The Genre Director - Quentin Tarantino: You Made Turkey Shoot!

INT. LONDON UNDERGROUND PLATFORM DAY

England 1983. Commuters stand in silent groups awaiting the next rattling arrival on the Piccadilly Line.

Work, consume, be silent, die - is etched on the faces of many. The Thatcher Years.

Only two men are having a conversation; one, a young proto movie geek, the other, a national newspaper film critic. Although he saw himself as a Cinema Critic.

MOVIE GEEK
Glad the mail strike is over.
CRITIC
So am I…

He was about to launch into a haughty rant about militant trade unions when his companion stepped away to look at a large movie poster on the curved wall opposite.

On the poster - in the style of Hunter With His Kill trophy photography - a tall muscular bald headed man carrying an MI6 stands with his foot on the corpse of a beautiful young woman while other hunters stand behind.

MOVIE GEEK
That’s the bloke from Mad Max. Roger Ward.
I want to see that.

The gleaming dome combines with the curvature of the paramilitary hunter’s moustache to conjure a diabolically evil face a leer coloring the edges of cruel resolve. If that was the brief to the poster artist at press kit time, he succeeded admirably.

( That poster art cannot be found, but the British DVD re-titled Blood Camp Thatcher uses a different shot. Not as effective but you get the idea.)

Emblazoned below was the title TURKEY SHOOT, with the admonitory ad line: NO FILM FOR CHICKENS.

CRITIC
They haven’t press shown it, so it’s obviously trash.
If I bother to catch it, I might give it a paragraph.
Looks vile and sadistic to me.
I just don’t understand people’s taste these days.

Vile, sadistic, and trashy, with the added bonus of Roger Ward, sounds pretty good to the movie geek.

INTERIOR. FILM CRITIC’S OFFICE DAY

With the end of the mail strike - small packages had not been delivered for 10 days - there was a mountain of correspondence on the Critic’s desk. Inside the final package was a small slender box about six inches long. The Critic did not glance at the covering letter, he wanted to get straight to The Gift. He opened the box and immediately his nostrils were assaulted by a foul pungent aroma.

There, on a bed of cotton wool, was a rotting turkey’s foot. The luckless appendage had set out on its adventure through the postal system some 11 days before and was now at the height of putrefaction.

The Critic grabs the covering letter. It is an invitation to the Press screening of Turkey Shoot, mailed on the day before the mail strike, arriving now on the day of the screening. If he leaves immediately, he will get there just in time. This insult to his dignity and stature must be addressed.

CUT TO: FORTIES-STYLE LAP DISSOLVE MONTAGE

The Critic watches the movie, scribbling furiously.

Nearby, other nasally-affronted critics note each sensational act.

Superimposed titles of some of their phrases glide past camera.

Like: “ cut in half by a bulldozer!”

“ riddled with arrows! “

And: “lesbian rape!’

Various angles of London Underground commuters reading newspapers intently.

Close up of the TURKEY SHOOT reviews excoriating the film.

The words “Senselessly violent” lift off the page, moving towards camera. As it does so, the word “senselessly” fades out, leaving only the word “ violent “ to dominate the frame.

The Reader takes this in, along with detailed examples of at least six depraved-fun sequences he and his mates would love to see.

EXTERIOR WARNER WEST END THEATRE 2 NIGHT.

The Critic is crossing Leicester Square. A light dusting of snow is falling. He sees there is a line round the block of the adjacent Theatre. It is the line for the movie TURKEY SHOOT.

*****

Its first week’s figures top the house record for a February opening. In a blizzard! With a helpful assist from British postal workers. Certainly those odor affronted critics sold a lot of tickets.

Perhaps box office was also influenced by the fact that the villain’s name is Thatcher, the sadistic commandant of the B.F. Skinner Re-Education and Behavior Modification Camp.

You know that Russian proverb? No good deed will go unpunished. It’s funny how things turn out.

