Why Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay for Natural Born Killers is better than Oliver Stone’s movie.
Rendered obsolete.
Tarantino’s screenplay is way better than the movie version that resulted. My main issue with it now, aside from the sloppy pacing, is that rifts between Mickey & Mallory are shown within the first hour of the movie, not to mention background info that ruined the tone and pacing.
In the screenplay, Mallory is singing love songs the whole time she is in jail, as part of her dedication to Mickey. She will not speak to anyone, just sing songs like “He’s A Rebel” and “Leader of The Pack”. There are no rifts between the couple. They are madly in love for the entire time, and their only passion is for eachother, no one else.
Their isolation from eachother is the main focal point in the screenplay, as bits of the past are dispersed intermittently. The screenplay itself as a singular vision focusing on a story told by the media specifically is more of a commentary on the media than Oliver Stone haphazardly clunking around with some laugh tracks and projections.
That said, I’m not going to lie, I’ve always liked Natural Born Killers as a movie. It was an amusing and digestible teen movie of the time with one of my favorite artists, Trent Reznor, producing the soundtrack. Now that I’ve read the screenplay though, that movie is shameful!
In fairness, both of them fail to really reconcile why Mallory is being kept in a male prison same as Mickey… But I digress…
The screenplay is great! It’s a shame Tarantino couldn’t get the funding to do it his way, early on in his career. It was apparently crafted from a fantasy that the characters in TRUE ROMANCE had together… very clever.
The younger me will still like the movie to some degree, but now not nearly as much!