Quentin Tarantino’s is the classic American success story: hyperactive video store geek with an encyclopedic knowledge of cinema borrows plot points and characters from obscure foreign films and assembles them into cool-looking English-language movies whose unexpected popularity instantly transforms him into an international celebrity. He gets to hang with the Wu-Tang Clan, who call him “Q. T.”
Four years before hitting the big time with Reservoir Dogs, Tarantino scored his first big break in show business, playing an Elvis impersonator on a November 1988 episode of The Golden Girls. The geriatric sitcom was then wheezing through its fourth season, and Tarantino was a struggling actor desperate for work-any work-to keep him solvent while he honed his craft. After learning that the show was looking for twelve Elvis impersonators to appear as guests in a wedding scene, Tarantino’s agent pitched him to the casting director as “Elvis meets Charles Manson.” Unlike the other Elvises (Elvii?), Tarantino wore his own clothes to the shoot. “I was the real Elvis,” he later told Playboy magazine. “Everyone else was Elvis after he sold out.” Though he ended up looking more like Smiths frontman Morrissey than the King of rock ‘n roll, he did get to harmonize alongside the other Presley pretenders to Don Ho’s Hawaiian Love Chant and stay on the good side of temperamental star Bea Arthur. “[She's] fine after she’s had her morning coffee,” Tarantino recalled. For his work, the future Academy Award winner received residuals totaling more than $3,000 over the course of a year. “Every time I was running out of money, I’d get a check for $100 or $200 or $300,” Tarantino marveled. “It was so great-now I understand why people do this.”
