The Quentin Tarantino script the studio thought was awful: “This is the worst screenplay”
The New Hollywood boom of the late 1960s and ‘70s saw filmmakers move away from the strict demands of studios, but by the time movies like Jaws and Star Wars had emerged, the movement accidentally gave way to studio dominance once again. The emergence of blockbusters changed Hollywood forever, with indie pictures subsequently falling by the wayside.
Yet, in the ‘90s, things began to change. There was a shift, and more indie filmmakers started to emerge, such as Steven Soderbergh and Richard Linklater. It was Quentin Tarantino, however, who made the most sizeable impact, stunning critics with his 1992 directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs.
The movie was violent and highly stylised, looking strikingly different from everything else that was being released at the time. Packed with humorous dialogue and darkly comedic moments, such as the infamous ear-cutting Stealers Wheel scene, Reservoir Dogs caused several people to walk out at Cannes Film Festival, including Wes Craven, but it was a landmark moment for independent cinema nonetheless. It proved that a small budget could still generate a profit, with Tarantino’s idiosyncratic style providing a refreshing break from Hollywood blockbusters.
Pulp Fiction was his next project, becoming one of the most iconic movies of the ‘90s, as well as being widely regarded as one of his finest achievements. Tarantino penned the screenplay with Roger Avery, leading them to win an Academy Award for their work. Yet, the highly successful movie (it grossed $213.9million against a budget of around $8million), almost failed to make it past the writing stage.
Avery and Tarantino had worked on the screenplay by writing lots of standalone scenes, which they pieced together to form the final film. Avery explained (via We Got This Covered), “No establishing shots… No wasted space, no traveling here and there, just no fat. It had to be the best material we had written to that point.” The pair were really proud of what they’d written, playing around with sequencing so that the movie would flow with a nonlinear structure.
“We laid it out and we started changing names and piecing it together. It underwent a number of passes and pretty soon it was what you see,” he added. Yet, when the final script was handed to “TriStar and a producer named Mike Medavoy,” it received some unexpected criticism. “We turned it in and they said ‘this is the worst screenplay that this film company has ever been handed. This is awful. It’s not funny. It makes no sense. This guy’s dead, he’s alive. What’s going on?’ They put it into immediate turnaround.”
Clearly, Medavoy wasn’t sold by the unconventional narrative, although this proved to be one of the film’s most compelling aspects. “I didn’t have huge expectations for this. I wasn’t thinking we were going to change film history with this movie. I just thought we put our hearts and souls into this thing, and it is what it is,” Avery continued. The pair ended up working with another production team, the now-defunct Weinstein Company.
Pulp Fiction was a massive success, and Medavoy reportedly regretted turning down the screenplay. Avery revealed, “I met with him later on and he actually said, ‘I made a mistake. I got to tell you, it was a weird time in my life, I didn’t really understand it. It just read very violent… And I was wrong.’”
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