tim Burton's name is all over The Nightmare Before Christmas, but Henry Selick directed it, Caroline Thompson wrote its screenplay and Danny Elfman wrote all of its songs. When something pops off, everybody wants to be the reason why. Whatever the reason, he got sole credit as Pulp Fiction's writer-director, the genius behind everything. Maybe Miramax was trying to cultivate an auteur whose name would be easier to market alone than with an occasional co-writer or maybe Tarantino was already trying to build up his cult of personality. People like to be seen as a project's sole creative force, especially when working in media like film and television, where there are dozens of people collaborating.
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