Tarantino's 'The Movie Critic' Based on William Margold?

CHATSWORTH, Calif.—Speculation has surfaced online that director Quentin Tarantino's forthcoming 10th (and, according to lore, last) film The Movie Critic may be based on late AVN Hall of Famer/porn historian William Margold. When the project was announced last month, many put forth celebrated film critic Pauline Kael as the possible inspiration for its central character, but Tarantino soon laid that theory to rest during an appearance in Paris as part of his current promotional tour for his new book Cinema Speculation. Reports from the Q&A with Cannes Film Festival director Theirry Fremaux said that Tarantino would only confirm the movie's title, that it takes place in 1977 and that it is not about Kael. In fact, some have reported that he went one step further and told attendees the main character is not a movie critic at all. That said, the new theory that Margold is in fact Tarantino's muse for the picture arose after an Easter Sunday stop on his Cinema Speculation tour, this one in Barcelona, Spain. There, according to Spanish news outlet La Patilla, he commented, "There is a lot of speculation as to who [The Movie Critic] is based on. And yes, he is a real critic, but he is not known ... and I am not going to tell you more." A subsequent post on the subreddit r/Tarantino extrapolated from this morsel of information that Margold is likely the model for the character, based on a number of subtle clues. For one, the post pointed out, Tarantino has sometimes written on the website for his revival theater The New Beverly as "Jim Sheldon"—a fictional critic who is credited as having once written for '70s adult paper Hollywood Press, which Margold did. In addition, it went on, Margold is mentioned in Cinema Speculation, and his mainstream reviews (for both Hollywood Press and L.A. Xpress) are sometimes read on Tarantino and longtime collaborator Roger Avary's podcast "The Video Archives." Furthermore, Margold wrote in his review of Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez's Grindhouse that he was once told Tarantino "has been reading my Hollywood Press/LAXPRESS columns for well over 30 years" and that he "apparently wondered why I didn't like his movies." Perhaps adding some credence to this hypothesis is the fact that on the page dedicated to "Jim Sheldon" reviews at movie fan site Letterboxd.com, a profile picture is displayed that very decidedly appears to be of Bill Margold. Whether or not Margold will turn out to be the subject of The Movie Critic remains to be seen, but one thing that's very clear is he most certainly did not like Tarantino's movies—in the above-mentioned Grindhouse review, he called the director "vastly overrated" and quipped "[his] 'work' includes the violently flatulent Reservoir Dogs, the sporadically interesting Pulp Fiction, the tedious Jackie Brown, and the homage heavy handedness of the Kill Bill duo." Margold died in 2017 during a broadcast of his talk program on the now-defunct XXX Porn Star Radio. He entered the adult business as a performer in 1972, and would go on to serve as head of the Free Speech Coalition (FSC), as well as found or co-found the X-Rated Critics Organization (XRCO), Fans of X-Rated Entertainment (FOXE) and the PAW Foundation. He also for years hosted his own "Legends of Erotica" induction ceremony during the AVN Adult Entertainment Expo at Raymond Pistol's Showgirl Video on Las Vegas Boulevard. The Movie Critic is slated to go into production in Los Angeles this Fall. Photo of Quentin Tarantino by Gage Skidmore, used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license; image was cropped due to space limitations.