On October 26th, I told you how Quentin Tarantino participated in an anti-cop rally – a cry against “police terror” which devolved into a raucous, law-enforcement gripe-fest. This event took place just four days after the on-duty murder of a hero NYPD street cop.
Tarantino had fired up the crowd by complaining that cops are too often “murderers.” “When I see murders, I do not stand by . . . I have to call a murder a murder and I have to call the murderers the murderers,” he blathered to a cheering rally-goers.
The NY Post reports that Tarantino is now lying about a claim he had served time in a Los Angeles County jail. I guess in order to give him more “street cred” for his anti-cop antics.
On a recent episode of “Real Time with Bill Maher,” Tarantino recounted it again to claim solidarity with police protesters — that he understands what it means to be frightened of cops. “Back when I was in my 20s and broke, I was a little scared of the cops, all right?” Tarantino told Maher. “And oftentimes, I had warrants out on me for traffic stuff that I never took care of and everything . . . I’d get stopped, and I’d have to do eight days in county jail.”
This isn’t the first time Tarantino has told this story. In 1992 he told Paris Voice a version of the same story. “If I had a brush with the law, I think I’d wise up fast,” he said. “I spent eight days in the county jail on traffic warrants once. At first, I thought, ‘Wow, I’m going to pick up some great dialog in here.’ But then you realize what a waste of time it is. They treat you like an animal, and nobody wants to be treated like an animal.”
There multiple versions of his incarceration tale. In some, he did one stint in jail; in others, he has done multiple. One was printed in a 1997 profile of Tim Roth in GQ UK magazine: “Tarantino . . . had worked in a video shop and he had spent eight days in LA County jail for unpaid parking tickets.” In Jeffrey Dawson’s 2000 biography “Quentin Tarantino: The Cinema of Cool,” the writer-director is quoted as saying, “I went to jail about three different times just for warrants on me for moving violations . . . They had warrants on me for three years and eventually I got stopped and they sent me to jail.” In 2009, the British news site Metro.co.uk quoted Tarantino as saying, “I was kind of excited about going to jail the first time and I learned some great dialog.”
A key story in his “story” is that Tarantino worked at LA’s Video Archives rental store for five years as a budding filmmaker. In the Maher appearance, he said he couldn’t pay his traffic tickets because he earned only $10,000 a year.
There’s just one problem: The LA County Sheriff’s Department has no record of the filmmaker ever being in its system. At The Post’s request, the department searched its files back through the 1980s, when Tarantino would have been incarcerated. “A check of Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department jail records revealed no evidence that Mr. Tarantino was ever incarcerated in our jail system,” said Capt. Christopher Reed of the Sheriff’s Office.
Tarantino’s agent, lawyer, publicists and Harvey Weinstein, who produced the director’s upcoming movie, “The Hateful Eight” did not respond to any of The Post’s calls or emails. The Post also left voice mails on Tarantino’s personal phone line. No one responded to any of the inquiries.
DCG
P.S. Remember to boycott Tarantino’s new movie, The Hateful Eight, which opens on Christmas Day.