The studio that refused to make the “unfilmable” ‘Pulp Fiction’: “This is the worst thing ever written”
The rose-tinted glasses of nostalgia and the lure of the legacy that Quentin Tarantino clearly craves so much have created the impression that the upstart auteur had the world at his feet after Reservoir Dogs, but it’s not like his script for Pulp Fiction became the subject of an industry-wide bidding war.
It’s worth remembering that the writer and director’s debut feature barely broke even at the box office in the United States, with Tarantino admitting it took American critics and audiences a little longer to cotton on to how great his first movie was, unlike their European counterparts, who immediately embraced it.
It was a minute before Reservoir Dogs evolved from a cult classic into a genuine one, by which point Tarantino had already started working on Pulp Fiction. Manoeuvring himself into a development deal, things fell apart at the very first hurdle when the boss of a major studio refused to fund the picture.
The filmmaker inked a contract with Danny DeVito’s Jersey Films, which had a first-look agreement with Sony’s TriStar Pictures. It was reported in February 1993 that Pulp Fiction was officially in pre-production, but by June, the project had been placed into turnaround when the boss, Mike Medavoy, said the story was “too demented” to turn into a film.
According to Roger Avary, nobody in the upper rungs of the TriStar ladder could wrap their heads around the nonlinear script, the constant jumping between characters, and the volume of violent scenes. “This is the worst thing ever written,” he remembers being told. “It makes no sense. Someone’s dead, and then they’re alive. It’s too long, violent, and unfilmable. So I thought, that’s that.”
Much like Harvey Keitel had become Tarantino’s guardian angel on Reservoir Dogs, DeVito stepped in to fill that role on Pulp Fiction. He believed in the movie from the second the script landed on his desk, and continued to champion the screenplay when Lawrence Bender took it to Miramax, who agreed to fund the production and give the director the creative freedom he desired.
As they say, the rest is history. Obviously, Tarantino got the last laugh when Pulp Fiction earned over $200 million at the box office, transformed the landscape of American cinema for the rest of the decade, and won “the worst thing ever written” an Academy Award for ‘Best Original Screenplay’.
To rub further salt into the wound, TriStar had a pretty shitty 1994. The company could have distributed one of the year’s best films had anyone in a position of power been able to understand, never mind comprehend the script, with its highest-grossing release of the year being Brad Pitt’s Legends of the Fall, which made almost $65 million less than Pulp Fiction despite costing over three times as much to make.
Some of TriStar’s other masterpieces that year included Chevy Chase’s Cops & Robbersons, the martial arts sequel 3 Ninjas Kick Back, and Steve Martin’s Mixed Nuts, with the flops heavily outweighing the hits. Medavoy’s loss was Miramax’s gain; if there were any justice in the world, he’d have been kicking himself.
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