“PULP (pulp) n. 1. A soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter.

2. A magazine or book, containing lurid subject matter and being characteristically printed on rough, unfinished paper.”

—QUENTIN TARANTINO, ROGER AVARY
Preface to Pulp Fiction

It was the middle of the afternoon on New Year’s Eve day of 1989 when I stuffed the manuscript of Selling a Screenplay into a large FedEx envelope, got into my car and drove down to the post office to send it off to New York. I knew my editor wouldn’t read it until after the holidays, but I didn’t care. The book was finished. I could usher in the New Year with a sense of satisfaction and relief.

Selling a Screenplay seemed like the culmination of the eighties for me. I had spent more than two years writing the book, had watched it grow and evolve through several permutations before it reached its final form, and I was very pleased with the result. My objective was to give a voice to the buyer, “the other side of the desk.”

In Hollywood, everyone is either a buyer or a seller. What does the buyer look for? When a writer writes a screenplay, he or she has to sell it to an agent. The agent has to sell it to a production company or studio. Then the executive has to sell it to his or her boss. The boss then has to sell it to upper management, the head of the studio. If it’s a large-budget movie, the studio head has to sell it to the CEO, who then has to sell it to the board. And so on and so on. That’s just the way it works.

I presented the buyer’s point of view because I wanted to illustrate the process that all pitches go through before a penny is spent in buying, optioning or developing a screenplay. I went all over Hollywood, interviewing readers, producers, executives and heads of studios. In addition, I included interviews with writers Oliver Stone, Alvin Sargent, Anna Hamilton Phelan, James L. Brooks, Douglas Day Stewart, Earl Wallace, Bill Kelley and Dan Petrie Jr., who shared their screenwriting process and confided how some of their scripts sometimes had to wait ten or more years before they got the green light for production.

When I returned home from the post office, I was surprised to find a message from my editor on the answering machine. He wished me a happy New Year and hoped I had the same success with Selling a Screenplay that I’d had with The Screenwriter’s Work-book.

Published in 1984, The Screenwriter’s Workbook was received with great enthusiasm and popularity and went into three printings within the first year. Colleges and universities around the country picked it up and started using it as a text in their creative writing classes. The success of the book resulted in my traveling extensively, both in the U.S. and foreign countries.

Meanwhile, Sherwood Oaks was finding it difficult to compete with major colleges and universities, who were now offering their own continuing education courses in film, and was in the process of shutting down. During this time, many people asked if I would be willing to teach writing workshops in their homes. So, once or twice a week, I started teaching intimate workshops for ten or twelve students. I carried a small whiteboard under my arm, propped it up against a chair in the living room and started guiding people through the process of writing a screenplay.

In this way I taught many professional writers, directors, development people, advertising executives, actors, attorneys, housewives, doctors, physicists, set designers and production managers, some famous, some not so famous. I was invited to teach a group of elite journalists, including the editors of the two major Los Angeles newspapers and feature writers for several prominent national magazines.

During the middle to late eighties, I spent several years participating as a final judge in the prestigious Nissan screenwriting competition and was invited to become a member of the prominent Filmic Writing Advisory Board at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema/Television, then joined the school’s film faculty. I taught, gave lectures and workshops at UCLA and at UC Berkeley, Santa Barbara, Davis and San Diego and was invited as guest lecturer to Harvard, Stanford, NYU, Columbia and several other prominent universities. I spent the better part of two years traveling to various cities on weekends, crisscrossing the country every few weeks under the auspices of the American Film Institute. I became an adviser to the NEA in Washington, reading grants and proposals, and had been elected to chair the Academic Liaison Committee at the Writers Guild of America West, where I had the opportunity of introducing several programs which are still functioning today.

I read thousands of screenplays and was asked to be an expert legal witness for several copyright infringement cases for clients like Steven Spielberg, Universal Pictures, United Artists, Sylvester Stallone and many, many other individuals and companies. I was a screenwriting consultant for the entire Animation Department at Disney, working on Oliver! and The Little Mermaid, gave special courses for the story departments at 20th Century Fox and Universal Pictures, was a screenplay consultant to Tri-Star Pictures and was called in as a consultant on several major films, including Wall Street, White Palace, Broadcast News and others.

