How ‘Pulp Fiction’ sneakily avoided an NC-17 rating: “The audience is going to hate me”
As much as it is nice to believe that there are movies out there that were made without profit in mind, this thought is ultimately naive. Even indie films created on small budgets are typically released with the hopes that they’ll make a sizable profit because, really, that’s the only way to sustain further artistic endeavours. The film industry is one of the most lucrative in the world, hence why we are continuously seeing big-budget franchise movies released at a rapid rate – the more profit, the better.
So, even when it comes to lower-budget films, the pressures of selling enough cinema tickets and raking in a significant amount of money can affect the final product. Quentin Tarantino experienced this first hand when he made his second feature, Pulp Fiction, which became one of the biggest hits of the decade, grossing $213.9million despite the fact it was made with just $8million.
The film, which played with form in a non-linear way, didn’t fit the stereotypical Hollywood mould, yet it proved that audiences were interested in this kind of stylised film, and it subsequently changed the industry forever. Indie cinema wasn’t seen as the exclusive realm of high art and inaccessibility anymore – small budgets clearly had the potential to make huge monetary gains if they were used correctly, and so we saw the rise of ‘Indiewood’.
But how did Pulp Fiction make so much money? Besides the fact that it’s a great film, word of mouth and advertising would’ve had people intrigued; it was also important to the producers that they didn’t miss out on a huge potential market – teenagers. With many violent moments in the film, it wasn’t a surprise that it seemed to be headed for an NC-17 rating, which would prevent children under 17 from seeing it at the cinema.
That’s a lot of missed ticket sales, though, especially for a film like Pulp Fiction, which certainly had the gritty, humorous, and trendy appeal to attract a big group of teens. So, the producers ensured that the movie would get an R rating instead, allowing teenagers to be accompanied by adults. To do this, however, they had to get creative, because Tarantino wasn’t about to cut out any violent scenes for the sake of it.
Phil LaMarr, who played Marvin in Pulp Fiction, told Variety about his character’s brutal death, which was a vital scene in ensuring the correct age rating. “Originally, Marvin was supposed to get shot twice: once in the throat, and then they go, ‘Damn, we’ve got to put him out of his misery,’ and then Vincent kills the kid. But John [Travolta] said, ‘If I kill this guy on purpose, the audience is going to hate me.’”
“And so they changed it to just the one accidental shot. The other choice was that they built a bust of me that was rigged to shoot tons of brain and blood onto the back window, though Quentin never planned for that to be in the final cut. He said, ‘We’re going to show this young Black kid getting his brains blown out for the ratings people to give them some things that you can take out, so you can leave in some other things.’ So if they hadn’t blown out my brains, they would’ve had to cut out the Gimp.”
So there you have it. The infamous gimp sequence might not have made it into the movie if Tarantino hadn’t amended Marvin’s death, leaving us with one of the movie’s most unforgettable scenes.
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