Maria Puente

USA TODAY

The vitriolic struggle between police unions and director Quentin Tarantino, up to now confined to words, is verging into the realm of veiled threats.

The Oscar-winning filmmaker better watch out, warns the director of the national Fraternal Order of Police, because they have a "surprise" in store in retaliation for Tarantino's inflammatory remarks against police brutality and his refusal to back away from said remarks.

A slew of major police unions, including the FOP, have called for a boycott of Tarantino films, especially the upcoming The Hateful Eight opening on Christmas Day. The film just won the Hollywood Ensemble Award for the cast during the Hollywood Film Awards on Nov. 1.

But a boycott is not enough; now the unions really want to hurt him where it counts, said FOP executive director Jim Pasco to The Hollywood Reporter on Thursday.

"Something is in the works, but the element of surprise is the most important element," Pasco said. "Something could happen anytime between now and (movie premiere). And a lot of it is going to be driven by Tarantino, who is nothing if not predictable.

"The right time and place will come up and we'll try to hurt him in the only way that seems to matter to him, and that's economically," says Pasco.

Wait, is that a threat? asked THR. Not in the physical sense, assured Pasco.

"Police officers protect people," he says. "They don't go out to hurt people."

But hurt movie openings? Maybe. Pasco did not return e-mail invitations to elaborate.

Nor did he detail how police unions could damage a movie — another of Tarantino's patented bloody epics, by all accounts — by calling even more attention to it. The FOP has more than 330,000 members nationwide.

It's certainly gotten a rush of advance publicity already, starting when Tarantino attended an anti-police brutality rally in New York last month and suggested that some cops who shoot civilians are "murderers" and he stands with the "murdered."

Enraged, police union bosses started calling for a boycott and issuing bristling statements, referring to Tarantino by such choice terms as "depraved," a "cop-hater," and a "purveyor of degeneracy."

A Texas Republican, Ted Poe, even went to the floor of the House to denounce Tarantino's comments as "idiotic" and to declare that they "encourage mischief and crimes against peace officers."

"Anti-police comments, like these from Hollywood, should be looked at for really what they are," said Poe, a former prosecutor. "It is a commercial by the Hollywood film crowd to make money off of films that preach hate and violence by pandering to police haters."

For days, Tarantino ignored the shouting; then, this week, he chose specific media outlets to declare that he wasn't intimidated, wasn't backing down, didn't say what the unions think he said, and even if he had, he has a First Amendment right to say what he believes without being threatened.

"Yeah, I was surprised (about the backlash)," he said on MSNBC on Wednesday night. "I was under the impression I was an American and that I had First Amendment rights, and there was no problem with me going to an anti-police-brutality protest and speaking my mind ... Just because I was at an anti-police-brutality protest doesn't mean I'm anti-police."

Tarantino said he believes the unions are using him to steer attention away from his assertion that citizens have "lost trust" in police in the aftermath of police shootings and by the bitter feuding between police and African-American activists over who is more victimized by the other.

Quentin Tarantino was 'surprised' by backlash to police brutality remarks

Neither Tarantino nor his distributor, The Weinsten Company, have responded to the latest development in the quarrel. But others are worrying about the implications.

One tweet alluded to the threats directed at the Beatles after John Lennon compared the band's popularity to Jesus in 1966.

Carl Dix, a spokesman for the Revolutionary Communist Party and also for Rise Up October, the group that organized the rally Tarantino attended, issued a statement condemning the union's promise of a "surprise" in language as vivid as the union statements have been.

"The mafia style attack coming from Jim Pasco of the FOP would be cartoonish thuggery if it weren't so dangerous," Dix said. "Artists need to be able to speak for justice without attacks and retribution. This is why we launched #SideWtihQuentin and everyone should join us in speaking out against these bullying tactics. We should also understand that like any bully, they become most vicious when they're exposed."

Scott Mendelson, a film-industry reporter, recalled Friday in Forbes (a magazine not usually associated with liberals) what happened a year ago, when Hollywood was so freaked out by online threats (allegedly by North Korea) against the North Korea-mocking movie The Interview, that premieres were canceled and it was briefly pulled from theaters.

Result: Much hand-wringing and moaning about giving in to terrorist threats, Mendelson wrote. What the police unions are trying to do to Tarantino's film amounts to something similar, he wrote, calling for similar outrage:

It's "a grand act of intimidation and absolutely beyond the pale for someone proclaiming to represent those who protect and/or serve. Considering that the police are in-fact a governmental authority, said threat against person and/or economic interest as retribution for constitutionally protected speech has potentially crossed the line to where the filmmaker can say that his First Amendment rights are being violated."