During the eighties, I traveled extensively throughout Europe presenting workshops, seminars and lectures. Norway, then Brussels, had only been the beginning. From there it was on to Toronto, Edmonton and Montreal, then Berlin, Zurich, Paris, Amsterdam, Rome, back again to Oslo, Madrid, Berlin and several times London. I started using new teaching films; instead of Chinatown I used Witness (Earl Wallace, Bill Kelley); The Big Easy (Dan Petrie Jr.); Broadcast News (James L. Brooks); Gorillas in the Mist, written by one of my students, Anna Hamilton Phelan; and Ordinary People (Alvin Sargent).

As the dawn of the nineties approached I was getting burned out from the constant traveling. Once again, I started feeling that the end of one thing is always the beginning of something else. I thought about writing a new book, but had no clear vision of it.

As I wondered what the new decade might have in store for me, I attended a Writers Guild screening of a newly released film called Dances With Wolves, written by Michael Blake and directed by Kevin Costner. I loved it; the epic, visual sweep of the story reminded me of classic westerns like Red River and The Searchers. Dances With Wolves was a story about a man on a spiritual quest, and I was struck by its originality and point of view. For me, the film poignantly captured the “passing of the way,” a change of life in which the old gives rise to the new. The Native Americans were richly portrayed, unlike the stereotypical white soldiers, and expressed a sacred worldview affirming the relationship between all living things, what modern physicists now term the Gaia Principle. It was unlike any western I had ever seen. Yes, it said, we are one planet, one world.

A few weeks later, I was conducting a workshop in Vienna and found myself talking about the film. I didn’t remember it in all its detail, but what had moved me so much was the spiritual dynamic it expressed. It captured the Native American belief that all life is sacred, all life is related: the trees, the animals, the stones, the earth and the sky. The earth is just one giant, wondrous, living organism, and every living thing on this planet is connected to the life force. We are all the same, and we must honor and respect ourselves and each other, whether human, creatures and plants, or things.

It was around this time that I had a vague notion about writing a book analyzing the relationship between the screenplay and the movie. The more I thought about it, the more attracted I became to the idea. I could choose three or four films, analyze them in terms of character and action, include excerpts from the screenplays and add interviews with the screenwriters. I could show the distinctions between what’s on the page and what’s on the screen and create the kind of a book that I personally would like to read.

After seeing Dances With Wolves, I felt the idea had a lot of merit, but I needed some other films to analyze and write about. I started viewing movies with the purpose of using them in the book.

A short time later, I saw Terminator 2: Judgment Day (James Cameron, William Wisher). Putting it mildly, the film was a revelation; it absolutely blew me away. As I sat perched on the edge of my seat, totally mesmerized by the visual pyrotechnics, I knew this movie was the future. I had seen Terminator years earlier, and thought the idea behind the film was incredible, but nothing prepared me for what I was now seeing on the screen.

If I asked myself what the future of film would look like in terms of special effects and computer technology, it would be Terminator 2. Special effects fused into an active, dynamic story line, expanding and heightening the moviegoing experience. When I watched the T-1000 morph out of the linoleum tile into the holographic form of the night watchman, I was knocked breathless, totally awestruck by what I was seeing.

I walked out of the film with my pulse pounding and images flooding my mind. I couldn’t get the movie out of my head. I was emotionally struck by the Terminator’s sacrificing his “life” at the end. When the Terminator, a cyborg, a robot, sacrifices his life for the good of humankind, I thought about Joseph Campbell’s statement that a hero “is someone who has given his or her life to something bigger than oneself.” And, in the very last shot, we hear Sarah Conner (Linda Hamilton) telling us in a voice-over narration, “If a machine can learn the value of a human life, then maybe we can, too.” All this in a shoot-’em-up action movie.