Original concept: 1984 meets The Camp On Blood Island where they play The Most Dangerous Game. A genre cocktail. Fast paced total action and mayhem, with a little black humor, this time on a substantial budget.

Status in prep: A serious budget shortfall due to the Government changing its previous position on tax rebates for investors was causing the producers and I considerable difficulty as the shoot date approached.

I had to keep modifying the scale and number of set pieces to trim the original 44 day schedule to 28 x 10 hour days. Cut were the first 15 pages set in a corporate fascist city of the future where the heroes are captured in a series of chases. Next, a 4 page helicopter chase had to go, along with its pilot character to be played by Australian actor and TV personality Graham Kennedy, because terms could not be agreed. So I had to quickly distribute his function to other characters in the story. This all brought the script down by a quarter of its length. I made stuff up every shooting day to fill out the contracted running time. But all the action I came up with had to be achieved without incurring loadings for any stuntman. The prison camp had been built for 500 extras, but now we could only afford 75 on our biggest day. A range of challenges. How could I ensure an audience? I decided to increase the level of blood and black hearted laughs into a sort of Lucio Fulci high camp splatter movie. Blood is cheap.

Steve Railsback and Olivia Hussey stood up to the pressure remarkably well. Roger Ward contributes a Warden From Hell performance worthy of that category’s hall of fame. All the cast deserve praise. But Michael Craig is wonderful as the smoothly sadistic Thatcher. I love his delivery of the Re-Education Camp’s mantra: “ Freedom is Obediance. Obediance is Work. Work is Life.“ ( That’s the future that awaits us, folks, if we don’t come to our senses in November and put a Brain in the White House.)

One of my more hilarious memories was the day we cut Steve Rackman in half at the trouser belt level with a bulldozer. I wanted a shot of his bottom half, kneeling trapped against a tree, wriggling beneath the dozer blade. ( I know, I am a sick puppy.) We had the pants suspended by monofilament, but we were running very short on prosthetics. We had eaten sausages and steak for lunch; there were uncooked leftovers and lots of ketchup. Everyone pitched in to fill the Traveling Pants with a convincing set of innards, and squirt individually designed trails of tomato sauce. The things we do for our Art.

Needless to say, critics did not share my sense of humor. And to be honest, the film is far from perfect. But it allowed me to push some genre clichés to their outrageous extreme. All film makers find themselves in situations where the playing field tips and the goal posts shift. You just have to develop some elasticity and go with the flow, while still trying to preserve the core of your original vision. But ultimately, a good movie in these circumstances is a saleable movie.

TURKEY SHOOT broke box office records in some Australian drive-ins, scored a US theatrical release, albeit with MPAA cuts, and ultimately video audiences across the globe discovered it as a guilty pleasure. As a result of its cult following, Anchor Bay put out a re-mastered uncensored DVD which looks great. If you are curious, the extras provide some insight into a director hanging onto a runaway train. Some critics considered my career was over after TURKEY SHOOT. Luckily my next film was BMX BANDITS with Nicole Kidman. Audiences and critics seemed to click with that one.

But I certainly was not starting every producer/ executive interview with: “ Hi, I made Turkey Shoot ! “ (Escape 2000 in the US.) So, at the premiere of HBO’s Marilyn and Norma Jean, I met Quentin Tarantino. I gave my name and he said: “ You made Turkey Shoot ! ”

He went on to list all the things he liked about the film, including: “ I loved that scene where Roger Ward beats that girl to death on the parade ground while she tries to recite the dissident’s mea culpa.” Which he then recited verbatim! At the Sydney premiere of KILL BILL Volume 1, Quentin dedicated the screening to TURKEY SHOOT, much to the shock of the assembled glitterati. As he put it later: “ I like to stick a lighted weed up the ass of the snob.“

Quentin Tarantino is forgotten cinema’s Smithsonian. And I love a film maker whose idiosyncratic sense of wicked fun pulses from the screen.

So TURKEY SHOOT came full circle. A good B-Movie Deed, first punished, finally rewarded. I predict the same one day for GRINDHOUSE.