CHATSWORTH, Calif.—In an interview published this morning by Hollywood news site Deadline, director Quentin Tarantino confirmed the rumor spawned last month by online pundits that his upcoming and expectedly last film The Movie Critic is in fact based on a real-life writer for a '70s adult paper ... but perhaps not late AVN Hall of Famer William Margold, as originally conjectured.
The character, Tarantino told Deadline, "is based on a guy who really lived, but was never really famous, and he used to write movie reviews for a porno rag. ... He wrote about mainstream movies and he was the second-string critic. I think he was a very good critic. He was as cynical as hell. His reviews were a cross between early Howard Stern and what Travis Bickle might be if he were a film critic."
He added that "the porno rag critic was very, very funny. He was very rude, you know. He cursed. He used racial slurs. But his shit was really funny. He was as rude as hell."
Those who knew him would certainly agree: Sounds like Bill Margold.
However ... Tarantino went on to note, "He died in his late thirties. It wasn’t clear for a while but now I’ve done some more research and I think it was complications due to alcoholism."
Margold, of course, died in 2017 at the age of 73. And of the many things for which he was known, alcoholism was not one.
When the theory of Margold being the model for The Movie Critic was first hatched—on this Reddit thread—it was proposed that Tarantino had dropped hints to said effect by way of numerous references thoughout various outlets to a presumed fictional critic named Jim Sheldon said to have once written for a very adult-themed paper called Hollywood Press, which Margold actually did in the 1970s, when the forthcoming movie is set.
Could Tarantino be taking creative license with the biography of the real-life man behind his Critic to throw internet gossip hounds off track? Perhaps.
But the very same gossip hound (or so he claims) who first threw Margold's name into the film net-o-sphere today posted the following under a story on movie blog World of Reel about Tarantino's supposed confirmation of such: "It's not Margold. Sheldon was a real guy. ... The movie is going to be loosely based on Jim Sheldon. This is based on evidence I've been shown and cannot disclose. Jim and Bill went to school together and were buddies who wrote for The Hollywood Press together."
Asked by another commenter why he proposed that Margold was the inspiration in the first place, the unidentified snoopster explained, "I thought it was based on Margold at the time because I saw no footprint of Jim Sheldon. I didn't think Jim Sheldon existed. There still isn't any online footprint. But then I saw proof that he exists in the form of pictures with his name in print next to Bill's showing them both when they were college age at Santa Monica City college and that just solidified it for me. They both wrote for the same news paper there and then Bill likely brought Jim on board when he got a job at The Hollywood Press. Then the same source told me how Jim passed away and it matches up exactly with what Tarantino said."
Was there a real Jim Sheldon, despite there being next to zero evidence of his existence findable online? It's not out of the question—finding any evidence of the Hollywood Press itself is a challenge (but we managed, as pictured above). Meanwhile, Tarantino refrained in his Deadline interview from identifying the actual publication for which his character's muse wrote, saying only that in the movie it will be renamed "The Popstar Pages."
The Movie Critic goes into initial stages of pre-production next month.
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.
Photo of Hollywood Press from eBay.
