Paging Mr. Tarantino!

After the critical acclaim and box-office success of his second film, 1994’s “Pulp Fiction,” director Quentin Tarantino was hailed as the patron saint of American cinema, a video-store-clerk-turned-filmmaker whose singular, edgy vision provided an alternative--if not an antidote--to Hollywood mediocrity.

Mixing comedic pop culture riffs with snappy dialogue and graphically stylized violence, the director created his own genre and was hoisted on a pedestal here and abroad. Shortly after “Pulp Fiction” was released, it overtook Dennis Potter’s “The Singing Detective” to become the best-selling screenplay in British publishing history. When Tarantino submitted to an on-stage interview at London’s National Film Theatre, 3,000 ticket applications arrived from members alone. “Pulp Fiction”--an $8-million film that took in $210 million worldwide--brought with it the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or and an Oscar for best original screenplay. With only two complete films to his credit, the director has been profiled in three full-length biographies.

Then, last year, things turned. Apart from directing an episode of TV’s “ER” and a segment of the aimless 1995 film “Four Rooms,” he was never behind the camera. Instead, there was the blaxploitation film retrospective he hosted in Nottingham, England; those critically panned performances in forgettable films such as “Destiny Turns On the Radio” and “Girl 6”; a co-starring stint as Margaret Cho’s boyfriend on an episode of “All-American Girl”; and a poorly received guest host shot on “Saturday Night Live.”

After watching that show, New York Times film writer Caryn James compared the director to the Man Who Came to Dinner, wondering when he planned to go home. “How did so talented a director go into overload so fast?” she wrote. “Paradoxically, by acting as if he really did only have 15 minutes of fame, he provoked a career backlash that didn’t have to happen.”

For those impatient for a major offering from the peripatetic Tarantino, there’s news on the horizon: He’s writing an adaptation of crime novelist Elmore Leonard’s 1992 “Rum Punch”--the story of a Palm Beach gunrunner who hooks up with an ex-con in a money-laundering scheme--that Miramax Films co-chair Harvey Weinstein “is 90% sure” Tarantino will start directing in January. By following up a monster hit with a smaller-scale film (“Rum Punch” will be made for about $5 million), Tarantino is diffusing the pressure--consciously or not, heeding the advice of the venerable John Ford.

Tarantino is also writing an original screenplay whose subject has been kept under wraps. Weinstein, who has a long-standing relationship with the director, describes it only as “Krzysztof Kieslowski meets ‘Pulp Fiction’--a smart thriller full of random encounters and life theories, but fun rather than pretentious.”

Friends of Tarantino, 33, say he’s been recharging his batteries, mentoring young filmmakers, building a relationship with actress Mira Sorvino . . . generally just enjoying himself. Careers are long-term propositions, they note, judged in decades rather than years. No one blinked when Robert Zemeckis took a break after his ’94 blockbuster, “Forrest Gump.”

Maybe not. But a hungry film industry and the media that cover it wanted to know what Tarantino had done for them lately. Screenplays for his directorial debut, “Reservoir Dogs” (1992); “True Romance” (1993); “From Dusk Till Dawn” (1996)--as well as the story for “Natural Born Killers”--were all completed before the Tarantino phenomenon.

Some in the business regard him as a kid in a candy shop--indulging his fantasies and squandering his talent.

“If you’re looking for Quentin Tarantino to be a traditional director with all his oeuvres, you’re probably looking in the wrong direction,” said one Hollywood producer. “As a child of the People magazine culture, he’s become what he always wanted to be: a star. Movies take a couple of years to develop before they hit the screen. If his split focus isn’t detracting from his filmmaking career, it certainly is postponing it.”

The topic was raised at a June 11 news conference announcing Tarantino’s formation of Rolling Thunder, a group that, with the help of Miramax Films, intends to salvage and distribute 1970s exploitation pictures such as “Switchblade Sisters” and foreign film festival releases like “Chungking Express” that otherwise might not get exposure. The director, who dazzled the crowd with his encyclopedic grasp of film, seemed considerably less comfortable when his life became the focus.

Asked if he was spreading himself too thin, Tarantino bristled. “By playing a one-day part in this movie and another one-day part in that movie?” the T-shirted director asked in his rapid-fire machine-gun style. “And how is [the creation of Rolling Thunder] taking away from me doing my art form?”

Asked what he was up to, however, the director played it cool. “I’m leisurely living life and writing the next thing I’m going to do,” said Tarantino, who declined to be interviewed for this story. “When I’m not making movies, I don’t want to be doing anything. I just want to be kicking back and living life.”

