“Nope, not hung enough.”
I’ve already seen Django Unchained and I’m just counting down the minutes until I’m allowed to tell you about it, but in the meantime, as with any Tarantino project, Django’s creation story is almost as rich as what eventually made it to the screen. In a recent Village Voice profile, for instance, Quentin says he was inspired by the tale of Jody the Grinder, a character from black folklore with a monstrous penis. Yeesh, who’s writing this black folklore, Jackie Treehorn?
In 2006, when Tarantino sat down to write the script for Death Proof, his contribution to Grindhouse, the first scene he came up with revolved around the tale of Jody the Grinder, a character from black folklore with, as Tarantino put it, “the biggest dick.” Jody, so the story goes, was perhaps a bit too generous with his anatomical endowment. When his master finally caught Jody in bed with both the master’s wife and his daughter, that was it for Jody.
Post-hanging, Jody ended up in hell. “He met the devil, f*cked the devil, and the devil sent him back to Earth, with a curse to walk the Earth for eternity, f*cking white women,” Tarantino says today, laughing.
Look, I don’t want to crap on your mythology or anything, but becoming a giant-dicked invincible f*ck machine doesn’t sound like much of a curse. Also, I really hope that this myth isn’t the reason that giant, dick-shaped sandwiches are called “grinders” in certain parts of the country.
He ultimately couldn’t fit the tale of Jody the Grinder into Death Proof, but his interest in that kind of “uber-masculine black male figure of folklore” carried over into the character of Django. Tarantino saw him as a kind of black Paul Bunyan or Pecos Bill, whose adventures would have been disseminated (and exaggerated) through “spoken history passed down by slaves, about this one guy, throughout the course of time.”
You ever notice how white ghosts be all “booooo…”? If that ghost was a brother, he’d be all like “Well hello, dere…”
Also of interest – and this part I can tell you about because it’s out now – Django won’t have the episodic, non-linear structure Tarantino has become known for.