Was there some kind of new direction in film emerging? Some kind of shift in our collective unconscious, a new trend, in terms of themes and ideas? For days, I was caught in swirling thoughts of a new evolutionary force that might be emerging in Hollywood. When I told my editor in New York about it, and added that I wanted to base my next book on an in-depth analysis of modern screenplays like Dances With Wolves and Terminator 2, he said he liked the idea very much and suggested I add two more films. Did I have any ideas? I mentioned two movies that were popular at the time, but which I hadn’t seen: Thelma & Louise (Callie Khouri), and Silence of the Lambs (Ted Tally). My editor liked the idea well enough to tell me to just go ahead and start writing.

I chose those two films for a couple of reasons. The first was that I had followed the turbulent and stormy tribulations of MGM and the Italian financier who was accused of defrauding the studio. Thelma & Louise had been caught in the legal struggle that ensued, but when it finally reached the screens it was an instant hit; everyone, it seemed, had an opinion about it. Second, Silence of the Lambs had been released a few months earlier, and the character of Hannibal Lecter was turning out to be the hot topic on late-night TV. I felt that gave both films a lot of merit. And all four movies had been released within six months of each other, in ‘90 and ‘91, right at the beginning of the new decade. I found that quite interesting.

Looking more closely at the four films, I saw they reflected, at least from my point of view, four different aspects of movies in the nineties. Thelma & Louise represented a new, more complex form of the “buddy movie.” In this original screenplay, the two main characters were women, which was a significant departure. More important, I found that this was only the outer shell of the story line; the heart of the movie was the journey to insight and self-discovery both women took. Silence of the Lambs was the absolute horror movie. What made it so horrific was that Hannibal Lecter could easily have been my next-door neighbor. An adaptation from a Thomas Harris novel, Ted Tally’s screenplay was extraordinary. Dances With Wolves was the author’s adaptation from his own novel, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day was the sequel to an original screenplay that had taken more than seven years to get made.

As I was preparing the book I began to see four very different themes emerge. Dances With Wolves had a spiritual theme woven throughout the journey of John Dunbar’s search for himself; Thelma & Louise reflected the journey of self-discovery and enlightenment; Silence of the Lambs, a story about letting go of the past, took the horror film to a new level; and Terminator 2: Judgment Day was, I felt, both prophetic and revolutionary in terms of expanding the technology of film.

To my mind, James Cameron single-handedly oversaw the creation of the new “morphing” computer technology for Terminator 2: Judgment Day. And if we hadn’t had T2, we wouldn’t have had the technology to create Jurassic Park, Forrest Gump, Toy Story or even Titanic.

For each of these four movies, I illustrated these themes as I analyzed the screenplay in relation to the movie, augmented by the writers’ perspectives in their candid and revealing interviews. The result was Four Screenplays. Published in the fall of 1994, it was extremely well received, and as of this writing is being used as a text in history, English and philosophy courses in colleges around the country, and has been made available in several different languages.

Shortly after the publication of the book, I was invited to speak at a screenwriting seminar at the Mill Valley Film Festival in California. Mill Valley has a very special place in my heart because it was there, after Screenplay was first published, that I conducted my very first two-day screenwriting seminar, which I called “The Screenwriter’s Workshop.”

Mill Valley is a dedicated, intimate and avant-garde film festival screening a variety of films that are individual in taste, style and vision. During the morning presentation, I spoke about the journey of self-discovery in Thelma & Louise, the technological advancement of computer graphics in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the spiritual themes of Dances With Wolves and the use of flashbacks in Silence of the Lambs. Along the way I incorporated some of Joseph Campbell’s ideas and the new cinematic themes I saw taking hold in the nineties. During my talk I casually mentioned that from my perspective, we were in the middle of a revolution—at which point someone raised his hand and asked if I included Pulp Fiction as a part of that revolution.

