In late 1992, Quentin Tarantino left
Amsterdam, where he had spent three months, off and on, in a one-room
apartment with no phone or fax, writing the script that would become
Pulp Fiction,
about a community of criminals on the fringe of Los Angeles. Written in
a dozen school notebooks, which the 30-year-old Tarantino took on the
plane to Los Angeles, the screenplay was a mess—hundreds of pages of
indecipherable handwriting. “It was about going over it one last time
and then giving it to the typist, Linda Chen, who was a really good
friend of mine,” Tarantino tells me. “She really helped me.”
When
Tarantino met Chen, she was working as a typist and unofficial script
consultant for Robert Towne, the venerable screenwriter of, most
notably,
Chinatown. “Quentin was fascinated by the way I worked
with Towne and his team,” she says, explaining that she “basically
lived” at Towne’s condominium, typing, researching, and offering
feedback in the preparation of his movie
The Two Jakes. “He would
ask the guys for advice, and if they were vague or disparate, he would
say, ‘What did the Chink think?’ ” she recalls. “Quentin found this
dynamic of genius writer and secret weapon amusing.
“It began
with calls where he was just reading pages to me,” she continues. Then
came more urgent calls, asking her to join him for midnight dinners.
Chen always had to pick him up, since he couldn’t drive as a result of
unpaid parking tickets. She knew Tarantino was a “mad genius.” He has
said that his first drafts look like “the diaries of a madman,” but Chen
says they’re even worse. “His handwriting is atrocious. He’s a
functional illiterate. I was averaging about 9,000 grammatical errors
per page. After I would correct them, he would try to put back the
errors, because he
liked them.”
The producer, Lawrence
Bender, and TriStar Pictures, which had invested $900,000 to develop the
project, were pressing Tarantino to deliver the script, which was late.
Chen, who was dog-sitting for a screenwriter in his Beverly Hills home,
invited Tarantino to move in. He arrived “with only the clothes on his
back,” she says, and he crashed on the couch. Chen worked without pay on
the condition that Tarantino would rabbit-sit Honey Bunny, her pet,
when she went on location. (Tarantino refused, and the rabbit later
died; Tarantino named the character in
Pulp Fiction played by Amanda Plummer in homage to it.)
His
screenplay of 159 pages was completed in May 1993. “On the cover,
Quentin had me type ‘MAY 1993 LAST DRAFT,’ which was his way of
signaling that there would be no further notes or revisions at the
studio’s behest,” says Chen.
“Did you ever feel like you were working on a modern cinematic masterpiece?,” I ask.
“Not at all,” she replies. However, she did go on to be the unit photographer on the film.
When
Pulp Fiction thundered into theaters a year later, Stanley Crouch in the
Los Angeles Times called it “a high point in a low age.”
Time declared, “It hits you like a shot of adrenaline straight to the heart.” In
Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman said it was “nothing less than the reinvention of mainstream American cinema.”
Made
for $8.5 million, it earned $214 million worldwide, making it the
top-grossing independent film at the time. Roger Ebert called it “the
most influential” movie of the 1990s, “so well-written in a scruffy,
fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it—the noses of those zombie
writers who take ‘screenwriting’ classes that teach them the formulas
for ‘hit films.’ ”
Pulp Fiction resuscitated the career of
John Travolta, made stars of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, gave
Bruce Willis new muscle at the box office, and turned Harvey and Bob
Weinstein, of Miramax, into giants of independent cinema. Harvey calls
it “the first independent movie that broke all the rules. It set a new
dial on the movie clock.”
“It must be hard to believe that Mr.
Tarantino, a mostly self-taught, mostly untested talent who spent his
formative years working in a video store, has come up with a work of
such depth, wit and blazing originality that it places him in the front
ranks of American filmmakers,” wrote Janet Maslin in
The New York Times.
“You don’t merely enter a theater to see
Pulp Fiction: you go down a rabbit hole.” Jon Ronson, critic for
The Independent, in England, proclaimed, “Not since the advent of
Citizen Kane … has one man appeared from relative obscurity to redefine the art of movie-making.”
“I Watch Movies”
Just
seven years earlier, in 1986, Tarantino was a 23-year-old part-time
actor and high-school dropout, broke, without an apartment of his own,
showering rarely. With no agent, he sent out scripts that never got past
low-level readers. “Too vile, too vulgar, too violent” was the usual
reaction, he later said. According to
Quentin Tarantino, by Wensley Clarkson, his constant use of the f-word in his script
True Romance caused one studio rep to write to Cathryn Jaymes, his early manager:
Dear Fucking Cathryn,
How
dare you send me this fucking piece of shit. You must be out of your
fucking mind. You want to know how I feel about it? Here’s your fucking
piece of shit back. Fuck you.
“Like a lot of guys who had never
made films before, I was always trying to figure out how to scam my way
into a feature,” Tarantino tells me. Though he was indisputably king of
all movie knowledge at Video Archives, the suburban-L.A. store where he
worked, in Hollywood he was a nobody. Surrounded by videos, which he
watched incessantly, he hit upon an idea for recycling three of the
oldest bromides in the book: “The ones you’ve seen a zillion times—the
boxer who’s supposed to throw a fight and doesn’t, the Mob guy who’s
supposed to take the boss’s wife out for the evening, the two hit men
who come and kill these guys.” It would be “an omnibus thing,” a
collection of three caper films, similar to stories by such writers as
Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in 1920s and 1930s pulp magazines.
“That is why I called it
Pulp Fiction,” says Tarantino.
He
planned to share the writing with his fellow clerk Roger Avary and
another friend. Tarantino would write the first story, about the guy who
takes out the crime boss’s wife. Avary’s section centered on the
over-the-hill boxer, who double-crosses a crime boss and then ends up
rescuing him as he’s being anally raped by a hillbilly in a pawnshop.
When
the third writer didn’t materialize, Tarantino had to write that story,
too. Working in his mother’s house for three and a half weeks, he says,
he heard a set of bizarre criminal characters speaking to him. Soon he
abandoned his original idea and wrote instead a violent script about a
gang of thieves and a bungled diamond heist. According to one source, he
named it after Louis Malle’s 1987 film,
Au Revoir les Enfants,
which Tarantino playfully mispronounced as “reservoir dogs.” Scrawled
across hundreds of pages, the script was unpunctuated, absolutely
illegible, and undeniably great.
Pulp Fiction would have to wait. Tarantino was determined to direct
Reservoir Dogs then and there.
He talked to Lawrence Bender, a former tango dancer he’d recently met who had produced one low-budget horror movie,
Intruder.
After looking at the rough draft, Bender said, “Wow, this is
extraordinary. Can you give me some time to raise some money?” Tarantino
signed an agreement on a paper napkin, giving Bender two months to do
it. One potential buyer was reportedly ready to mortgage his house, but
only if he could direct the movie. No one seemed ready to back the
untested Tarantino.!
But Bender knew somebody who knew the actor
Harvey Keitel, and that changed everything. Keitel meets me in a New
York diner expressly because, he says, “I want your readers to know
there’s great talent out there, and they should be seen and heard. We
don’t have to keep repeating the same movies and sequels, ad infinitum.
An example like Quentin should be a call to arms. Of course, people say,
‘Oh, so-and-so would have made it anyway.’ That’s almost like saying
the world is fair, and the cream will rise to the top. That’s bullshit.”
You can read the whole Vanity Fair article
here !
