Is Tarantino Making A Movie About Pauline Kael and Warren Beatty?

His final film could be about the greatest film critic who ever lived

Quentin Tarantino is making one last movie. At least that’s what he tells us; the genius filmmaker strongly believes that directors lose their mojo after a certain age, a position which once might have seemed reasonable, but that considering Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg are still out here giving us all-timers seems outdated. 

But this is what he says, that there’s just one more in the chamber. Maybe he’ll retire to a career of writing books (his essay collection Cinema Speculation is excellent) or podcasting (his show Video Archives is terrific). Maybe he’ll pivot to TV - the prestige cable landscape seems like a place where he could have fun. Or maybe he’ll come back and make more movies, having realized this self-imposed limit was silly in the first place. 

At any rate, the next one is supposed to be the last one, and it’s called The Movie Critic. Here’s what we know: it’s set in LA in the late 70s, it’s about a woman and it’s about a movie critic. Deadline reports that it’s about Pauline Kael, the greatest film critic who ever lived. And if that’s the case - and I do suspect it is - that means Tarantino is making a movie about one of the strangest episodes in the history of film criticism: when Warren Beatty brought Kael to Hollywood and in the process perhaps broke her. 

To say that Kael was the greatest film critic who ever lived is actually doing her an injustice. I think she might have been the greatest cultural critic who ever lived. Her writing is sexy, and that’s because she inherently understood the sensuality and erotic voyeurism of the cinema. This is what set her apart from the stuffy critics of her day, and she immortalized this aspect of herself with the titles of her books - I Lost it at the Movies, Taking it All In, Deeper Into Movies. Her style was electric and her opinions could be infuriating. But even when she was wrong she was never wrong, she was always backing her wildest shit up with impeccable prose that levitates you as you read it. She’s my favorite writer, pound for pound, and if I ever wrote anything as good as her worst piece I could die happy. 

Kael and Warren Beatty go way back, way back to a movie that in many ways made both their careers: Bonnie & Clyde. Beatty was already a star by then, but perhaps the wattage was dimming. He was arguably mostly famous at that point for being La La Land’s most legendary lothario, bedding every beauty within the Los Angeles County limits. If there was a starlet who was taking Hollywood by storm, she was at one point out with Beatty. 

Looking to get his movie mojo back, Beatty decided he wanted to capture the excitement of the Nouvelle Vague coming out of France, and the result was Bonnie & Clyde, an iconic masterpiece that everybody hated and got savaged in reviews. 

Enter Kael. Unlike every other major critic she loved the movie. She got the movie. And she wrote a big defense of the movie. Now, this was a different era. Back then writing mattered. And what Kael wrote really mattered. The movie went from a bomb to a hit. Critics came back to their typewriters, tails between their legs, recanting their previous pans. And Bosley Crowther, the hidebound movie critic at the New York Times, got his ass fired because of his negative review. He just wasn’t hip to the times anymore. 

Bonnie & Clyde was a sensation, and more than that, it was the movie that opened the door to the 1970s Golden Age of New Hollywood. Ask any historian worth their salt and they’ll tell you it all begins here, with Beatty as an impotent Clyde Barrow and the balletic, blood spurting shoot-outs. It all is birthed from Bonnie & Clyde, and I often wonder what would have happened if Kael had not shown up when she did to write what she wrote. 

Kael started working at The New Yorker and became the preeminent movie critic. She battled Andrew Sarris, still living with his mom, in print over the idea of auterism. She gathered to her the Paulettes, a group of young men who were her proteges and admirers. And for a decade she wrote the best film criticism you’ll ever read. 

Things went well for Beatty too. In the years after Bonnie & Clyde he would make some all-timers, movies like McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Shampoo and The Parallax View. Beatty had produced Bonnie & Clyde - had been deeply involved in every aspect of the production - and that was what really turned him on, having the full control. In 1978 he took total control with Heaven Can Wait, which he co-directed and co-wrote and produced, as well as starred in. The movie was a hit. 

With everybody but Kael. She hated it, felt it was “prefab.” She panned the film, seeing it as a betrayal of what she had loved about Beatty, of what she had loved about Bonnie & Clyde. By this time Kael found herself unhappy at the New Yorker, and management was maybe not treating her as well as she should have been. 

Then in 1979 Beatty called her up and invited her to come to LA and work with him. He wanted her to produce the new movie from James Toback, a guy so infamously horny that his eventual cancelation felt like going through the motions. Yeah, no shit James Toback is a creep. Kael had loved his first film, Fingers, about a concert pianist up to his knuckles in gambling debt (it’s autobiographical; I’ll never forget the time I was doing a phone interview with Toback and he stopped to buy a scratcher ticket). Kael jumped at the opportunity and she abandoned New York City for Los Angeles, a city of which she had been vocally not fond, and threw herself into her new career. 

A few weeks in Toback requested she be fired from the film, and Beatty obliged. She had a six month contract at Paramount and they shuffled her off to Don Simpson’s office. Don Simpson could not have more represented everything Kael hated about Hollywood, and so of course he would go on to become a huge success in the 80s. He would also go on to engage in heroic drug abuse and die on the toilet. 

Kael toiled in that office for the remainder of her contract, trying to get projects moving, always getting squashed by Simpson. After the contract ended she went back to New York, where she was almost unable to get her job at the New Yorker back. It was a tough, humiliating six months in LA. 

Was that the point? Did Beatty bring Kael out to humiliate her in revenge for her Heaven Can Wait review? Or did Beatty see this woman, who had all the power in their relationship because of how she saved his career, and want to exert power over her? Was this yet another seduction for a man for whom seduction came slightly easier than breathing? Or, and this is the wildest one of them all, did Beatty just think that bringing Kael to LA was a good idea, and that she could do a good job on this Toback film, but she just kind of got chewed up by the system after he lost some interest? The story that has been immortalized is that this was an act of revenge, a Machiavellian maneuver intended to bring Kael to heel, and I used to subscribe to that theory, but over the years I’ve come to wonder if that really makes sense, if that was really how Beatty operated.

If this is the story that Tarantino is telling then I would expect the most salacious version of it to be what he brings to the screen. And I doubt he’ll be telling the story of Pauline Kael, any more than he told the story of Sharon Tate. Maybe this will be another of his period pieces where he fixes history, and instead of killing Hitler or Manson, he’ll end it with Kael saving Hollywood and keeping the 70s vibe rolling for decades to come. Or maybe it’ll be something totally unexpected, using this as just a little launching pad. 

Whatever it is, I’m excited. I’m always excited for a new Tarantino, as the man has not only never made a bad movie, he seems to have a hard time making movies that are not masterpieces. In the back of my head I wonder if Cliff Booth and Rick Dalton couldn’t show up in a scene. The possibilities seem very cool to me. 

Whatever it is, I’m there. There are people who don’t like Tarantino films, and I feel bad for them, because they’re truly missing out. Hopefully I won’t be missing out, and Tarantino will walk back his claim that The Movie Critic will be his final film… although maybe a movie about Beatty and Kael could be the perfect way for him to bow out.