Transcript

Pulp Fiction · Verbal Diorama

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Hi, everyone.
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I'm Em.
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And welcome to verbal Diorama, episode 353, Pulp Fiction.
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This is the podcast that's all about the history and legacy of movies you know, and movies you don't.
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That's buying the $5 milkshake.
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Probably in Amos and Andy, eating a Royale with Cheese and doing the Twist to Chuck Berry at the same time as doing this episode.
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That's what you call multitasking.
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Welcome to Verbal Diorama.
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Whether you're a brand new listener, whether you're a regular returning listener, thank you so much for being here.
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Thank you so much for choosing to listen to this podcast.
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I am so happy to have you here for the history and legacy of Pulp Fiction.
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And if you are a regular returning listener, thank you so much for continuing to listen and support this podcast.
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However long you have been listening and supporting this podcast.
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But this podcast has been going for over seven years and now 353 episodes.
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So if you are a brand new listener to this podcast, you have plenty of episodes to catch up with.
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As always though, thank you so much for your support.
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It genuinely does mean so much to an independent podcaster who does all of this all by herself every week.
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And I feel like I've been on a bit of a run in the last few episodes.
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So episode 350 was Star wars pretty huge.
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351 Empire Records not so huge, but cult favorite Shawshank Redemption, another cult favourite that has become synonymous with being one of the best movies of all time.
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And now Pulp Fiction, which revolutionized independent cinema, basically single handedly resurrected John Travolta's career, made stars out of Samuel L.
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Jackson, Uma Thurman and Tarantino himself, and influenced pop culture for decades to come.
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It's also very sweary.
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So as a family friendly podcast, I need to be careful which clips I use, but hopefully here's the very PG trailer for Pulp Fiction.
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Small time crooks, Honey Bunny and Pumpkin summon up the courage to hold up a random LA diner.
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Entrusted with retrieving a glow emitting leather suitcase that belongs to their boss, powerful crime kingpin Marsellus Wallace.
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Guns for hire, Vincent Vega and Jules Winfield end up with a bloody mess on their hands.
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Fortunately, men like Winston Wolfe are always around to handle a crisis.
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Vincent is also tasked with showing Mia Wallace, Marsellus' wife, a good time while her husband is out of town.
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Meanwhile, proud champion boxer Butch reneges on his deal with Marsellus and finds himself on the run.
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All of the stories come full circle as Jules and Vincent find themselves exactly where it all began.
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An all too familiar diner.
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Let's run through the cast.
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We have John Travolta as Vincent Vega, Samuel L.
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Jackson as Jules Winfield, Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace, Bruce Willis as Butch Coolidge, Harvey Keitel as Winston Wolf, Tim Roth as Pumpkin, Amanda Plummer as Honey Bunny, Maria de Mederos as Fabienne, Ving Rhames as Marsellus Wallace, Eric Stoltz
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as Lance, Rosanna Arquette as Jody and Christopher Walken as Captain Coons Pulp Fiction was written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, with a story by Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery in 352 episodes.
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I've never done a Quentin Tarantino movie.
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I've done Tarantino adjacent, like From Dusk Till dawn, which Tarantino wrote and Robert Rodriguez directed.
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That's episode 229 of this podcast.
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Tarantino also stars in that movie too, but as far as his directorial efforts, this is my first time.
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And if we're being honest, without Pulp Fiction, From Dusk Till dawn probably wouldn't exist, at least not in the way it does.
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But, and I always come back to this, if you're going to be a film history podcast, you do have to jump into genres you wouldn't necessarily otherwise choose.
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And honestly, when I do, usually those episodes do really well.
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So it's in my vested interest to do this.
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Pulp Fiction, famed for its extreme violence, bad language and gore, chooses to be divisive and it is visceral and shocking.
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But it's also extremely well written and funny, even when people get their brains blown out.
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So to start the story of Pulp Fiction, we have to start with Quentin Tarantino.
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And in 1986 he was a 23 year old part time actor and high school dropout while working as a clerk at Video Archives, a suburban LA video store.
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And there he was, the fountain of all movie knowledge.
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He knew all the tropes, all the homages, and he had dreams of writing his own screenplay.
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He had no agent at the time, but he still sent out scripts.
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They would always be rejected for being too vile, too vulgar, too violent.
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Three V words that would become synonymous with Tarantino's career going forward.
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Inspired by a 1963 horror film called Black Sabbath, which is also where the band got their name from.
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Written in three distinctive parts, Tarantino hit upon an idea to combine three of the standard Hollywood film the boxer who's supposed to throw the fight and doesn't, the mob guy who's supposed to take the boss's wife out for
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the evening, and two hitmen who come and kill some guys.
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It would be a collection of three caper films similar to stories by writers like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett in the 1920s and 30s pulp magazines.
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Hammett and Chandler pretty much invented the modern hard boiled detective story.
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Both men were published in Black Mask, one of the more famous pulp magazines.
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Their heroes were tough and talked smart.