Anyone who exploded with the force of Tarantino needs to take a break, said Michael Steinberg, who directed 1993’s “Bodies, Rest & Motion” and produced 1994’s “Sleep With Me,” in which Tarantino had a part.

“Quentin made an almost unprecedented splash with his first two films, ‘Reservoir Dogs’ and ‘Pulp Fiction,’ revitalizing movies in the same way that Kurt Cobain of Nirvana revitalized rock,” he said. “Unlike Cobain, however, he pulled back and handled the pressure well. He’s smart to take his time. You have to go to deep waters to catch the big fish. And with so many others imitating him, Quentin is probably looking for something fresh.”

Director Andrew Davis (“Chain Reaction”) experienced the pressure placed on those who strike it big. Not only was there the internal burden of topping “The Fugitive” (1993), he recalls, but, as always, the industry wanted more of the same.

“When you make money for people, they want you to do it again,” Davis says. “Though I was viewed as an ‘action guy,’ I decided to go take advantage of my independence and do the offbeat ‘Steal Big, Steal Little’--a move for which they faulted me. And Tarantino, who’s not a formula filmmaker, has to generate the material since Hollywood won’t be delivering the script to him.”

In any case, Davis adds, there’s nothing that says a director has to turn out film after film. “Paul Brickman [“Risky Business”] and Martin Brest [“Scent of a Woman”] had big careers with relatively few movies,” he said. “And how many has Stanley Kubrick made?”

Still, there are signs that the message is starting to get through. For the last few months, Tarantino has been writing, isolating himself from the Hollywood hype. “I’m temporarily handing in my membership in the celebrity club,” he recently told his press agent.

Though Tarantino needed to decompress after “Pulp Fiction,” says his producing partner, Lawrence Bender, he’s now putting in the “perspiration” on which good writing depends.

“Quentin was on quite a ride--a great one,” he said. “He doesn’t regret those two years. Traveling provided much-needed perspective on Hollywood’s myopia--and there are some interesting and talented members in that celebrity club. But Hollywood can zap one’s creative energies and Quentin is trying to get back to himself. Though I wouldn’t say he has writer’s block, an artist always has some fear when starting again, creating something from nothing.”

While waiting for the muse to strike, Tarantino has thrown his weight behind other people and projects. He’s executive producing “And God Said ‘Ha!’,” his friend Julia Sweeney’s autobiographical tragicomedy that is playing at Los Angeles’ Coronet Theater and headed for Broadway; “Full Tilt Boogie,” a $500,000 feature-length documentary about the shoot of Robert Rodriguez’s “From Dusk Till Dawn,” for which he’s picking up the tab; and “Curdled,” the story of a woman fascinated by serial killing that Miramax plans to release in late September.

At the instigation of Tarantino, Miramax has also acquired the rights to Leonard’s “Killshot,” which Tarantino will write, as well as “Freaky Deaky” and “Bandit,” which he’ll executive produce with Bender. The director--whose “Reservoir Dogs,” “Pulp Fiction,” “True Romance,” “Four Rooms” and “From Dusk Till Dawn” have all been distributed by Miramax--compares his relationship with the company to that of Clint Eastwood and Warner Bros. or Steven Spielberg and former MCA President Sid Sheinberg.

Their sensibilities are similar, Weinstein says.

“Tarantino could direct a dinosaur movie in his sleep--but that’s exactly what he would be doing: sleeping,” he said. “He’s smart enough not to let the media convince him he has to swing for the fences. Quentin has his own particular horizon he wants to expand. The only thing he has refused to do is an English tea movie--but even that may change. Quentin and Jane Campion [“The Piano”] agreed to exchange blind scripts, both of which we’ve agreed to finance. He’ll be up to his neck in corsets and Jane will be doing machine guns. We’ll be seeing Holly Hunter with an AK-47. They may have been drunk, but they shook on it.”

Though Tarantino is donating one-quarter of the Rolling Thunder profits to film preservation, he’s far less expansive when it comes to himself. The director lives in the same Crescent Heights duplex he’s rented for years. His old Geo Metro is still parked in the garage. When Manhattan Beach’s Video Archives went broke, the operation’s most famous employee bought most of the cassettes--not to mention the shelves (labeled “sci-fi” or “drama”) on which the videos had been displayed.

