Pulp Fiction

Pulp Fiction is a 1994 American crime film written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, based on a story by Tarantino and Roger Avary, and starring John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Ving Rhames, and Uma Thurman.

The film tells a few stories of criminal Los Angeles. The film's title refers to the pulp magazines and hardboiled crime novels popular during the mid-20th century, known for their graphic violence and punchy dialogue.

The screenplay of Pulp Fiction was written in 1992 and 1993, and incorporated some scenes originally written by Avary for True Romance. Its plot is presented out of chronological order. The film is also self-referential from its opening moments, beginning with a title card that gives two dictionary definitions of "pulp". Considerable screen time is devoted to monologues and casual conversations with eclectic dialogue revealing each character's perspectives on several subjects, and the film features an ironic combination of humor and strong violence. Its script was reportedly turned down by Columbia TriStar as "too demented". Miramax co-chairman Harvey Weinstein was instantly enthralled with it, however, and the film became the first that Miramax fully financed.

Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or at the 1994 Cannes Film Festival, and was a major critical and commercial success upon its U.S. release. It was nominated for seven Oscars, including Best Picture; Tarantino and Avary won for Best Original Screenplay. John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, and Uma Thurman each received Academy Award nominations for their roles and revitalized and/or elevated their careers. The nature of its development, marketing, and distribution — and its consequent profitability — had a sweeping effect on the field of independent cinema.

Since its release, Pulp Fiction has been widely regarded as Tarantino's masterpiece, with particular praise singled out for its screenwriting. The film's self-reflexivity, unconventional structure, and extensive use of homage and pastiche have led critics to describe it as a touchstone of postmodern film. It is often considered a cultural watershed, with a strong influence felt not only in later movies that adopted various elements of its style, but in several other media as well. A 2008 Entertainment Weekly list named it the best film from 1983 to 2008 and the work has appeared on many critics' lists of the greatest films ever made. In 2013, Pulp Fiction was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Narrative structure

Pulp Fiction's narrative is told out of chronological order, and follows three main interrelated stories: Mob contract killer Vincent Vega is the protagonist of the first story, prizefighter Butch Coolidge is the protagonist of the second, and Vincent's partner Jules Winnfield is the protagonist of the third. The stories intersect in various ways.

The film begins with a diner hold-up staged by a couple, then picks up the stories of Vincent, Jules, and Butch. It finally returns to where it began, in the diner. There are a total of seven narrative sequences; the three primary storylines are preceded by intertitles:

1. "Prologue — The Diner" (i)
2. Prelude to "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife"
3. "Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife"
4. Prelude to "The Gold Watch" (a — flashback, b — present)
5. "The Gold Watch"
6. "The Bonnie Situation"
7. "Epilogue — The Diner" (ii)

If the seven sequences were ordered chronologically, they would run: 4a, 2, 6, 1, 7, 4b, 3, 5. Sequences 1 and 7 partially overlap and are presented from different points of view, as do sequences 2 and 6. In Philip Parker's description, the structural form is "an episodic narrative with circular events adding a beginning and end and allowing references to elements of each separate episode to be made throughout the narrative." Other analysts describe the structure as a "circular narrative".

Plot

Hitmen Jules Winnfield and Vincent Vega arrive at an apartment to retrieve a briefcase for their boss, gangster Marsellus Wallace, from an associate, Brett. After Vincent checks the contents of the briefcase, Jules shoots one of Brett's associates, then declaims a passage from the Bible before he and Vincent kill Brett for trying to double-cross Marsellus. They take the briefcase to Marsellus, but have to wait while he bribes champion boxer Butch Coolidge to take a dive in his upcoming match.

The "famous dance scene": Vincent Vega and Mia Wallace do the twist at Jack Rabbit Slim's.

The next day, Vincent purchases heroin from his drug dealer, Lance. He shoots up, then drives to meet Marsellus's wife Mia, whom he agreed to escort while Marsellus is out of town. They eat at a 1950s-themed restaurant and participate in a twist contest, then return to home with the trophy. While Vincent is in the bathroom, Mia finds his heroin, mistakes it for cocaine, snorts it, and overdoses. Vincent rushes her to Lance's house, where they revive her with an adrenaline shot to her heart.

Butch double-crosses Marsellus and wins the bout, accidentally killing his opponent. At the motel where he and his girlfriend Fabienne are lying low and preparing to flee town, Butch discovers she has forgotten to pack his father's gold watch, a beloved heirloom, and flies into a rage. Returning to his apartment to retrieve the watch, he notices a gun on the kitchen counter and hears the toilet flush. Vincent exits the bathroom and Butch shoots him dead.

