1994

Pulp Fiction

DIR. QUENTIN TARANTINO

RONALD GRANT/MARY EVANS/EVERETT

Director Quentin Tarantino’s trademark cartoonish approach to violence is abundantly apparent in this scene with John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson.

It was the movie no one wanted, directed by a largely unproven geek, with only one bankable star—and it ended up a box-office smash that “affected film for 20 years,” David Koepp, coscreenwriter of Jurassic Park, tells LIFE. In fact, it fueled “nothing less than the reinvention of mainstream cinema,” critic Owen Gleiberman wrote in the pages of Entertainment Weekly.

The film, of course, was Pulp Fiction, and the director was Quentin Tarantino, who not long before had been an impoverished video-store clerk in suburban Los Angeles. In 1992, he had achieved some success as the writer-director of Reservoir Dogs, a modestly budgeted heist film. The movie garnered significant attention and, more important, provided Tarantino the $50,000 he needed to finance a trip to Amsterdam, where he intended to pen his next project.

Inspired by a lifetime of movie-watching and a clutch of crime novels, the 30-year-old would get up, walk around the city’s famed canals, “then drink like 12 cups of coffee, spending my entire morning writing,” he told Vanity Fair. Over three months, he filled a dozen school notebooks with his jottings, resulting in a first draft that resembled, according to friend and amanuensis Linda Chen, “the diaries of a madman.”

Every major studio passed on the project, and it wasn’t until Bruce Willis signed on that the film had anything resembling a bankable star. But Pulp Fiction became a triumph, turning the detritus of American pop culture into a giddy, twisty masterpiece composed of three interlocking stories: “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,” Tarantino said.

Reflecting both the modernist Cahiers du Cinéma and B-movie dreck, the film unified a series of opposites: violence and buffoonery, poetry and vulgarity, and—not least—authenticity and artifice. When actor Harvey Keitel probed the young auteur about the source of his work’s street-smart qualities—had he grown up on the mean streets, in a family steeped in crime?—Tarantino answered simply: “I watch movies.”

© MIRAMAX, COURTESY PHOTOFEST

Shall we dance? Uma Thurman and Travolta cut the rug in a film that mixed genre tropes with throw-away pop culture (Quarter Pounders, Fonzie) and giddily propulsive action—becoming, in the process, somehow greater than the sum of its parts.

RONALD GRANT/MARY EVANS/EVERETT

The tyro director on the set of the film no one wanted to make. “Every major studio passed,” producer Lawrence Bender told Vanity Fair. But the film went on to become a major critical and box-office hit. In the process, it resurrected the career of actor John Travolta, who was, at the time, “less than zero,” according to Tarantino’s agent.