Tarantino Began His Career With A Dolph Lundgren Fitness Tape

A lot of great filmmakers began their careers with modest cinematic ventures; before he took over the Star Wars franchise, J.J. Abrams wrote the godawful Gone Fishin'. Before The Godfather, Francis Ford Coppola directed porn. Before Twin Peaks, David Lynch made Dune. But perhaps taking the cake for weirdest early film gig is Quentin Tarantino, who apparently worked as a PA on Maximum Potential, the 1986 "workout cassette" featuring a post-Rocky IV, pre-Masters of the Universe Dolph Lundgren.

Of course, the home fitness video market was huge in the '80s -- after all, why join a gym when you can get in shape in the comfort of your own living room alongside the Aryan monster who murdered Apollo Creed? Still, it is a tad amusing to picture the future Once Upon a Time in Hollywood filmmaker pitching in to capture the best possible footage of Dolph doing squats, pretending to be a lifeguard, running with his bros on the beach, or magically appearing on a stressed-out businessman's TV to teach him how to properly rotate his neck muscles.

According to Tarantino, he didn't add much to production (hence the lack of unnecessary close-ups of Dolph's feet), and his job consisted of cleaning up "an acre of dogshit" on Venice Beach where they were filming. Tarantino vowed that were he to become a director, he would help his PAs with up any canine feces that needed to be extricated from a shot -- a promise he later made good on during the production of Pulp Fiction. So in a small way, the making of one of the most acclaimed movies of the '90s was somewhat shaped by the dookie-cleaning demands of a Swedish bodybuilder.

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Top Image:  Arman Julian Productions