DIRECTED BY: Sarah Kelly
MUSIC BY: Cary Berger & Dominic Kelly
STARRING: Robert Rodriguez, Quentin Tarantino, George Clooney, Juliette Lewis, Harvey Keitel, Lawrence Bender, Fred Williamson, Michael Parks, Ken Bondy, Amy Minda Cohen, Jason 'Jake' Cross, Victoria Lucai, Cecilia Montiel, Tim 'Stuffy' Soronen, Rick Stribling
RUNNING TIME: 97 minutes
DISTRIBUTED BY: Dimension Films
Full Tilt Boogie is a feature length documentary following the making of From Dusk Till Dawn. All of the major stars of the film are interviewed along with much of the crew. It follows the movie from conception to the final day of shooting. It spends a lot of time focusing on the crew and putting a face on those names that we always see in a film's credits.
This movie was financed by Dusk writer/star/executive producer Quentin Tarantino. After the decision was made to shoot with a non-union crew the IATSE (International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, the film-crew union) started trying to shut the project down. Quentin wanted to document the fact that the Dusk crew was not taking advantage of the non-union crew members and the union was more concerned with loosing their power base than with the welfare of the crew. To document the project he got aspiring film-maker Sarah Kelly, who was a production assistant on Pulp Fiction to shoot this film.
After getting the film-makers, and the crews take on the union situation Sarah tried to get the IATSE's side of the story but they would not return her phone calls. Not one to just give up she and her small crew flew to Miami, Florida and crashed the IATSE's convention. Rather than speak to her they jerked her around and stone-walled her. Their thinking was that if they never went on record she could not portray them in her film and consequently it would look like some one-sided propaganda piece that never tried to get the whole story. Instead Sarah dedicated a whole section of the movie to her experience getting the run-around from the union, which just makes them look like the badguys.
Besides the expected interviews with the major players of the film (Tarantino, Rodriguez, Clooney) their is a good bit of time spent with the lower ranking crew members. Also unlike the very polished HBO First Look specials that concentrate on the serious aspect of film-making this one spends much more time on the communal aspect and the goofing around that takes place on the set. One of the funniest parts chronicles a "best male ass" contest that some of the crew-women have as something for the ladies in reaction to the fact that their are naked Titty Twister Dancers walking around the set all of the time.
The movie premiered September 9, 1997 at the Toronto Film Festival. On July 31, 1998 it was released on about 12 screens across the nation. In the fall of 2000 it was released for rental on VHS take and included as an extra on the From Dusk Till Dawn Collector's Series 2 disc DVD set.