My Best Friend's Birthday

My Best Friend's Birthday is a partially lost black-and-white amateur film written by Craig Hamann and Quentin Tarantino and directed by Quentin Tarantino, while he was working at the now shuttered Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, California. The project started in 1984, when Hamann wrote a short 30-40 page script about a young man who continually tries to do something nice for his friend's birthday, only to have his efforts backfire. Tarantino became attached to the project as co-writer and director, and he and Hamann expanded the short script into an 80 page script. On an estimated budget of $5,000, they shot the film on 16mm over the course of the next four years. Hamann and Tarantino starred in the film, along with several video...