‘My Best Friend’s Birthday’: Quentin Tarantino’s seldom seen first movie
My Best Friend’s Birthday is the first film directed by Quentin Tarantino. Shot in 1984 for just $5,000, the rough cut was 70 minutes long before a fire at the processing lab destroyed all but 36 minutes of the film. It’s never been officially released.
Co-written with Craig Hamaan and photographed by Roger Avery, My Best Friend’s Birthday stars a motley collection of Tarantino’s video store co-workers and friends from acting class. The stylistic foundations upon which Quentin built his career – Martin Scorsese, Jean-Luc Godard, John Cassavetes, blaxploitation and rock and roll – are evident in this clumsy but fun little flick. And the dialogue is unmistakably what was later to become known as Tarantinoesque.
“I would raise up enough money until I had enough to shoot for a weekend,” Tarantino once explained of his life when trying to make the film. “Then we wouldn’t do anything for like two months, and then I’d have more money, and we’d shoot for another weekend. We pretty much shot for like forty-two hours straight on those weekends… None of us knew what we were doing. Pioneer Chicken was our craft service.” Which explains a lot about the thinking of the young director.
What’s most fascinating about My Best Friend’s Birthday, though, isn’t what it is, but what it almost is. You can practically hear the future coming in like a freight train through the clunky edits and rambling monologues. Tarantino hadn’t figured out pacing yet, but the patter is already there—hyperverbal characters who sound like they grew up watching Donahue reruns and reading Famous Monsters of Filmland while high on fountain Coke. Even in its mangled state, the film’s DNA mutters its way into True Romance and Reservoir Dogs like a badly dubbed trailer for something bigger.
“It was my film school — and I actually got away really cheap. When it was all over I knew how to make a movie.”
Quentin Tarantino on his early filmmaking effort.
And yes, it’s a bit of a mess—an overexposed, low-rent, post-adolescent delirium. But that’s part of its charm. The whole thing feels like a punk zine version of a movie, scribbled together with borrowed gear, stolen time, and a VHS rack’s worth of cultural references. There’s an innocence to it, if you can call a film where a guy hires a prostitute to cheer up his buddy “innocent”. Think Ed Wood meets Clerks, if Ed had a crush on Pam Grier and a stack of De Palma tapes at home.
The truncated version that survives is jagged and chaotic, but it’s also a rare peek into Tarantino’s larval phase—before the Cannes standing ovations, before the trunk shots and trunk deals. Just a guy who loved movies a little too much and decided to make one with a few broke friends and a 16mm camera. You don’t watch My Best Friend’s Birthday for the plot (good luck with that), you watch it to see a director learning to walk while already quoting Elvis.
You can view what’s left of My Best Friend’s Birthday below.