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Chandler's most famous protagonist was Philip Moore Marlowe Hammett's was Sam Spade.
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Chandler and Hammett only met each other once, on 11 January 1936 at a black Mask magazine event in Los Angeles.
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Because of this, Tarantino almost titled it Black Mask, but instead decided to call this script Pulp Fiction.
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Pulp isn't just crime or mystery in general, but the dark and gritty style of hard boiled and noir novels.
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It originated as a type of inexpensive fiction magazine published from 1896 through to the 1950s, commonly releasing adventure, detective, mystery, fantasy, gangster and science fiction stories.
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Tarantino planned to share the writing of this script with his friend and fellow clerk, Roger Avery, and another friend, Adam Rifkin.
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The plan was each would write and direct their own short film, despite the fact they were all broken.
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Tarantino would write the first story about a guy who takes out the crime boss's wife.
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Avery would write about the over the hill boxer who double crosses a crime boss and then ends up rescuing him.
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And the third story, well, that never happened because Adam Rifkin never wrote it.
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So while Avery's section grew into a script called Pandemonium Reigns, Tarantino wrote the third story and he worked in his mother's house for three and a half weeks, abandoned the original idea and instead wrote a violent script about
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a gang of thieves and a bungled diamond heist.
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While Tarantino worked at the video store, he would recommend films to customers, one of which was Louis Malle's 1987 film Au Revoir Les Enfants, which Tarantino couldn't pronounce.
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He instead pronounced au revoir as reservoir.
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Pulp Fiction then would have to wait because Tarantino had just written Reservoir Dogs and he was determined to make it his directorial debut.
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In 1990, he passed the Reservoir Dog script to producer Lawrence Bender, who agreed to produce it.
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It was through Reservoir Dogs that Tarantino met Harvey Keitel.
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Keitel signed on as a lead actor, and his commitment to the project helped raise $1.5 million to produce the movie.
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But most importantly, he backed Tarantino as the director.
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Reservoir dogs, with its $3 million budget, was would make $22 million.
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And the success of that movie wouldn't only cement Tarantino as a writer director who encourages on screen violence, it would also cement his passion for paying homage to other works of film, including Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon, Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho,
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and Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets and Goodfellas.
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With work on Reservoir Dogs completed but not yet released, Tarantino earned $50,000, which for a broke high school dropout was like winning the lot.
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After writing True Romance, which he ended up selling and was released in 1993, directed by Tony Scott, Tarantino returned to the notion of a trilogy film, where the main character of one story would be a minor character in
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the others.
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At the premiere of Terminator 2 in 1991, he met Stacy Sher, a young Hollywood executive who would soon become president of production at Danny DeVito's Jersey Films.
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She's also been featured in the podcast before.
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In the episode I did on Erin Brockovich, it was Stacy Sher who introduced Tarantino to DeVito.
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And DeVito would also be vitally important to Pulp Fiction.
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But first, Tarantino had to write Pulp Fiction, and using some of his $50,000, he packed a suitcase and traveled to Amsterdam solely to write his next movie.
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He spent three months in Amsterdam in a one room apartment with no phone or fax, scribbling a script in a dozen school notebooks.
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The writing was indecipherable.
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He'd filled several notebooks.
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By the time of the 1992 Cannes Film Festival, where Reservoir Dogs was screened at midnight out of competition, it had already caught the attention of Harvey and Bob Weinstein, who would distribute it as a Miramax movie.
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While Tarantino was in Amsterdam, he had visitors.
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Stacy Sher and Roger Avery stayed with him, and Avery helped him on the second act of Pulp Fiction.
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By the time Avery left Amsterdam, he believed he was the co writer of Pulp Fiction.
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We'll come back to that, though.
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Tarantino's producer friend Lawrence Bender flew out to meet him and found him listening to Dick Dale's Misirlou on a Walkman.
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While he was furiously writing, bender, along with TriStar Pictures, had invested $900,000 to develop Tarantino's next project and they were pressing him to deliver.
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When he got back to Los Angeles, he called up his good friend and script consultant, Linda Chen.
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Chen was working as a typist when they met and had also worked in an unofficial capacity for screenwriter Robert Towne.
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Tarantino found their relationship genius writer and secret weapon interesting and started reading pages of his scribbled script to her over the phone.
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He then started asking her to join him for midnight dinners and would show her the pages of the school notebooks.
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She would comment on his atrocious handwriting and grammatical errors.
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Tarantino, knowing he had to deliver something to Bender, ended up crashing on Chen's couch.
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She agreed to work on his screenplay so long as he looked after her rabbit, Honey Bunny, while she was working on location elsewhere.
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Tarantino did not look after the rabbit.
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The rabbit died.
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He named a character Honey Bunny in homage.
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But Chen did indeed make sense of his notes and scribbles, typed it up for him and he delivered a 159 page screenplay in May 1993.
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With May 1993 last draft typed on the front, signaling he would be making no studio mandated changes.
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Bender finally had something he could send out and he did to Danny DeVito.
