Rebels on the Backlot (14 page)

At an exclusive luncheon at the Hôtel du Cap down the coast, Tarantino dazzled the critics with his glib mix of trash talk, middlebrow manners, and cinematic erudition. (Typical Tarantino patter on movies: “Any time you try to get across a big idea, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. First you need to make a good movie. And in the process, if there’s something in it that comes across, that’s great. And it shouldn’t be this big idea. It should be a small idea, from which everyone can get something different.” Tarantino on food: “Breakfast cereal is one of my favorite foods, because it’s so easy to fix and it tastes so incredibly great. Cap’n Crunch is, of course, the crème de la crème.”)

The night before the official screening, Bender and Tarantino had gone to the festival palace to run the movie and discovered
that in one of the reels, the lips were out of sync with the dialogue for two full minutes. Tarantino had missed it during postproduction; it was too late to do anything about it. As the big moment approached on Saturday night, Cannes’s particular form of hysteria was at a fever pitch. Huge crowds lined the Croisette all the way from the Carlton, where Tarantino was staying, to the festival palace a half mile away.

Harvey Weinstein gathered the cast to have a drink at the Carlton and then everyone piled into a line of limousines to drive to the screening. It looked like a presidential motorcade. Tarantino and Bender had gone out and bought Armani tuxedos for the occasion. As the director, producer, and moguls stepped from the limousines with Willis, Travolta, Jackson, Thurman, and the rest of the entourage, they were greeted by a screaming wall of fans and an army of paparazzi. “JOHN!” “BRUCE!” “QUENTIN!” The bodyguards shoved against the phalanx of cameras and the wild-eyed crowd. Tarantino thought, “This is what it’s like to be a rock star.” Five minutes into the screening the audience began to react, shouting, yelling. “It was like New Cinema had arrived,” said Weinstein. “Like a truck had pulled up and delivered it.”

The prescreening pandemonium was to be expected, perhaps, but even Tarantino was amazed when he emerged from the screening at midnight. From the landing of the modernist, bunkerlike palace, he could see that the huge crowd was still waiting for him three hours after he’d gone into the building. Exultant, he stood up among the floodlights on the edge of the stairs and a raucous cheer went up. The director saluted his new acolytes like the odd movie hero-geek he had become.

Miramax continued to oil the buzz machine. They worried about the influential Maslin’s review, and had timed showing her the movie so they could bury the review if it was negative. They needn’t have worried. It turned out to be the sort of copy you feature on posters:
“Pulp Fiction
remains bracingly off-kilter as it mixes lurid, outrageous elements with sweetly appealing ones, to the point where the viewer never has the faintest idea what to expect,” she wrote near the end of the festival. “If that sounds random, it
isn’t: Mr. Tarantino has also devised a graceful circular structure that sustains his film’s bold ambitions and two-and-a-half-hour running time. The storytelling is solid and the time flies.” Harvey Weinstein was not about to let this go to waste. He found out what hotel rooms the members of the Cannes jury were staying in and slipped a copy of Maslin’s movie review under their doors just before they went to vote.

Five days later,
Pulp Fiction
won the Palme d’Or. Festival director Gilles Jacob had hinted at this when he told Harvey Weinstein to make sure he came to the closing ceremony (most of the festivalgoers clear out before the last day). Clint Eastwood headed the jury that year, and when Bender ran into Eastwood’s then girlfriend, Frances Fisher, on the way into the ceremony, she whispered, “Congratulations, I’m really happy for you.” But as the awards progressed,
Pulp Fiction
won nothing—not Best Director, not Best Actor—and the group’s spirits sank. They knew that the violence and the vulgar language—constant use of the “n” word, constant use of the “f” word—had not pleased some of the more conservative members of the audience. Perhaps the jury didn’t get the film. But when the final award was announced, it was
Pulp Fiction
after all. As Tarantino stood at the podium to accept, a woman in the audience let loose. She booed loudly and shouted,
“Pulp Fiction
is shit! Kieslowski! Kieslowski!” The Polish director Krzystof Kieslowski also had a film in competition. In true bad-boy fashion, Tarantino—on live television—gave her the finger.

W
HILE
Q
UENTIN WAS BUSY FENDING OFF THE PAPARAZZI AND
starlets at the festival palace in Cannes, twenty-three-year-old Paul Thomas Anderson was nursing twenty-dollar drinks at the bar of the Carlton, taking in the spectacle with something very much like envy. He was a mere tourist at Cannes, not even in the humble ranks Tarantino had been in two years before when he brought
Reservoir Dogs
to the festival. But he was a tourist with a plan. Anderson had flown out from Los Angeles at the suggestion of his agent, John Lesher, who let the young Anderson sleep on the couch in his suite.

Anderson had no particular reason to be at Cannes, but he did have a script called
Sydney
(which would later be
Hard Eight).
He had worked on it at the Filmmakers Lab in Park City, Utah, and had every intention of getting it made. Those who met him at Cannes remember an intense young man on the hustle, intent on meeting every producer and rainmaker he could, always with a cocktail and cigarette in his hand. Amid the Tarantino-mania, Anderson was as enamored of the hot young director as anyone else.

But it wasn’t
Pulp Fiction
that captured his imagination; it was another movie that premiered at Cannes,
Sleep with Me
, in which Tarantino had a memorable cameo. In the film Tarantino gives a hilarious, unhinged interpretation of the homosexual subtext of
Top Gun
, that quintessential movie of the 1980s, and Anderson was electrified by it. Tarantino plays a character named Sid who tells a partygoer: “Top
Gun
is fucking great. What is
Top Gun?
You think it’s a story about a bunch of fighter pilots…. It is a story about a man’s struggle with his own homosexuality. It is! That is what
Top Gun
is about, man. You’ve got Maverick, all right? He’s on the edge, man. He’s right on the fucking line, all right? And you’ve got Iceman, and all his crew. They’re gay, they represent the gay man, all right? And they’re saying, go, go the gay way, go the gay way. He could go both ways.”

