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If we’re looking for suspects in the death of cult, Quentin Tarantino has to be up there. He has previous – he didn’t even pay his late fees at Amsterdam’s famous cult video shop
A week ago I was in Amsterdam, a charming city among whose more celebrated attractions lies the Cult Videotheek. Nestled by a canal, its suitably poky interior plays host to a vast array of strange and wonderful DVDs for rent and sale, two floors of the kind of old-school marginalia its name implies, its place in movie culture legend further secured by being the spot where Quentin Tarantino reputedly ran up (and ran out on) $150 in late fees while writing Pulp Fiction in the Dutch capital.
who, in fact, may have triggered its demise in the first place – was Quentin Tarantino. That’s the same Tarantino who racked up all those endless rentals in Amsterdam between writing sessions at the Betty Boop Coffee House. What Reservoir Dogs began and Pulp Fiction made into a phenomenon was the pillaging of decades’ worth of cult influence – stripping out an entire generation of movies for shots, lines and soundtrack ideas. And the problem was never the plagiarism, it was that in becoming a one-stop shop for the history of cult, Tarantino didn’t persuade people to investigate further, he became the filmic equivalent of a giant Tesco putting every smaller shop for miles out of business. And to think – Cult Videotheek never even got their late fees.