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Linda Chen would end up working on Pulp Fiction as a unit.
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Still photographer DeVito and his company, Jersey Films, loved the script and Bender and Tarantino's newly formed production company, a band apart, were given financing and office facilities.
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Jersey Films got a share of the project and the right to shop the script to a studio.
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And they had a first deal look with TriStar.
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TriStar chairman Mike Medavoy received the script and read it and he liked it, but questioned Tarantino on the violent scene where a character gets shot in the face accidentally in a car with pieces of his brain splattered all
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over.
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Medavoy thought it was too over the top and cautioned Tarantino that he was likely to get blowback from studios.
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In February 1993, Pulp Fiction actually appeared on a variety list of films in pre production at TriStar.
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But despite this, TriStar passed on making the movie and put it into turnaround.
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In fact, every major studio passed on Pulp Fiction.
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Due to its extreme violence, some called it unfilmable.
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Lawrence bender and Danny DeVito then went to Miramax, the formerly independent studio that had recently been acquired by Disney.
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They handed the script to Richard Gladstein, who passed it to now disgraced convicted sexual abuser Harvey Weinstein.
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Weinstein and his brother Bob were enthralled by the script, but the notoriously family friendly Disney company might be an issue right now.
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Disney may have seemed an unlikely match for Pulp Fiction, but Weinstein had the final say when he signed the contract with Disney selling Miramax.
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With the Weinstein still running the company.
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He wrote the word autonomy on every page because he'd heard that Jeffrey Katzenberg was notorious for not giving it and doing many episodes of this podcast where Jeffrey Katzenberg was involved.
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I would agree with that.
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So due to his shrewd dealings with Katzenberg, Weinstein had the right to make Pulp Fiction regardless.
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But he still went to Katzenberg and showed him the script.
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Katzenberg read it and said, easy on the heroin scene if you can, but that is one of the best scripts I have ever read.
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Even though you don't need it, I am giving you my blessing.
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Pulp Fiction was the first Miramax film given the green light after the Disney acquisition, and Miramax completely financed it themselves.
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Pulp Fiction was given an $8.5 million budget because with a lower budget they could maintain more control over the movie itself.
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And Danny DeVito also gave Tarantino something important.
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As part of his own development deal at TriStar Pictures, DeVito was given final cut and cast approval on all of his projects.
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He passed that along to Tarantino and the other directors he worked with at Jersey Films.
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Tarantino would use it and he would need it because we need to talk about the cast.
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Daniel Day Lewis had just won an Oscar for My Left Foot, and Harvey Weinstein pushed for him to be cast as Vincent Vega, a part Tarantino wrote with Michael Madsen in mind after they worked together on Reservoir Dogs,
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with Vincent Vega being the canonical brother of Madsen's character Vic Vega in Reservoir Dogs.
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Madsen ended up taking a role in Wyatt Earp, so Tarantino decided to look elsewhere due to the low budget.
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They needed actors who would be recognisable but cheap.
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And they didn't come more recognisable and cheap than John Travolta after his trend setting early roles in Saturday Night Fever, Urban Cowboy and Grease, which helped launch Disco Cowboy, Chic and Greasers by the time the 90s came around,
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his biggest commercial success was 1989 family comedy look who's Talking and its sequels.
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But Travolta's star had seriously waned.
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Tarantino wanted to meet with him, so Travolta went to the director's address on Crescent Heights Boulevard and they talked for hours.
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Tarantino told him he had two roles in mind for him, a vampire movie called From Dusk Till dawn and Pulp Fiction.
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Travolta replied that he was not a vampire person.
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He'd never played a drug addict on screen, and he consulted his agent, his friends and his wife, Kelly Preston, all of whom convinced him to take part.
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So Travolta was in until Harvey Weinstein caught wind of the idea and responded, anyone but Travolta.
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Mike Simpson, Tarantino's agent at William Morris Endeavour, had given Weinstein a term sheet of Tarantino's demands, which included final cut, a two and a half hour running time and final choice of actors.
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One of the actors was John Travolta.
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Weinstein responded that the entire list was approved except for John Travolta.
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He suggested Daniel Day Lewis, Sean Penn, William Hurt.
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Bruce Willis also really wanted to play Vincent Vega.
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During a late night telephone call with Simpson, the Weinstein's accepted all of Tarantino's deal points except the casting of Travolta.
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Weinstein attempted to bypass the issue and suggested they close the deal and address the Travolta in the room the next day.
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But Simpson refused, telling Weinstein they had to agree to everything right now or there was no deal and they would take Pulp Fiction elsewhere.
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They did have other potential buyers waiting in the wings.
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Ronna Wallace of Live Entertainment, which had produced Reservoir Dogs, had actually stormed William Morris security that night in an attempt to disrupt Simpson's call with the Weinsteins.
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Simpson gave the Weinsteins 15 seconds to agree to Tarantino's demands with a promise that if he hung up, the deal was over.
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Harvey Weinstein kept talking, arguing, not used to not getting his own way, and Simpson followed through on his threat and started counting down from 15 seconds.
