"He is the single most influential director of his generation," Peter Bogdanovich said, during an event at , in 2012, honoring the director, by which time it was customary to add the phrase "for better or worse." To talk of Tarantino's influence now is to do so with a wince or small cluck of nostalgia for that period, somewhere between the launch of the Hubble telescope and the impeachment of Bill Clinton, when you could barely find a coffee shop in Southern California that didn't clatter with the sound of aspiring young screenwriters bashing out talky, violent, blackly comic shoot-'em-ups on their typewriters.