Cinema Tarantino: The Making of Pulp Fiction

A script arrived at my house, the title page read Pulp Fiction, and I loved it,” says Danny DeVito. DeVito had a first-look deal with TriStar. “I had just spent a weekend at the White House, and there was a lot of talk that there was too much violence on the screen, and Hollywood should address it,” says former TriStar chairman Mike Medavoy. “So I read the script, which I liked a lot, and there was one scene that is really extremely violent, where they shoot someone in the back of the car and there are pieces of his brain splattered all over. The director and I had a discussion, and I said, ‘That is really over the top, and you’re going to get blowback.’ He said, ‘But it’s funny!’ It turned out he was right. The audience thought it was funny, and it did not get the blowback I thought it would get.” However, TriStar passed on making the movie.

“Every major studio passed,” says Lawrence Bender. Then, says DeVito, “I gave it to the king, Harvey Weinstein.”

It went through Richard Gladstein, who was now at Miramax. Weinstein, who had recently merged Miramax with Disney in an $80 million deal, was walking out of his L.A. office on his way to catch a plane for a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard when Gladstein handed him the script. “What is this, the fucking telephone book?,” Weinstein asked him when he saw that it was 159 pages, the normal being 115. He lugged the script to the plane, however.

“He called me two hours later and said, ‘The first scene is fucking brilliant. Does it stay this good?’ ” remembers Gladstein. He called again an hour later, having read to the point where the main character, the hit man Vincent Vega, is shot and killed. “Are you guys crazy?” he yelled. “You just killed off the main character in the middle of the movie!”

“Just keep reading,” said Gladstein. “And Harvey says, ‘Start negotiating!’ So I did, and he called back shortly thereafter and said, ‘Are you closed yet?’ I said, ‘I’m into it.’ Harvey said, ‘Hurry up! We’re making this movie.’ ”

Disney may have seemed an unlikely match for Pulp Fiction, but Weinstein had the final say. “As for [then chairman] Jeffrey Katzenberg, that was the first test of what I call autonomy with Jeffrey,” says Weinstein. “When I signed my contract with Disney selling Miramax, with us still running the company, I wrote the word ‘autonomy’ on every page, because I had heard that Jeffrey was notorious for not giving it. When I read the Pulp Fiction script, I went to him and said, ‘Even though I have the right to make this, I want to clear it with you.’ He read it and said, ‘Easy on the heroin scene, if you can, but that is one of the best scripts I have ever read. Even though you don’t need it, I am giving you my blessing.’ ”

The script was sent out to actors with the warning “If you show this to anybody, two guys from Jersey [Films] will come and break your legs.”

by Mark Seal, Vanity Fair |  Read more:

Photograph by Annie Leibovitz