What to do this long weekend: Watch Pulp Fiction
* Oops, it’s a long weekend if you’re a student, but not if you have a job. What do we know about official holidays, we’re freelance.
You must have a dvd lying around.
We can’t believe Pulp Fiction is 20 years old. Sign of age: saying things like, “We can’t believe Pulp Fiction is 20 years old.” The first time we saw it our brain was divided between “What the hell is going on!” and “This changes everything.” It did change the movies, though not the Academy, which gave Best Picture that year to Forrest Gump. It certainly changed the way we think and talk about burgers, foot massages, Samuel L. Jackson, cleaning cars, and watches.
Harvey Keitel discusses car-cleaning procedures with John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson. Photo from VF.com.
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.”
Read The Oral History of Pulp Fiction in Vanity Fair.
Infographic of the death toll in Tarantino movies from VF.com. They misspelled Inglourious Basterds.
Answers to questions you might be asking, unless you wandered onto this site purely by accident >>>
February 23rd, 2013 at 14:52
Pulp Fiction was such a milestone film, I cold remember where, when, and what context I saw it. I just arrived from a flight from the US, lamenting how I couldn’t see this movie. The week before that, I caught an episode of Siskel and Ebert praising Tarantino’s film like crazy. Fortunately enough, wowow had the movie in their programming lineup. I never saw film the same way again.
February 23rd, 2013 at 15:46
Ah Pulp Fiction. When it happened, every other goddamned movie tried so hard to be like it, and people in film school wanted to make their version of it.
I still love this movie. Whenever I play it, I’m surprised that I could actually recite the whole damn thing. I feel so happy when I meet people younger than me loving the first Tarantino movies.
This movie, and Cate Blanchett (for the first Elizabeth) losing their respective Oscars made me lose faith in the whole awards thing (most recent disappointment: John “Denethor” Noble never being nominated in the Emmys for being a lead in a sci-fi show). Really, Forrest Gump and Gwyneth Paltrow’s forgettable role?
February 25th, 2013 at 10:01
“I’m gonna be medieval on your ass.”
February 25th, 2013 at 17:49
My automatic LSS by the mere sight of those two words: Girl You’ll be a Woman. It’s the only song I can dare dance to, but alone, and minus Uma’s grace.
One worthy movie that followed the multiple POV style is GO, from 1999. It was so clever and fun that I didn’t mind very Dawson’s Creek Katie Holme’s tiny part in this.