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When he got to eight, Bob Weinstein cut in, suggesting they say yes.
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And Harvey Weinstein relented with the F word.
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And so once again, Travolta was in the movie.
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Harvey Keitel would be instrumental in the casting of Bruce Willis.
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Keitel picked up his daughter one day at Bruce Willis's house in Malibu and casually mentioned that Quentin Tarantino was getting ready to do another film.
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Willis was a huge fan of Reservoir Dogs and wanted to work with the young director, even if it meant taking a drastic reduction in the $5 million salary he demanded as one of Hollywood's most bankable action stars.
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So Keitel agreed to make the introduction.
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He invited Willis and Tarantino to a barbecue at his home and the pair met.
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Willis immediately went for the role of Vincent Vega, but with Travolta already cast, there was only one possible part for Butch the Boxer.
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The problem was, Tarantino had written the part four and promised it to Matt Dillon.
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Dillon read the script and wanted to sleep on it, but you don't sleep on a part in a Tarantino movie.
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So Tarantino called up Willis and offered him the role of Butch Harvey.
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Weinstein was delighted by this, because the movie now had a bona fide movie star and they could sell it as such.
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And as I'm going to come to, they did sell it off.
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The power of Bruce Willis.
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Michelle Pfeiffer, Meg Ryan, Holly Hunter, Halle Berry, Jennifer Aniston and Rosanna Arquette were all reportedly considered for the role of Mia Wallace, but Tarantino had already decided on Uma Thurman.
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She was 23 years old.
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She was just starting out in her acting career.
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She'd been a model since the age of 15 and had had small parts in the Adventures Of Baron Munchausen, where she appeared nude, and Dangerous Liaisons as the young, naive virgin Cecile.
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She'd just starred in Gus Van Sant's adaptation of Even Cowgirls get the Blues, which was a critical and commercial flop, when her agent, Jay Maloney, sent her the script for Pulp Fiction.
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But Thurman was unsure.
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Not just for the obscenities or her character's drug habit.
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She struggled with the idea of a depiction of male rape.
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She met with Tarantino for dinner at the Ivy in Los Angeles for three hours, followed by a lengthy discussion in her apartment, and Tarantino struggled to convince her he wanted her for the role as soon as he met
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her.
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But she was never on his original wish list, which included Jennifer Beals, Virginia Madsen, Alfra Woodard, Bridget Fonda and Angela Bassett.
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Eventually, Uma Thurman agreed to be in the movie, and looking back, she questioned why she questioned it in the first place.
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Jules Winnfield had been written for Laurence Fishburne, who was offered the role but turned it down because he felt the movie glamourised heroin.
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Second choices were Samuel L Jackson and Eddie Murphy.
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Jackson came in for an audition and impressed, but another candidate auditioned and blew the team away.
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It prompted Lawrence Bender to inform Jackson's agent that they might need to consider the other actor.
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Jackson's agent suggested he return, and Jackson was annoyed at being asked again, but he believed the original audition was a reading rather than a proper audition.
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He was hungry, so he bought a burger with him and when he got there, no one was there to greet him, which annoyed him some more.
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And then a line producer said to him, I Love your work, Mr.
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Fishburne.
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He'd reached the point of 0f's given, and so he did the audition, kinda grumpy, reading his lines whilst waving a hamburger around, which would end up being incorporated into the scene.
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When Jackson came to the final scene in the diner where Jules quotes the Bible, his acting became so real and so angry that the actor reading with him lost his place.
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When Jackson got back to New York, he was still annoyed.
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But then Lawrence Bender called and told him the job was his.
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And the one thing that sealed it was they never knew how the movie was going to end until Jackson did the final scene in the diner.
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The other actor, Paul Calderon, was given a small role as Paul, the bartender at Marcellus's club.
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Tarantino cast Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer, who were friends as Pumpkin and Honey Bunny.
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Their size, their look, their energy, everything about them made Tarantino want to use them.
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He contacted another friend, Eric Stoltz, and offered him two parts, and he said they both wear bathrobes.
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And Stoltz chose the role of Lance, the heroin dealer.
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Tarantino played the other part himself, and many men wouldn't be comfortable with a graphic rape scene.
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Ving Rhames, a theatre veteran who grew up in Harlem, was Tarantino's first choice for Marsellus Wallace, and Reims actually embraced the rape scene, noting that because of his sheer size, he didn't ever get the opportunity to play many
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vulnerable people.
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And Tarantino would say it was a sheer mark of Reims's masculinity.
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Because of the extremely low budget, every cast member would be paid the same amount, $20,000 a week, but the major cast members would also share a percentage of the film's profits.
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Travolta and Thurman would have to be coached on how to convincingly take and be on drugs.
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Tarantino enlisted Craig Hammond, a friend from acting school and a former heroin addict, to ensure that everything about drugs in the film would seem absolutely authentic in close ups.
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Thurman snorted sugar.