I had a lot of mixed feelings about Pulp Fiction. When I had first seen it a few months earlier it was storming across the country, creating an avalanche of opinion. People either loved it or hated it. When I walked out of the screening, I was one of those who hated it. I felt it was way too long, had much too much gratuitous violence and was too talky. Basically, I thought, it was a B movie— shallow, exploitative, the epitome of everything I don’t like in the movies. Influential maybe, significant maybe, but in no way revolutionary, at least as I was defining the term.

When I asked the person what he liked about the film he replied that it represented a totally new structure and that he was curious to hear my opinion. Now, I had heard this before; several people had confronted me with the film’s structure and “dared” me to analyze it in terms of the Paradigm. As far as everybody was concerned it seemed like Pulp Fiction was it—innovative in thought, concept and execution, everything a revolutionary film should be.

I replied that Pulp Fiction might be influential and striking in form, but to my mind it was a still a B movie, and because of that I would not classify it as revolutionary. After I finished the seminar and was preparing to leave, I was approached by a man who was intrigued by my evaluation of Pulp Fiction and invited me to be a guest on the local National Public Radio station.

The next day at the NPR station, the interviewer asked me what kind of an impact I thought Pulp Fiction might have on young, emerging filmmakers. Was it a landmark film? It was a huge topic, to be sure, and I tried to answer it by saying Pulp Fiction seemed to spark a new awareness in the filmgoer’s consciousness. Yes, I added, we were riding a wave of change, and while technology would definitely affect the movies, the real “revolution” was going to manifest itself more in terms of form than content—that is, what you show and how you show it. Pulp Fiction, I said, was definitely a part of that.

“Why?” he asked. I explained that Hollywood was in a period of change comparable to the late twenties when sound was introduced. At that time, through audiences’ desire to hear actors “speak,” the camera was imprisoned inside a refrigerator, and as a result we lost all the movement and fluidity of the camera we had attained during the Silent Era. Scenes had to be staged around the microphone. The actors entered the camera’s frame, spoke their lines and exited from the camera’s frame; the actors, the writers, the cameramen, became the prisoners of sound.

The screenwriters of the Silent Era did not know much about writing dialogue; their forte was telling stories with pictures, so Hollywood brought in Broadway playwrights to help them tell their stories in words, not pictures. That’s a theme F. Scott Fitzgerald touches on in his final novel, The Last Tycoon. Since that time, we’ve remained in a state of technological flux: from black and white to Technicolor, standard screen size to CinemaScope, 35mm to 70mm—and now, computer graphics and digital technology. It’s the screenwriters who have really become the artisans of change, because they must learn to adapt this new hi-tech awareness to their screenplays.

“What do you think makes Pulp Fiction so influential?” the interviewer asked. I told him I had asked myself that same question many times and had no real answer. I concluded the interview by saying Pulp Fiction is definitely an influential film, and may even be revolutionary, and left it at that. Because the movie was such a hot topic of conversation, I thought I needed to look at it more closely.

When I returned home from Mill Valley, I got ahold of the screenplay. When I opened it, I read on the title page that Pulp Fiction was really “three stories … about one story.” I turned the page and read two dictionary definitions of Pulp: “A soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter,” and “A magazine or book containing lurid subject matter and being characteristically printed on rough, unfinished paper.” That’s certainly an accurate description of the film. But on the third page, I was surprised to find a Table of Contents. That was odd, I thought; who writes a Table of Contents for a screenplay? I saw that the film was broken down into five individual parts: Part I was the Prologue; Part II, Vincent Vega and Marcellus Wallace’s Wife; Part III, The Gold Watch; Part IV, The Bonnie Situation; and Part V, the Epilogue.

As I studied the script, I saw that all three stories bounce off the inciting incident of Jules and Vinnie retrieving Marcellus Wallace’s briefcase from the four kids. This one incident became the hub of all three stories, and I noticed that each story is structured as a whole, in linear fashion; it starts at the beginning of the action, goes into the middle, then proceeds to the end. Each section is like a short story, presented from a different character’s point of view.