Tarantino ad-libbed the monologue in the film—in fact the script said: “Quentin does his thing.” But according to Avary, “his thing” had been dreamt up by Avary, and it was a riff that the two friends constantly bantered back and forth. Yet again Quentin had appropriated another good idea from his friend.

Nonetheless, the impression made on Anderson would be lasting. Later he would credit Tarantino’s success with allowing his own films to get made, and Tarantino became one of his closest friends, guiding him in the byways of overnight success.

B
EFORE THE
C
ANNES FESTIVAL
, M
IRAMAX HAD THOUGHT
they had a cool little movie on their hands with
Pulp Fiction.
They
planned to release it in the summer of 1994, and if things went well they hoped they’d take in perhaps $30 million at the box office.

Now all those bets were off. Harvey Weinstein had wanted to release the film in August as an action movie at the end of the summer season. But according to Weinstein, it was his brother, Bob, who thought the movie had a shot at a more high-toned audience than the popcorn summer crowd. He suggested releasing the movie at the prestigious New York Film Festival, in September. After that they would take the movie into a wide release.

This was a big risk for Miramax. Until then the company had released most of its movies with shoestring budgets, placing them in a handful of theaters and ramping up slowly if they did well. Miramax had not been in the business of conducting major national movie releases:
Pulp Fiction
would be the first. Backed by a pricey marketing campaign and supported by a premiere at the prestigious New York Film Festival, the studio released the movie on one thousand two hundred screens simultaneously in October 1994. “On the one hand it was scary beyond belief,” said Mark Gill, then head of marketing at Miramax. “You didn’t know if you could take a movie like that and open it. It looked so different from everything else that was out there.” Critics liked the film, but would mass audiences? On the other hand, he noted, “it already had an enormous reputation.”

Gill needn’t have worried. On its opening weekend
Pulp Fiction
took in an astounding $9 million, and exceeded expectations from there. The exit polls were glowing, and the critics kept on writing. Eventually Miramax spent some $10 million on marketing (more than the budget of the film itself), as the film stayed in theaters week after week.
Pulp Fiction
ultimately took in $107 million in the United States, the first Miramax film to break the $100 million barrier, and another $105 million abroad, smashing every record imaginable for an independent film.

But
Pulp Fiction
became more than just a hit film, it became a cultural phenomenon, everything from the music, to the look of Vince Vega and Mia Wallace, to the movie’s unique dialogue.
“Dead nigger storage” became the politically incorrect phrase of the moment, and teenagers everywhere could do Tarantino’s hamburger scene:

Tarantino later credited Miramax with his film’s success, saying, “Nobody else in town, even with the Palme d’Or, would have had the confidence to say, ‘This is going to be a smash hit. We’re going to open in the biggest number of theaters we can.’ Warner Bros and the other studios would have been scared of it.” In turn, Weinstein charitably credited Tarantino with Miramax’s coup, and protected and coddled him like a favored son in the lean creative years that followed. Weinstein always said: “We’re in the Quentin Tarantino business.”

P
ULP
F
ICTION CEMENTED
M
IRAMAX’S UNIQUE STATUS IN THE
movie industry as an arbiter of cool, and nourished Harvey Weinstein’s mythic power to single-handedly make media stars of his movies, his pet actors, and directors. More were to come: Gwyneth Paltrow, Kevin Smith, Matt Damon, and Ben Affleck. But
Pulp Fiction’s
success had far-reaching effects in the movie industry beyond Miramax. No one in Hollywood could ignore a film that cost $8.5 million and made $200 million and the cover of major American magazines. In its wake, all of Hollywood’s major studios were forced to take a serious look at independent films, which could no longer be considered marginal. No one could afford to dismiss the impact of a quirky, controversial auteur like Quentin Tarantino. And no one could afford to miss out on whatever would be the next
Pulp Fiction.

“It was the beginning of the prospect of a massive upside to an independent film,” said Mark Gill. “It became possible to say, ‘Let’s take something made for the art house and possibly make it explode.’”

Gradually the major studios began to open boutique divisions of their own, designed to make or acquire independent-style movies. Twentieth Century Fox founded Fox Searchlight. Universal ultimately bought PolyGram, which became October Films and later USA Films in 1998. Sony had opened Sony Classics in the late 1980s. New Line created Fine Line. Paramount created Paramount Classics. Warner Brothers could not figure out how to marry its bureaucracy-heavy, star-studded studio with the lightweight style of independent film until finally opening Warner Independent in 2002. The influence of independent film continued to trickle upward, and by the second half of the 1990s, the major studios found themselves in business with many of the rebel auteurs who found their audiences in the American mainstream.

Predictably, studio executives, producers, and agents began to throw together projects that attempted to capture Tarantino’s cutting-edge tone, but most of them failed. The post–Pulp
Fiction
years saw a rash of bad urban shoot-’em-up movies featuring white guys in dark glasses. Among the more forgettable were
Two Days in the Valley, The Way of the Gun
, and
Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag.
But Tarantino also helped inspire a generation of young filmmakers.
Pulp Fiction
was a turning point in the emergence of a new kind of film: bloody, brash, funny, and undeniably hip. The film was a sort of challenge and an invitation to other filmmakers to upend the established order in Hollywood, to create something new and ambitious for the silver screen. If Tarantino was a poet of violence who kicked down the door of the Hollywood system, there were others who dared to tread behind him.