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Travolta spent some time with Hammond, who taught Travolta how to lovingly caress and needle and spoon, and how to show the way a heroin high comes in waves, not all at once, and how to replicate a heroin high.
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The advice was to drink as much tequila as you can and lay in a warm pool or tub of water.
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For Mia's overdose scene, Tarantino got advice from Hammond how to depict an overdose and asked how someone would revive her.
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Hammond said that when he OD'd, someone hit him up with salt water.
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But Tarantino took it a step further and wrote a scene where Mia is administered adrenaline to the heart, not something that would likely work in real life.
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But there is a medication that might called naloxone, an opioid antagonist that blocks the effect of opioids.
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It's usually injected into a thigh muscle or sprayed into the nostril almost instantly reversing the overdose.
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That's if the person overdosing hasn't already died.
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If the heart has stopped, a shot of adrenaline in the form of epinephrine might help, but only if also injected into the thigh and not the heart.
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Having an ex addict on set also meant using the correct terminology for the bags that contain cocaine and those usually used for heroin.
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The reason Mia messes up that it's not cocaine is because that style of bag is usually used for cocaine, not heroin.
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And she would also have been too drugged up to realize the powder was different.
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And believe me when I say that information purely came from the Internet, because for the longest time I had no idea that the drugs in Vince's coat pocket was heroin.
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I just thought she OD'd on cocaine.
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And seeing that OD itself for the first time was enough to traumatize me to never touch a drug in my life.
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Costume designer Betsy Hyman, who worked with Tarantino on Reservoir Dogs, was already an established costume designer when they met.
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The clothing in Pulp Fiction is understated and often overlooked, but important to the characters.
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And much of the inspiration for the design came from Reservoir Dogs.
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She sat down with Tarantino and they worked together on the visual design for the movie.
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She saw Mia Wallace as a cool girl, kind of a bad girl, in a marriage with a big time gangster who protects her by isolating her.
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Because they had very little budget and she couldn't find trousers that were long enough for uma Thurman, who's five' 11.
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And because they had a 50s diner theme, she decided to crop the trousers.
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And cropped trousers came back into fashion shortly after Pulp Fiction.
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While Mia is barefoot for most of the movie, which is a Tarantino special, as we know, Thurman wore gold Chanel pumps to the diner to show she was wealthy.
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And Hyman contacted Chanel, who had some gold ballet flat samples, and they lent them to the production for free.
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For Vincent and Jules, she based their looks off Reservoir Dogs too.
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She went for a short collared, very tight fitted suit on Samuel L.
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Jackson because Jules was like a preacher.
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And on John Travolta as Vincent, she chose a linen rumpled suit because he didn't really have his stuff together like Jules did.
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He had messy long hair extensions that Travolta had done himself and an earring.
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She wanted it to look like the same outfit that he'd been sleeping in.
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She found his bolo tie at Kenny's Western Wear in the Valley.
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The trench coat he lends to Mia is a gabardine trench coat from the 50s that Hyman got at Palace Costumes, a costume rental in la.
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Samuel Jackson grew mutton chop sideburns and was supposed to have a large afro.
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But a production assistant, Quentin Tarantino, sent to South LA to buy an afro wig, had no idea what that was.
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So she returned instead with a Jheri curl wig, which Tarantino didn't like but Jackson loved and for butch.
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Hyman found old fashioned Levi's made from polyester and went to shot for the worn leather jacket.
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Determined to make an 8.5 million dollar movie look as if it cost 25 million dollars, Tarantino shot with the slowest film Kodak made on 50 ASA film stock, which is the slowest stock they make.
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And it creates an almost no grain image.
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The closest thing in the 90s-50s Technicolor.
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And this film required ultra bright lighting, which was incredibly hot.
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Filming on the 51 day shoot began on the 20th of September 1993 in the Hawthorne Grill in suburban Los Angeles, the first of the film's 70 locations and sets.
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During the same week that Tarantino filmed the opening scene, he also filmed the last scene with Jules and Vincent in the Hawthorne Grill, interrupting the robbery that starts the movie.
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Marsellus briefcase containing the movie's MacGuffin was just filled with a light bulb and two batteries.
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By far the largest chunk of the budget, $150,000 went to creating the Jackrabbit Slim set.
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It was built in a Culver City warehouse where it was joined by several other sets as well as the film's production offices.
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It was populated by actual impersonators as well as Steve Buscemi in a cameo as Buddy Holly.
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The production even used Tarantino's car, a 1964 Chevelle Malibu convertible, which unfortunately ended up getting stolen during filming in 2013, the car was found.
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It had been purchased by a new owner who had no idea it was stolen, nor that the VIN had been altered, nor that it previously belonged to Quentin Tarantino.
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And if you have John Travolta in your movie, it makes sense to make him dance.
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Tarantino had actually written the scene before Travolta was officially in the movie, but it was Tarantino who suggested they do the twist at Jack Rabbit Slims.
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Travolta had actually won the Twist contest when he was 8 years old, so he knew every version and he listed them off to Tarantino, the Batman, the Hitchhiker, the Swim, as well as the twist.
