Cinema Speculation

by Quentin Tarantino

Then, on a Downtown Saturday Night, Jim Brown’s new movie, Black Gunn, began flickering through the film projector’s shutter gate for an extremely excited audience of about eight hundred and fifty black folks, eight hundred of them male. And frankly, I’ve never been the same. To one degree or another I’ve spent my entire life since both attending movies and making them, trying to re-create the experience of watching a brand-new Jim Brown film, on a Saturday night, in a black cinema in 1972. The closest thing to that experience I had prior was the year before, when I saw my first James Bond film, Diamonds Are Forever, with the way the audience knowingly responded to every quip Sean Connery made. And I’d probably add the way the audience had responded to Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry as well. Still . . . there was no comparison.