“Quentin’s first indulgence when he first had money was a $500-a-week laserdisc habit,” recalled his friend Rana Joy Glickman, line producer of “Sleep With Me” and producer of “Full Tilt Boogie.” “Now he’s moved into prints.”

The upper floor of Tarantino’s home serves as a makeshift screening room where a rickety projector flashes 16-mm images on the wall. To screen the 35-mm “Mysterians” and “The Message From Space” for friends, he rents a small theater at Planet Hollywood or the nearby Directors Guild.

Many in his circle--personal and professional--go back quite a ways. Sarah Kelly, a production assistant on “Sleep With Me,” is director of “Boogie”--much of whose crew worked on “From Dusk Till Dawn,” “Four Rooms” and “Pulp Fiction.” Some of the Rolling Thunder executives are pals from his Video Archives days.

The director’s most intriguing liaison, however, is a romantic one--with Academy Award-winner Sorvino (“Mighty Aphrodite”). After paparazzi snapped the Pope of Pop Culture and the Harvard grad kissing in Paris, the two went public early this year.

“Tarantino is so extroverted while Mira is in her own world--a little spacy,” said someone familiar with the couple. “But he’s a film fanatic and she’s in the business--clearly there’s a shared interest there.”

Journalist Lynn Hirschberg, who became close with the director after profiling him for Vanity Fair, believes he’s battling a massive case of mistaken identity.

“More is expected from Quentin since ‘Pulp Fiction’ struck such a deep nerve,” she said. “As Holden Caulfield said in ‘Catcher in the Rye,’ he’s someone people think they can call up and he’d be their friend.

“In real life, however, Quentin is not a cool cat. He’s a nerd--a cute, movie-junkie weird guy who wants to live the life he’s always dreamed of. In the face of all the criticism, he’s managing to swim his own race. As long as the opportunities are there, he intends to do everything. Quentin lives in Quentinland . . . and he’s very happy there.”

That world will continue to include acting, his colleagues say. No matter that most of his performances have been greeted with considerable disdain. He got off on the right foot in the twentysomething romance “Sleep With Me” (1994), playing himself as a party guest who delivers a monologue about the homosexual subtext of “Top Gun.” “If Tarantino’s cameo is any indication, he might want to consider more work on the other side of the camera,” the Ottawa Citizen said.

The director followed that advice--but with decidedly mixed results. He played his first feature lead--gambling man Johnny Destiny--in 1995’s “Destiny Turns on the Radio,” a disastrous comic fantasy that triggered the Tarantino backlash. After viewing the film, the New York Daily News’ Dave Kehr was moved to observe: “As an actor, Tarantino is a great director.”

In an August 1995 review of Robert Rodriguez’s “Desperado,” in which Tarantino played a hapless drug dealer, another Daily News critic, Robert Dominguez, remarked: “[Tarantino’s] goofy grin and rat-tat-tat ramblings are distractions. . . . ‘Desperado’ is the latest in a line of wincingly bad turns.” Still, the reception accorded his portrayal of a psychotic brother in the vampire thriller “From Dusk Till Dawn” provided a psychological boost: “Uncharacteristically restrained . . . riotously evil,” wrote Jack Mathews in The Times.

Though no fan of the on-camera Tarantino, film critic Richard Schickel hopes he stays the course. In light of the director’s “tricky” gift, he said, that won’t be easy.

“All careers built around transgressive material are difficult to sustain in Hollywood,” he said. “And, at a time when Bob Dole and other idiots are pressing for ‘family entertainment,’ Tarantino is a marked man. Though he may have been surfing on the celebrity wave, he’s directed two major movies--’Reservoir Dogs’ and ‘Pulp Fiction’--and written a great one--’True Romance.’ That’s more than a debut . . . it’s half a career.

“Tarantino’s pictures stick in your mind and say something--his natural place is on the fringe. Not every director has to move into mainstream movies, sign a multi-pic pact and get the Irving Thalberg Award. If he does, we all lose.”

Whether Tarantino ever fulfills the promise of his first two films, most agree that he’s made his mark. It was he, they point out, who made it cool for name actors such as Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone to cut their price to stretch creatively in smart, cutting-edge films. And it was Tarantino who hit home the reality that low-budget independent films--increasingly popular since the release of “sex, lies, and videotape” in the late 1980s--can also make one rich.

Joan Hyler, a former William Morris agent who is now a talent manager and producer, brings up yet another of the director’s cinematic achievements. “If only for the fact that Tarantino reinvented John Travolta,” she said, “he deserves a prominent place in the Hollywood Hall of Fame.”