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Travolta would teach Uma Thurman the steps and suggested that when Tarantino wanted to see a different step, to call it out.
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So Tarantino then filmed the scene right on the dance floor with a handheld camera, calling out each step as he wanted it.
36:17
Filming wrapped on 30 November 1993, with the final scene shot being Christopher Walken delivering a four minute eight page monologue in which he, as Captain Koons, presents a gold watch to Bruce Willis's boxer character as a child.
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The speech was so long that the little boy who played young Butch started to feel sleepy, so Walken just did the rest into the lens.
36:41
At the wrap party held on the Jackrabbit Slims Diner set, Walken danced alongside John Travolta and coincidentally, they would later both be cast in the movie Hairspray.
36:54
And now is as good a time as any to segue into the obligatory Keanu reference of this episode.
36:59
And if you're not sure what that is, it's where I try and link every movie that I feature with Keanu Reeves for no reason other than he is the best of men.
37:09
Now obviously Keanu Reeves is not in this movie, nor did he ever appear on any of Tarantino's lists to be in this movie.
37:17
But he did walk on stage at the 1995 Oscars ceremony to introduce Pulp Fiction as one of the nominees for Best picture.
37:26
And so that is the easiest way to link Keanu to the movie Pulp Fiction.
37:32
Pulp Fiction, of course, doesn't have a traditional score.
37:34
In fact, it has no score.
37:37
Instead, Tarantino used an eclectic assortment of surf music, rock and roll, soul and pop songs.
37:44
Dick Dale's rendition of Miss Erlou, a traditional Eastern Mediterranean folk song, plays during the open credits rather iconically.
37:53
His friends Chuck Kelly and Laura Lovelace were credited as music consultants and they suggested some of the songs.
38:00
The soundtrack album peaked on the Billboard 200 chart, number 21.
38:04
The single urge Overkill's cover of the Neil diamond song Girl, you'll Be a Woman soon reached number 59.
38:12
The soundtrack is equally untraditional, consisting of nine songs from the film, four tracks of dialogue snippets followed by a song and three tracks of dialogue alone.
38:22
Some of its songs have become synonymous with the movie, such as Chuck Berry's UN Never Can Tell.
38:28
Quentin Tarantino had originally intended My Sharona by the knack to be played during the gimp torture sequence, but the rights had already been licensed to another film in 1994.
38:39
Reality Bites the poster for Pulp Fiction is one of the most striking movie posters.
38:46
There are no floaty heads on this movie poster.
38:49
It was the brainchild of Miramax's creative director James Verdassoto, and it resembles a vintage weathered paperback cover foregrounding Uma Thurman in character as Mia Wallace lounging on a bed with her legs crossed in the air, holding a lit
39:04
cigarette and staring seductively beside a pistol and a pulp novel.
39:09
It was to all intents and purposes a modern take on the mid century femme fatale.
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Photographer Firouz Zahedi captured a host of images with Thurman sitting cross legged and lying on a bed deliberately shot purely for the marketing material.
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She smoked Lucky Strike cigarettes and had under her hand a copy of Norman Bly's novel Harlot in her Heart.
39:32
Ahead of the official release of Pulp Fiction On 14 October, Miramax sent the poster to 1,100 cinemas across the US.
39:42
Almost immediately lucky Strike threatened to sue the studio for using its name and logo on the cigarette pack lying beside her.
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Miramax eventually recalled the posters while the art team produced a second run.
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The replacement blurred out the cigarette box but also changed and enlarged the title font, added the cast credits on the left side, propped up a new gun on Thurman's pillow and swapped out Norman Bly's novel Harlot in Her
40:09
Heart with a fake paperback called Pulp Fiction.
40:12
But not before many of the posters went into general circulation.
40:16
And nowadays a genuine Lucky Strike poster of Pulp Fiction could fetch you anything from 5,000 to over $10,000.
40:26
And when it came to getting Pulp Fiction rated here in the UK it is very much an 18, but a shot of Marvin's head exploding in the car was cut to avoid an NC17 rating in the US from
40:39
the MPAA and that footage has never been released in any future re release.
40:46
So let's talk about the release because I've spoken on this podcast before about Harvey Weinstein and how he would use his considerable Hollywood might to get his own way and dominate awards season.
40:58
See Shakespeare in love episode 252 for more on that.
41:02
But for Pulp Fiction, Weinstein had a similar plan to build momentum at the box office and make a push for awards season.
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He flew the cast to the Cannes film festival in May 1994 where Pulp Fiction screened twice, once to the press in the morning and once in the evening to huge fanfare and that was it.
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Weinstein did something he called the Iron Curtain strategy.
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Just two screenings, nothing else.
41:30
And no one else had access to see it.
41:33
But even before then, Weinstein had done his homework.
41:37
He targeted the New York Times critic Janet Maslin and connected her to Tarantino before the Cannes Film Festival, before the Cannes jury could see the movie, he gave a copy of the movie to Maslin.