I remembered Henry James’s literary question: What is character but the determination of incident? And what is incident but the illumination of character? If this key incident is the hub of the story, as I now understood it, then everything in the film, whether actions, reactions, thoughts, memories or flashbacks, is tethered to this one incident.

Suddenly, it all made sense. Understanding that Pulp Fiction is “three stories about one story” allowed me to see the film as one unified whole. The movie is three stories surrounded by a prologue and epilogue, what screenwriters call a “bookend” technique, as in The Bridges of Madison County (Richard LaGravenese), Sunset Boulevard or Saving Private Ryan (Robert Rodat).

Now I began to see how the film was put together. The Prologue sets up Pumpkin and Honey Bunny (Tim Roth and Amanda Plummer) in a coffee shop discussing various types of small-time robbery. When they finish their meal, they pull their guns and rob the place. The film freezes and we cut to the main titles. Then we cut into the middle of a conversation between Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) and Vinnie (John Travolta), who are having an enlightening discussion about the relative merits of a Big Mac here and abroad.

That sets up the entire film and tells us everything we need to know: the two men are killers working for Marcellus Wallace (Ving Rhames); their job, their dramatic need, is to retrieve the briefcase. That’s the true beginning of the story. In Part I, Jules and Vinnie arrive, state their position and kill the three guys, and it’s only by the grace of God they’re not killed themselves. Vinnie takes Mia (Uma Thurman) out to dinner, and after she almost accidentally overdoses, they say good night. Part II is about Butch (Bruce Willis) and his Gold Watch and what happens when he wins the fight instead of losing it as he had agreed to do. Part III deals with cleaning up Marvin’s remains, which are splattered all over the car, a continuation of Part I. That’s followed by the Epilogue, in which Jules talks about his transformation and the significance of Divine Intervention and then Pumpkin and Honey Bunny resume the holdup that began the film in the Prologue.

It became crystal clear to me that no matter what kind of story is being told, whether told in a straight line or not, the story requirements remain the same. No matter what the form of the film, whether linear or nonlinear, there is always going to be a beginning, a middle and an end. A film like Courage Under Fire (Patrick Sheane Duncan), for example, or Groundhog Day (Danny Rubin, Harold Ramis), or The Usual Suspects (Chrisopher McQuarrie), or The English Patient, or Sliding Doors (Peter Howitt) are all structured around a specific, inciting incident; only when that incident is shown does the story line split off into different directions. To build a nonlinear movie means to define the parts, then structure each part from beginning to end, at which point the screenwriter can put them in any order he or she desires.

I saw that Pulp Fiction was indeed a new departure, a kind of beacon leading us into the future, just like Gatsby’s green light, because it presents a new way of looking at things. It’s as revolutionary in its own way as Terminator 2: Judgment Day was.

A few months later, I was in Mexico City conducting a screen-writing workshop for the Mexican government when I was invited to see a new film by the noted Mexican director Jorge Fons called El Callejón de los Milagros (Midaq Alley) with Salma Hayek, in one of her first major film roles before she became an international star. Released a short time after Pulp Fiction, this film seemed more novelistic than cinematic. There were four stories in the film, each one revolving around four or five different characters, all living, working and loving on the same street and linked by an incident that shatters a father-son relationship. This incident affects all the characters in some way, and is woven into the film’s structure as characters and events sometimes fold back on themselves novelistically. The film, though high in melodrama, is unique, striking, in terms of concept and execution.

Comparing these two films, Pulp Fiction and El Callejón de los Milagros, so different in context and culture, yet so similar in form and execution, I began to understand the many different ways a story can be told. When I saw The English Patient I liked it very much. I didn’t think it was mere coincidence that all these films had emerged at the same time. I thought there might be something larger going on, a new consciousness and awareness in approaching the craft of screenwriting. When I read the screenplay of The English Patient I saw there were really two stories entwined between time past and time present. One story, the past, has Almásy (Ralph Fiennes) and Katherine (Kristin Scott Thomas) meeting and falling in love, and is shown through the memories and flashpresent sequences of the English Patient recalling his memories in present time. Even though the end is the beginning, and the beginning is the end, the two stories move forward in a linear fashion; it’s through the brilliant transitions of sight, sound and image that the movie moves so fluidly, illuminating both past and present in an emotional movie experience.

