Writer and director Quentin Tarantino is reportedly shopping his tenth feature film – tentatively titled “The Movie Critic” — which he has said in the past will be his final film.
Details of the script, which was written by Tarantino, have been kept quiet, and reports suggest that studio executives have been forced to read the script in a conference room at Tarantino’s agent’s office — a process he adopted with “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” after some of his “Hateful Eight” screenplay got leaked in 2015.
Among the tidbits that have made it into the public sphere: the film is set in the 1970s and centers around a female lead. Rumors have circulated that the female at the center of the story might be Pauline Kael, who was an essayist and novelist in addition to her work as a film critic.
According to The Hollywood Reporter, Kael was “known for her pugnacious fights with editors as well as filmmakers” and worked as a consultant at Paramount for a short period of time in the 1970s. She took that job on advice from actor Warren Beatty.
Tarantino has not yet found a studio home for the project either — and reports indicate he might be looking for a deal similar to the one he landed at Sony with “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” – which allowed them to distribute the picture but will kick the copyright back to him after a preordained length of time.
Tarantino’s play for ownership of that film resulted in a hard no from Warner Bros. — the studio reportedly believed that if they gave him a deal they would later be forced to do the same for other directors.
“Warner Bros. couldn’t do that because then they would have to give Christopher Nolan that same deal,” a source told The Hollywood Reporter at the time.
Other directors who have successfully negotiated similar deals for ownership of their films include George Lucas, Mel Gibson, Peter Jackson, and Richard Linklater.