Kurt Russell in Death Proof, Quentin Tarantino's contribution to the double-bill Grindhouse project with Robert Rodriguez.
The film world is full of great movies that got away, from b>Stanley Kubrick's Napoleon to b>Terry Gilliam's Don Quixote.
But those lucky enough to have caught Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror at the London Film Festival (the sister film to Tarantino's Death Proof in their double bill project b>Grindhouse) will have seen something unique. Machete, the fictional film Rodriguez made a genius b>fake trailer for in Planet Terror, is being made into a full-length feature, after plans to include it on the Grindhouse DVD fell flat. "When I started showing (the trailer) to people, they said, 'We want to see this movie,'" Rodriguez explained. "Bob Weinstein even said, 'I want to see that movie.'" So he made it. Machete is now slated as a 2008 production, although whether the comic timing of a short trailer (the "Where are my wife and daughter?" moment is particularly priceless) can be stretched beyond 90 minutes is a moot point. If not, it won't be the first time a trailer has raised false expectations for a movie. But if it succeeds, could it be the first time a spoof movie-within-a-movie outsells the original feature? It's already looking like a cult classic. Which, after all, is the whole point...
