Quentin Tarantino's Next Movie Is About A Movie Critic Crossed With Travis Bickle From Taxi Driver

Quentin Tarantino's tenth and possibly final film, "The Movie Critic," has been enveloped in intrigue for years, even before he announced it. There is the stunning fact that the venerable American independent has not wavered on his proclamation that once "The Movie Critic" bows in theaters, he will bow out of the moviemaking business. Then there's the fact that in the past two years, Tarantino has released two books — a pulpy novelization of his last film, "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood," and a book of critical essays called "Cinema Speculation" — which lends a good deal of credence to that proclamation, as it allows us to imagine what the noted cinephile might do with himself without any movies to make. And now there are the details that are coming out about Tarantino's actual plans for "The Movie Critic," and they're quite tantalizing.

As Tarantino gears up to commence pre-production on "The Movie Critic," he's been dropping choice details about the film here and there in interviews and on various podcast episodes related to his brick-and-mortar movie theater in Los Angeles, the New Beverly Cinema. There was speculation the film might be a riff on legendary critic Pauline Kael, but Tarantino dismissed it all in a master class at the Cannes Film Festival. Actually, he clarified, "The Movie Critic" would be about a "guy who really lived, but was never really famous," who writes movie reviews for an XXX magazine. We then learned Tarantino aims to "remake" movies from the '70s, and now, we have our first confirmation of which ones.

In a recent interview with the French newspaper Libération, Tarantino revealed that "The Movie Critic" will be about "Travis Bickle if he were a film critic."

I can say this because I'm one of them: today's movie critics are an exceedingly tame bunch. Even setting aside Tarantino's affinity for historical riffing, it makes sense why the provocateur would want to travel back to the mud-slinging, name-calling, wheeling-and-dealing scene of the '70s for his take on the art of movie reviewing. Travis Bickle, the antisocial, anti-heroic hero of Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver" certainly embodies one of the dominant moods of the decade on film — the potent stew of post-Watergate paranoia, urban alienation, and masculine anxiety.

But something tells me that Tarantino's critic-hero is going to be decidedly more affable than Bickle. Back in April, Jordan Ruimy postulated at World of Reel that the particular critic Tarantino might have in his sights is William Margold. Tarantino has been blogging for years at the New Beverly Cinema site under a pseudonym complete with a whole personality and back story. "Jim Sheldon," as he's called, is a good old boy living in L.A. who writes film reviews for an adult magazine. So does the character in "The Movie Critic," and so did Margold, who also occasionally directed and acted in adult films. 

Ruimy noted that in the later years of his life, Margold blogged (in quite purple prose) about film on the sites Hollywood Press and LA XPress, and Tarantino was reportedly a huge fan. Margold's world doesn't seem all that different from the breezy, New Hollywood kickback vibes that Tarantino channeled in "Once Upon a Time." Perhaps "The Movie Critic" will synthesize that energy with Bickle's to create a kind of Frankenstein of the American man in the 1970s. Whatever the result, we'll be in the front row for his last first showing.

Update: Sheldon was in fact a real critic who, like Margold, wrote for the Hollywood Press. "The Movie Critic" may be Sheldon-inspired, rather than Margold-inspired, or may be some kind of composite.