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She gave it a rave review.
41:52
And not only that, he researched everybody on the jury, found out which hotels they were staying at and which room numbers.
41:59
And just before the jury members saw Pulp Fiction, a copy of Maslin's glowing review was slid under each jury member's door.
42:09
At the event, the Palme d' or was set to be announced, the best of the 22 films that had been screened at Cannes.
42:15
And that year's jury president, Clint Eastwood, announced that the unanimous winner was Pulp Fiction.
42:22
Pulp Fiction wasn't seen again until the New York film festival in September 1994, a month before its wide release.
42:30
When someone in the crowd fainted during the scene where Mia is revived by a shot to the heart, the movie was stopped and the lights were brought up to get the person medical attention.
42:40
The movie was stopped for nine minutes before it resumed.
42:43
It wasn't one of Weinstein's publicity attempts, but many thought it might have been.
42:48
And to be honest, it might as well have been.
42:51
Before Pulp Fiction's premiere, Tarantino convinced Roger Avery to forfeit his agreed on co writing credit and accept a story by credit so the line, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, could be used in advertising and on screen.
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And when Pulp fiction released on 14th October 1994, it was an instant hit, debuting at number one at the domestic box office, staying there for two weeks before being dethroned by Stargate.
43:19
It stayed in the top 10 for seven weeks and then returned to the top 10 in its 18th week of release thanks to the Oscar campaign, and stayed in the top 10 for a further eight weeks.
43:31
Pulp Fiction finished with an $8.5 million budget, but because they were so frugal with their costs, they ended up returning $500,000 to Miramax.
43:41
But the Weinsteins were hardly strapped for cash.
43:44
They'd already recouped their $8.5 million investment before production even began, by selling the foreign rights for $11 million on the strength of Bruce Willis involvement alone, ensuring the movie would be profitable no matter what.
43:59
On its final $8 million budget, Pulp Fiction grossed $108 million domestically and $105 million in internationally.
44:08
For a total worldwide gross of $213 million, it was the first Miramax film to surpass $100 million in the US and Canada, and the 10th biggest film domestically in the US of 1994.
44:21
Even though it played on substantially fewer screens than any other film in the top 20, it has a 92% on rotten tomatoes.
44:30
With a consensus of injecting its compendium of crime tales with the patois of everyday conversation.
44:37
Pulp Fiction is a cinematic shot of adrenaline that cements writer director Quentin Tarantino as an audacious purveyor of killer kino.
44:47
When it came to the 1995 Academy Awards, the Weinsteins had ensured that the movie went wide from the get go and rose to be number one in America.
44:56
Winning big at the Oscars would also give the film a second life at the box office and in the home video market.
45:03
And Pulp Fiction was nominated not only for Best Picture, but also for six other awards.
45:08
Best Director, Best Actor for John Travolta, Best Supporting Actor for Samuel L.
45:13
Jackson, Best Supporting Actress for Uma Thurman, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing.
45:19
It was up against Forrest Gump for many of these awards, including Best Picture.
45:25
Miramax had spent 300 to $400,000 on the Oscar campaign, only about half what Paramount had allegedly spent on Forrest Gump.
45:35
Weinstein, as always, had done his due diligence.
45:38
He had done demographic analysis as to who the likely voters were.
45:43
He would send people out to canvas for votes at retirement communities for those in the business where everyone was still an Academy member.
45:51
After all of that, though, Pulp Fiction would only win one award that night, Best Original Screenplay for both Quentin Tarantino and Roger Avery.
46:00
When the presenter Anthony Hopkins announced the winners, the television screens went black for a moment, which Avery says was payback for pranks Tarantino had played on him in the past.
46:11
He paid a cameraman $500 to have the camera turned off Tarantino.
46:16
When they announced the award at the BAFTA Awards, Pulp Fiction won Best Original Screenplay and Samuel L.
46:23
Jackson won for Best Supporting actor.
46:26
At the 52nd Golden Globes, Tarantino was named as the sole recipient of the Best Screenplay honour and failed to mention Roger Avery in his acceptance speech.
46:36
And Pulp Fiction was selected for preservation in the Library of Congress national film registry in 2013.
46:44
To call Pulp Fiction a phenomenon is somehow not enough.
46:48
It's become iconic in its soundtrack, its visual language, its use of storytelling.
46:53
Certain scenes are forever immortalized in cinema and memes.
46:58
It's influenced tv, music, literature and ads, including Harvey Keitel as Winston Wolfe starring in some very famous home insurance ads here in the uk.
47:09
It resurrected film noir as well as John Travolta's career.
47:12
It showed us the brutality of life in a way that was somehow palatable to the masses.
47:18
It glamorizes violence, drugs, crime, death and revenge.
47:22
There's religion, spirituality, improbable coincidences and homages to other movies and pop culture icons like Marilyn Monroe and Flock O Seagulls.
47:32
It's also extremely racist and homophobic.
47:36
It's often discussed within the framework of postmodernism.
