Facts About Quentin Tarantino and Pulp Fiction
In celebration of Pulp Fiction's 20th birthday, we have compiled a list of facts about the movie and it's incredibly talented mastermind, Quentin Tarantino
1. Connie Tarantino (Tarantino’s mother) insisted that the only film she ever had to take her son out of was Disney’s Bambi; young Tarantino couldn’t handle Bambi’s mother dying.
2. Tarantino’s first brush with crime came around the time he was caught shoplifting a paperback of The Switch, the latest hard boiled action/comedy from novelist Elmore Leonard. He was nabbed by a store detective and taken home in handcuffs. That novel’s central characters were Ordell Robbie and Louis Gara, whom Leonard would write into another novel, Rum Punch— a novel Tarantino would adapt into his third film, Jackie Brown.
3. Although Tarantino has gone on record to say he has never seen Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers, of which was originally written by Tarantino then later re-written by Stone, Tarantino did pocket a healthy chunk of change for his participation in writing the original screenplay. He sold his option on that original screenplay to two film producers, Don Murphy and Jane Hamster, for $100,000— which he then used to buy the cherry-red Malibu that John Travolta drives in Pulp Fiction.
4. Tarantino has said in interviews that Mario Bava’s cult classic, Black Sabbath, is owed a certain amount of praise for helping Tarantino construct the tree-part structure to his Pulp Fiction script. Tarantino made it his mission to pay the film a tribute and named a brand of heroin used in Pulp Fiction after Mario Bava. This can be seen in the Lance and Vincent bedroom scene.
5. Pulp Fiction’s main boxing bout is Wilson versus Coolidge— a match with a remarkably presidential ring, though Calvin Coolidge and Woodrow Wilson never faced each other in an election. The undercard match is Vossler versus Martinez, a reference to Tarantino’s Video Archives co-workers, whose roommate fights were legendary at the store.
6. When the Pulp Fiction script was going out to actors, it came with a warning; “If you show this to anybody, two guys from Jersey Films will come and break your legs.”
7. A peculiar footnote about the casting of Pulp Fiction's leading couple (John Travolta and Uma Thurman) at Jackrabbit Slim’s; they refer to each other as ‘cowboy and ‘cowgirl.’ Travolta’s last pre-Look Who’s Talking hit was Urban Cowboy; Thurman had just starred in Gus Van Sant’s film version of Even Cowgirl’s Get the Blues.
8. While shooting Mia’s (Uma Thurman) description of her ill-fated TV series, Fox Force Five, Tarantino got the idea of another vehicle for Thurman, an action film centered on a similar group of deadly women. He wrote thirty pages, then put it away for several years. One day they returned to the project and it became Kill Bill.
9. At the wrap party for Pulp Fiction, Travolta and Walken— an eccentric dancer in his own right, as seen in Pennies from Heaven and Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice” music video— did some dancing and prompted someone to suggest they should do a musical. A decade later, they danced together as husband and wife in Hairspray.
10. Miramax had a deal with Disney (Disney owned Miramax) which granted them autonomy to make whatever movies they wanted to make, without Disney’s approval, provided they stayed within certain boundaries like budget and MPAA rating. Harvey Weinstein sent Disney studio executive Jeffrey Katzenberg a copy of the finished Pulp Fiction screenplay to which Katazenberg said; “Holy shit, this fucking thing. It’s brilliantly written, but you’re out of your mind.” Tarantino was less concerned about making his film under the Disney banner; “I think Walt would’ve probably got a big kick out of it.”
