I've known about
Quentin Tarantino's amateur feature film
My Best Friend's Birthday for years (ever since I discovered IMDB at the turn of the Millennium) but I've never seen it, or even known that I could see it. The 80 minute film, made on 16mm over the course of four years in the mid 80's by Tarantino whilst he was working at that infamous rental store Video Archives on a shoe-string $5,000 budget, has apparently only be shown to a few, and absolutely never released to the masses. Well until now, as 36 minutes of the feature (around half of it's total)
have leaked onto Youtube... Actually, it leaked a year ago but nobody noticed until
Dangerous Minds flagged it this week. Tarantino made the film with his friends and co-clerks at the time including
Craig Hamaan (co-writer) and
Roger Avary, the latter who would go on to co-write
Pulp Fiction, winning an Oscar with Tarantino some years later. Shot in black-and-white, My Best Friend's Birthday revolves around Mickey (Hamaan) whose girlfriend leaves him on is birthday and Clarence's (Tarantino) attempts to cheer him up which continuously backfire. If you are wondering why only the first half leaked, the second half was lost in a lab fire many moons ago and hasn't been found since. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v0cQF8dBK7k In that famous
Charlie Rose interview recorded around the time of Pulp Fiction's release, Tarantino would refer to the experience of shooting My Best Friend's Birthday (mostly shot on a weekend) as his film school, and that it was badly directed, but a pivotal step in him learning how to make films. And of course seeing the early development of the Tarantino 'pop culture' speak is fascinating. No word on what's to be done with this first half footage but surely Pulp Fiction is due a Blu-ray release by now? Couldn't they attach this extra on there?