Why Quentin Tarantino Held Onto This Line for 35 Years

Quentin Tarantino is well-known for being cinema’s ultimate scavenger, often picking up the best bits from other movies to reuse in his own stories. He loves to take famous lines, visual styles, or even obscure soundbites and give them a second life.

However, there was one very specific line he was desperate to use in his ninth film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, that actually came from a movie he had no part in making. The line was originally written for the 1991 action movie The Last Boy Scout, which was directed by Tony Scott and starred Bruce Willis.

Tarantino is a massive fan of that film’s writer, Shane Black, and he had visited the set back in the early nineties. While he was there, he heard a very strange insult that was eventually cut from the final version of the movie and never made it to the big screen.

Tarantino never forgot that missing piece of dialogue, and when he was casting for his 2019 masterpiece, he saw a perfect chance to finally use it. He cast Danielle Harris in the role of Angel, a member of the Manson Family.

Harris had actually played Bruce Willis’s daughter in The Last Boy Scout when she was just a child, and she was the one who was supposed to say the line decades earlier. Tarantino planned to have Harris shout the weird insult at Brad Pitt’s character, Cliff Booth, during the tense scene at Spahn Ranch.

He wanted her to tell Pitt’s character to take a bath in my a*s, a line he had loved since he first heard it on the set of the 1991 film. Harris was thrilled about the idea, recalling that she thought, Oh my god, I get to tell Brad Pitt to take a bath in my a*s, this is the best day ever!

Unfortunately, the miracle of life got in the way of Tarantino’s long-awaited movie reference. Harris was very pregnant during the production of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and she ended up going into labor on the exact day she was scheduled to film that specific scene.

Because she had to go to the hospital to give birth to her second child, the scene was filmed without her, and the line was lost once again. While that specific moment didn’t happen, Danielle Harris has been keeping very busy in the years since.

On February 27, her latest project, the crime thriller Bring the Law, was released both in theaters and on digital platforms. The movie, which marks the directorial debut of her fellow “scream queen” and close friend Scout Taylor-Compton, features an ensemble cast including Mickey Rourke and Peter Facinelli.

Aside from her acting, Harris is currently co-directing a new horror-thriller titled Last Chance Motel with Taylor-Compton, showing that she is moving into a new phase of her career behind the camera. She also continues to host her popular podcast, Talk Scary to Me, where she frequently discusses her long history in the horror genre.

As for Tarantino, he is currently preparing for his West End stage debut in London, while his script for The Adventures of Cliff Booth—a sequel to the very movie Harris missed out on—is currently being turned into a feature film directed by David Fincher for release later this year.

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