Using this new awareness, I started having my students focus and define the key incident of their stories, then showed them how to fuse the characters and the events into a structural whole. It didn’t matter whether it was a linear or nonlinear story line; I wanted my students to understand that screenplay structure is not something embedded in concrete, but flexible, like a tree that bends in the wind but doesn’t break. This would allow their stories to be told more visually, with more action than explanation.

To my mind, this is a shift in the craft of screenwriting, because it wasn’t too long ago that movie characters needed to explain who they were, what their background was and what their motivation or purpose was. Things were explained through the characters’ dialogue. But as a new generation grew up having watched television, it became pretty obvious that their visual sense had been heightened; their stories became more visual, unfolding with clarity and simplicity. It was a clear sign of evolution at work: Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Zemeckis, James Cameron, Terry Malick, Frank Darabont and others had discovered that words of explanation held back the visual line and forward thrust of the visual action.

I saw this same evolutionary force happening after Pulp Fiction; the style and personality of Tarantino’s voice and vision was beginning to influence filmmakers around the world. The more I traveled, conducting workshops and seeing many different films, the more I understood I had acquired a new way of understanding movies, thanks to Pulp Fiction.

As the decade came to a close, I found the influence of Pulp Fiction to be a major inspiration for filmmakers, not only in Hollywood, but also in England, Germany, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico and other countries. This new generation of moviemakers is exploring the innovative ground of cinematic territory and is “pushing the envelope” in terms of film form. But no matter how fragmented these artists’ stories may be, they follow the same model: beginning, middle and end. Only when the key incident or situation is set up does the story line splinter into different directions, crosscutting between time past and time present.

I think the German film Run Lola Run, written and directed by Tom Tykwer, is heavily influenced by Pulp Fiction. Fusing animation and special effects into what I call a “one-line movie,” the film is not so much a story as an idea, one action told with three different possibilities. Tykwer said in an interview, “Everyone has experienced the feeling of wishing he or she could turn the clock back just twenty minutes and do something differently. You can actually do that in a film.” And that’s the governing principle behind this movie.

The film tells three stories distinguished by the different choices the main character makes. Lola has twenty minutes to find a bag containing $100,000 that her criminal boyfriend left on the subway; otherwise he’s going to be killed. She can’t find the bag, so she sets out to raise $100,000. Three different realities are dramatized. In the first one, she runs to her unsympathetic father, who works in a bank, and asks for the money. He says no. She decides to rob the bank, and somehow manages to get away with it, only to be shot and killed by a nervous policeman. That solution is unacceptable.

The second story re-creates the first, except she’s delayed by a minute or so, and thus has a different choice to make in order to obtain the money. This time she manages to get the money, but in the end her boyfriend is killed. This, too, is unacceptable, so the film creates a third reality, and this time, after she receives the phone call from her boyfriend, Lola goes to the casino, wins $100,000, makes it to their rendezvous in time, delivers the money safely and they live “happily ever after.”

The film moves like the speed of light. Tykwer says, “You can only beat time in movies. In reality, we all know we’re victims of time—it’s going on, going on, going on, and we can’t stop it. Every second we come closer to our own death.” Lola manages to beat time only “with the weapon of the movies,” he says. Which brings me back to the point that we’re in the middle of a cinematic revolution, a revolution accentuated not only by technology but by form.

I look at the movies as an indication of where we are as a society, and since we’re a culture of moviegoers, the times are certainly changing. The way filmmakers are telling their stories today is evolving right in front of our eyes. Novelistic in structure, either linear or nonlinear in form, function and design, the movies are pushing all boundaries of visual storytelling. Whether shot digitally or on tape, whether shown in theaters, on television or on the Internet, movies are forging new pathways, leading to an expanded visual experience heralding the sounds and sights of new voices and new visions.

Which is what going to the movies is all about.