Kit Kittredge: An American Girl opens this Friday. Based on the disturbingly popular American Girl line of dolls, it tells the story of an adorable, plucky, scrappy young girl (played by the adorable, plucky, scrappy Abigail Breslin) who has amazing adventures and triumphs over adversity depsite living during the Great Depression. It's being pitched as part of a new wave of films that hope to make the metroplex a safe place for preadolescent girls; we can only applaud the effort, seeing as for the last 30 years, the joint has been corrupted by the likes of this guy.
That's Steven Prince, the subject of a little-seen Martin Scorsese documentary called American Boy: A Profile of Steven Prince. During the filming of Taxi Driver, Scorsese and Mardik Martin ran across the repulsively charismatic Prince -- a hustler, gunrunner, and drug dealer with a talent for spinning wild stories -- and were so taken by him that they not only made the documentary, but cast him in the film as the gun dealer who sells Travis Bickle his pieces. If the story sounds familiar, it's because a young Quentin Tarantino saw him tell it in American Boy and, er, appropriated it for a memorable scene in Pulp Fiction.
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