Few directors have had their filmography dissected and lauded more than Quentin Tarantino. He is often a gateway for budding cinephiles when learning what a film director is. Tarantino has the name recognition of a global celebrity, and his collection of idiosyncratic films exists in their own expansive universe, well before Marvel did. While anyone with a breath of film knowledge can name his entire filmography, what if you were told that there exists a lost Tarantino film — one that happened to be the first expression of his tastes and artistic sensibilities put to film? Step aside, Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino’s first film was actually My Best Friend’s Birthday, but you wouldn’t have seen it or known of it because it was lost in a fire.. or was it?
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Quentin Tarantino Made His First Film With His Friends at Video Archives

Image via Miramax

In 1984, while a young Tarantino was working at Video Archives in California and morphing into a walking IMDb with his vast pool of cinema knowledge, he decided to finally make a name for himself. Unlike his future catalog of feature films, the script for My Best Friend’s Birthday originated from another source, Craig Hamann, a friend, and co-worker of Tarantino’s at Video Archives. Together, they completed the script, expanding it to 80 pages, and banded their other colleagues at the video store to complete an indie screwball comedy shot in black-and-white on a 16mm camera.

Tarantino did his best Orson Welles impression by wearing multiple hats as the writer, director, producer, editor, and star of this film that also featured contributions from Roger Avary, who would go on to co-write Pulp Fiction and co-host The Video Archives Podcast with Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avary. The only professional actor in the film was Allen Garfield, a frequent supporting player in ’70s films, who can be seen in The Conversation and Nashville. Garfield was teaching the director how to act at the time of filming. In the director’s words, the amateur production of My Best Friend’s Wedding was his “film school.” Despite the positive takeaways from the experience, filming was a laborious process for Tarantino, stating that “I worked on the film for almost three years, trying to put it together, and then I started getting pretty depressed because the stuff we had done four months ago was really good and the stuff we did the first week was awful. I was totally embarrassed.”

What Is ‘My Best Friend’s Birthday’ About?

Image Via Super Happy Fun

The film that Tarantino finally completed in 1987 is far-cry from his feature work in the future, but when closely examined, the seeds of his artistic style are represented in this short. In an interview with Charlie Rose, Tarantino discussed his short, complimenting his work by saying “You could tell I made it.” While he never made a pure comedy again, its homage to film history and sampling of pop culture of the past puts this in line with the Tarantino brand. Throughout the short, there are references to The Partridge Family, Elvis Presley, Marlon Brando, various posters in the background to genre and B-movies from the ’70s, and a conversation about Dressed to Kill, a film from Tarantino’s filmmaking hero, Brian De Palma. The film, about Clarence (Tarantino), a radio DJ who vows to give his friend Mickey (Hamann), a memorable birthday after his girlfriend leaves him, features Easter eggs that would retroactively be callbacks to his future movies.

This includes a radio station named K-Billy (sharing the same name as the Steven Wright radio DJ from Reservoir Dogs), a martial arts gag that mirrors the imaginary Bruce Lee fight versus Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, and recycled lines from the short that were used in Tarantino’s script for True Romance (“I’d fuck Elvis”). Speaking of True Romance, Clarence is also the name of Christian Slater’s Tarantino-avatar character in the film directed by Tony Scott. Let the record show, in this early documentation of Tarantino’s voice, his on-screen character says the line that many people online have wanted the director to explicitly say for years: “I have a foot fetish.” For an amateur short with a shoestring budget, My Best Friend’s Birthday is a fascinating object, and a primitive insight of one of the most influential artistic minds of his generation. Even in Tarantino’s filmmaking infancy, the connective tissue of his work is present in some fashion.

‘My Best Friend’s Birthday’ Was Never Lost in a Fire

Image Via Super Happy Fun

If there is a glaring weakness in Tarantino’s indie short, it would be a lack of narrative cohesiveness. Scenes operate as a collection of vignettes and a mixtape of Tarantino’s thoughts on pop culture. My Best Friend’s Birthday is a 36-minute short that was intended to run for 70 minutes. As the legend indicates, a film lab fire destroyed the 34 minutes of missing footage, leaving Tarantino’s origin story incomplete. The final product would be screened at film festivals in the aftermath of the writer/director’s meteoric rise to fame, and soon enough, the legend of a fire destroying footage of My Best Friend’s Birthday became printed as fact, to paraphrase The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance. Tarantino was merely amused by this fabled story and never bothered to correct the record.

In 2019, a book titled My Best Friend’s Birthday: The Making of a Quentin Tarantino Film was published and subsequently debunked the theory that the 1987 short was partially eradicated in a lab fire. Featuring interviews with Tarantino, Hamann, and Avary, the book by Andrew J. Rausch reveals that the lost footage was instead discarded mistakenly. Since Tarantino was overall dissatisfied with the result, he chose to edit together the scenes he approved of into a condensed cut without reshooting the lost scenes. The truth, as it often is, is far less interesting and dramatic compared to the lab fire myth.

Nonetheless, the story behind the making of My Best Friend’s Birthday is a fascinating insight into the early career of cinema’s most iconic titans. The most noteworthy revelation of the truth behind the lost footage is the director’s decision to allow the fire rumor to run rampant among the public. As a master storyteller, he understood the mythical quality of a lost film from a celebrated filmmaker. For some, Tarantino’s boastful self-esteem hinges on egotism, and his keen awareness of his career arc (his claimed commitment to only making 10 movies has become close to universally known) and rise to success can be certainly classified as self-indulgent. While he may not be a movie star, the story of Tarantino’s first film is exemplary of his affinity towards creating an image of himself as a celebrity. For cinephiles, it is a blessing that a figure in Quentin Tarantino who is defined by his knowledge of film and unique pop culture brain became a household name, and this peculiar, singular, and inspiring first film was an immediate announcement of the director.

Tarantino recently announced the title of his tenth and final film. The Movie Critic will be set in 1977.