47:40
Describing the film in 2005 as Tarantino's postmodern mascot masterpiece to date, David Walker wrote that it was marked by its playful reverence for the 1950s and its constantly teasing and often deferential references to other films.
47:54
He characterized its convoluted narrative technique as post modern tricksiness.
48:00
He called the film a terminally hip postmodern collage.
48:04
Foster Hirsch, though, found Pulp Fiction far from a masterpiece, calling it authoritative, influential and meaningless, set in a world that could exist only in the movies, that it was a succulent guilty pleasure, beautifully made junk food for cineasts.
48:21
And that was always Tarantino's point at Cannes.
48:24
When an audience member shouted an obscenity to him as he was going onto the stage to accept the Palme d'.
48:29
Or.
48:30
He shot her the finger and then said, why?
48:33
The prize was unexpected.
48:35
I don't make movies that bring people together.
48:38
I make movies that split people apart, Unquote.
48:42
There's plenty of actual, proper critical analysis on the Internet about Pulp Fiction, which, if you're interested, I highly recommend that you read.
48:50
I'm not going to go into all of that right here, but this is a movie that really I shouldn't like.
48:56
It has all the hallmarks of the movies that I tend to avoid.
48:59
Excessive violence, drugs, repeated mentions of the N word by white characters, which honestly just gives me the icky.
49:07
Tarantino wrote an excellent screenplay, but that just seems like lazy expletives to me.
49:13
And the rape scene goes to places that are extremely uncomfortable.
49:17
But the payoff one rapist getting sliced by a samurai sword and the other getting his genitals blown off are at least somewhat justified redemption for their heinous crimes.
49:28
I think the reason Pulp Fiction resonates isn't just the surface level.
49:31
It's a great looking movie and it turns heads and gets people talking.
49:36
It's very much the definition of rage bait in many ways.
49:39
But I think Samuel L.
49:40
Jackson summarizes it best.
49:42
He said, the people who are worth saving get saved.
49:47
The two robbers, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny get saved.
49:50
They get another chance.
49:51
That's their redemption.
49:53
Uma has the chance to die.
49:55
She didn't die.
49:56
Butch gets another chance.
49:58
Marsellus Wallace even gets another another chance.
50:01
And I guess that's the point.
50:03
It isn't just the quote unquote good guys who get another chance.
50:07
Some people somehow miss a barrage of bullets flying in their direction, and some people get blown away while coming out of the toilet.
50:14
Call it divine intervention or divine intention, Jules Winfield only really starts to believe the Bible passages he's been reciting for years after that happens.
50:24
And Vincent disagrees with Jules and that kind of seals his fate.
50:29
Two things then in this movie, redemption and salvation.
50:34
The non linear narrative can be confusing, but it demonstrates the circular nature of this movie and the characters within it.
50:41
And of course Tarantino's on screen staples, the Red Apple cigarettes, the Big Kahuna burgers featured in his other movies.
50:49
How he made this movie for just $8 million, I'll never know.
50:53
But he did.
50:54
And indie filmmaking was never the same again.
50:57
It redefined independent cinema, proved you didn't need a huge budget or big name stars to be high quality and put bums on seats.
51:06
But not only did it change the course of several actors careers, reinvigorating John Travolta's making stars of Uma Thurman and Samuel L.
51:13
Jackson, it also showed that a well written screenplay, something that challenged conventional storytelling with overlapping timelines and interwoven stories, was still engaging for viewers.
51:25
It would lead to Hollywood a listers following Bruce Willis and booking indie projects to boost their credibility.
51:32
It also led to countless imitations, inferior copycats, all trying to emulate Tarantino's effervescent screenplay.
51:40
And then there's the film bro.
51:42
Tarantino grew up being the movie guy and his rise led to a multitude of other movie guys becoming synonymous with the film bro.
51:50
Young men who took Pulp Fiction and claimed it as film bro cinema despite the fact it seems to be beloved by both genders pretty equally, Pulp Fiction became a cornerstone of contemporary cinema, quite possibly the coolest film of
52:05
the 90s, and whether you like it or not, ultimately one of the most influential.
52:11
Until the Matrix came along at least.
52:16
Thank you for listening.
52:16
As always, I would love to hear your thoughts on Pulp Fiction.
52:19
And thank you for your continued support of this podcast.
52:24
The Next Episode how about some more F bombs?
52:27
How about some actual bombs?
52:29
How about a white actor doing blackface?
52:33
In 2008, just after Robert Downey Jr became Iron man, he was Oscar nominated for his role as a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude in Ben Stiller's controversial 2008 satirical comedy Tropic Thunder, which hasn't aged well,
52:53
but not for the reason you think.
52:56
So join me next episode for the history and legacy of Tropic Thunder.
53:01
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53:24
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53:32
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53:40
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53:46
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53:50
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53:53
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54:16
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54:22
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54:31
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54:36
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54:38
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54:43
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54:48
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54:52
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54:54
And finally.
59:21
Bye.