Grindhouse and [Robert Rodriguez]

Maverick filmmakers Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez have been pals since meeting at the 1992 Toronto Film Festival, at which it’s likely they bonded while simultaneously blowing each other’s minds with their respective plans to take Hollywood by storm. Apparently Tarantino even showed Rodriguez the first few pages of his script for Pulp Fiction.

Grindhouse (This is a favorite Hollywood trick.) , providing no less than fifteen actors and the two directors. As one participant said, all that was missing were the psychos and zombies. Let’s face it, the Weinsteins’ prowess for media exploitation has been working overtime on this exploitation movie — no doubt to hide the problems of a running time over 3 hours, a release date delayed by half a year, a hard “R” rating.

(Plus, younger and hungrier directors in recent years have been pushing the envelope to create wilder and rawer horror pics. Can Tarantino and Rodriguez even compete on their more famous playing field?) And let’s not forget the fact that the Weinsteins are having a more and more difficult time getting the New York City financial community to bankroll them. Not to mention that MGM is frustrated at distributing all those Weinstein Co. bombs.

The rest, as they say, is history: The two became as tight as Matt and Ben or Tango and Cash.

should we forgive him for the rose-mcgowan stunt?