An impassive, black man-mountain guards the entrance to the hotel suite - the message is clear: Movie Star at Work. After a long time in the wilderness, Pam Grier, feisty, sexy heroine of 1970s blaxploitation classics such as Foxy Brown and Coffy, is back as a bona fide star, courtesy of professional career-reviver Quentin Tarantino.
Continuing his mission to bring back the actors who inspired his love of film, Tarantino wrote his adaptation of Elmore Leonard's 1995 novel Rum Punch around the character of Jackie Brown, the black, forty-something air hostess who hatches a plan to double-cross cops and crooks alike, making a cool half-million in the process.
It's the kind of part that doesn't come along every day in age-obsessed, colour-coded Hollywood, admits the still-strikingly beautiful Grier.
"I was blessed that Quentin knew and loved my work, and that he wanted to write a film about a woman in her 40s, who's African-American and pulling off a comedic caper. There are so many elements in it that you don't usually get in a role. I have friends who are major stars, who are white women, who are going: God, I'd love to do a caper movie."
Grier first met Tarantino when she auditioned for a small role in Pulp Fiction. "I walked into his office, and there were all these posters on the walls from my films of the seventies. I was like, wait a minute: is this guy a fanatic, is he some kind of stalker? I asked him did he put these up because he knew I was coming and he said: `No, I was going to take them down because I knew you were coming.' Ooooh yeah! We just hit it off. we've been friends ever since." She lost out on that particular role (to Rosanna Arquette). "But you never know, if I'd got that part, maybe Quentin and I wouldn't have gotten along, and maybe Jackie wouldn't have been written for me, so I'm glad it worked out the way it did."
The blaxploitation movies of the 1970s were brash, sensational and trashy, featuring larger-than-life characters and plenty of sex and violence, propelled along by pulsating funk soundtracks. They reflected the increasing self-confidence of African-American popular culture of the period, but they were never seen at the time as more than disposable entertainment. Twenty years later, however, you can see the influence of their style and sensibility on American independent cinema in general and Tarantino in particular.
Grier agrees that Jackie Brown uses many of the tropes of the genre - the music, obviously, but also the pared-back cinematic style. "It was a relatively new industry at the time, and they used more of a European style. It was cost-effective, I suppose - long takes and they didn't like doing re-takes. If you do a lot of cutting you can lose a lot of the energy in the scene. Quentin shoots a lot of his conversations in two-shots, rather than cutting back and forwards over the shoulder, and that gives you real power as an actor. You aren't cut to pieces in the scenes, so you get to respond to the emotions in the same way you do in theatre. Quentin learned that from a lot of our movies. He's a child of the seventies films, they're his books, his college, his education. Also, he loves music, and as he's writing he's always thinking of the music that will work with the scenes."
Despite her long years in the wilderness, with a few minor roles in films such as Escape From L.A. and Bill And Ted's Bogus Journey, she's not prepared to accept that the movie business is a harsh or cruel trade. "It depends what you want to do. If you're prepared and you have talent, you will make it and people will take it seriously. They say there's not enough roles for women, but maybe there's not a lot of women who want to do certain roles. Men like action. We're from Venus, they're from Mars, and we have to get those Martians to watch. What do they want to see me do? Screaming and kicking butt, that's what. If we try to make them watch us sitting at home playing canasta and knitting crochet it's not going to work. They want to see me get on a wild stallion and shoot a gun and equalise just like they do."
But one of the most remarkable things about Jackie Brown, especially for those who (mistakenly) think of Tarantino as a guns 'n' gore merchant, is the film's relative absence of gunplay, and its quiet focus on a black heroine struggling with the realities of middle age and low pay.
`Jackie talks about ageing, but I don't care about ageing. I have more energy now than I had when I was 19, and I was a hot little firecracker then. So I interviewed many flight attendants, of all ages, races and gender. I used stories that my friends were telling me about not getting promotions because of their age or troubles with relationships, their emotional discontent with their age. I have friends who are younger than me, and they look a lot older. They don't look after themselves. I've seen blonde, white 35-year-old women in Hollywood who look like they've been through a wringer because of what they've been doing to themselves, and the amount of stress they have."
At the height of the blaxploitation craze in 1977, she told an interviewer that: "Blacks have been successful in Hollywood. Now, if we sit back with our stomachs full, picking our teeth, people will think we are content, and we will become passe." She agrees now that that's exactly what happened to that generation of black film-makers.
"We discovered an audience, and that audience was faithful to us. But it became redundant. It's a natural human reaction - if it ain't broke don't fix it. Let's milk this genre for everything we can until we've bored the audience to death and they don't come back any more. And that's what happened. It happens all the time. You can see the box office slump when a genre gets exhausted."
In the late 1970s she had been trying to expand her roles, making action movies targeted at a broader audience. "In one film, I rode the first jet-ski. It was the first year they'd come out and everyone was saying there's a black woman riding a jet-ski! In the 'hood, that was like going to the moon. But audience members were saying to me they were getting bored. I was telling the studio that there were untold historical stories that we could be doing great things about, turning them into dramas, Westerns, things like that. They said no, no one cares. They ignored the warning signs. That was the reason, and it was inevitable. Those movies are playing well today, on video. But we lost 14 years, because we bored them to tears. We had to wait until the end of the eighties, with the emergence of Spike Lee, John Singleton and so on, to make back that ground."
It's still not easy to be a black star in Hollywood, however. So is she experiencing any of the Travolta effect in her standing in the movie industry? "Absolutely, right across the board. There were people who wouldn't take my calls, but now they have to wait in line for me."
I tell her I think it's a shame she didn't get an Oscar nomination for her comeback, losing out to the sort of English Roses preferred by Academy voters. "Well, there's always a dream of winning an Oscar, but when you think about it, there's not very many actors who can say someone like Quentin invested two years of their life in writing a screenplay for them. I mean, I didn't have to pay him or even buy him lunch! I don't mind. If you say this is a comeback, then that means I must have been big once. This is my first starring role in 23 years. Some people do one every year, I wait for 23 - that's OK, it means that I'm choosy."
Jackie Brown opens nationwide next Friday