As Butch waits at a traffic light in his car, Marsellus spots him by chance and chases him into a pawnshop. The owner, Maynard, captures them at gunpoint and ties them up in the basement. Maynard is joined by Zed, a security guard; they take Marsellus to another room to rape him, leaving the "gimp", a silent figure in a bondage suit, to watch Butch. Butch breaks loose and knocks out the gimp. He is about to flee but decides to save Marsellus, returning with a katana from the pawnshop. He kills Maynard; Marsellus retrieves Maynard's shotgun and shoots Zed. Marsellus informs Butch that they are even, as long as he tells no one about the rape and departs Los Angeles forever. Butch picks up Fabienne on Zed's chopper.

Earlier, after Vincent and Jules have executed Brett in his apartment, another man bursts out of the bathroom and shoots at them wildly, missing every time; Jules and Vincent kill him. Jules decides their survival was a miracle, which Vincent disputes. As Jules drives, Vincent accidentally shoots Brett's associate Marvin in the face. They hide the car at the home of their associate Jimmie, who insists they deal with the problem before his wife comes home. Marsellus sends his cleaner, Winston Wolfe, who directs Jules and Vincent to clean the car, hide the body in the trunk, dispose of their bloody clothes, and take the car to a junk yard.

At a diner, Jules tells Vincent that he plans to retire from his life of crime, convinced that their "miraculous" survival at the apartment was a sign. While Vincent is in the bathroom, a couple, Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, hold up the restaurant. Jules overpowers Pumpkin and holds him at gunpoint; Honey Bunny becomes hysterical and trains her gun on him. Vincent returns with his gun trained on her, creating a Mexican standoff. Jules recites the biblical passage, expresses ambivalence about his life of crime, and allows the robbers to take his cash and leave. Jules and Vincent leave the diner with the briefcase.

Cast

• John Travolta as Vincent Vega:

Tarantino cast Travolta in Pulp Fiction because Michael Madsen, who had played Vic Vega in Reservoir Dogs, chose to appear in Kevin Costner's Wyatt Earp instead. Madsen has since expressed regret over his decision. Harvey Weinstein pushed for Daniel Day-Lewis in the part. Travolta accepted a reduced rate — sources claim either US$100,000 or US$140,000 — but the film's success and his Academy Award nomination for Best Actor revitalized his career; he was subsequently cast in hits including Get Shorty (1995), in which he played a similar character, and the John Woo blockbuster Face/Off. In 2004, Tarantino discussed an idea for a movie starring Travolta and Madsen as the "Vega Brothers"; the concept remains unrealized.

• Samuel L. Jackson as Jules Winnfield:

Tarantino wrote the part of Jules with Jackson in mind, but his first audition was overshadowed by Paul Calderón; Jackson had assumed the audition was merely a reading. Harvey Weinstein convinced him to audition a second time, and his performance of the final diner scene won over Tarantino. Jules was originally scripted with a giant afro, but Tarantino and Jackson agreed on the Jheri-curled wig seen in the film; one reviewer took it as a "tacit comic statement about the ghettoization of blacks in movies". Jackson received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor. Calderón appears in the movie as Paul, a bartender at Marsellus' social club, as well as Marsellus' assistant.

• Uma Thurman as Mia Wallace:

Miramax favored Holly Hunter or Meg Ryan for the role of Mia. Alfre Woodard and Meg Tilly were also considered, but Tarantino wanted Thurman after their first meeting.[19][20] She dominated the film's promotional material, appearing on a bed with cigarette in hand. She was nominated for an Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. Despite being launched into the celebrity A-list, Thurman chose not to do any big-budget films for the following three years. Thurman later starred in Tarantino's two Kill Bill movies (2003, 2004).

  Willis evoked one 1950s actor in particular for Tarantino: "Aldo Ray in Jacques Tourneur's Nightfall [1956] ... I said let's go for that whole look." His boxing robe, designed by Betsy Heimann, exemplifies Tarantino's notion of costume as symbolic armor.

• Bruce Willis as Butch Coolidge:

Willis was a major star, but most of his recent films had been critical and box office disappointments. As described by Peter Bart, taking a role in the modestly budgeted film "meant lowering his salary and risking his star status, but the strategy [...] paid off royally: Pulp Fiction not only brought Willis new respect as an actor, but also earned him several million dollars as a result of his gross participation." Willis' appearance and physical presence were crucial to Tarantino's interest in casting him: "Bruce has the look of a 50s actor. I can't think of any other star that has that look." Chandler Lindauer plays the young Butch Coolidge.

• Harvey Keitel as Winston Wolfe:

Tarantino wrote the part of Wolfe specifically for Keitel, who had starred in Reservoir Dogs and was instrumental in its production. In Tarantino's words, "Harvey had been my favorite actor since I was 16 years old." Keitel had played a character similarly employed as a "cleaner" in Point of No Return (1993).

• Tim Roth as Ringo/"Pumpkin":

Roth had starred in Reservoir Dogs alongside Keitel. He had used an American accent in Reservoir Dogs, but uses his natural, London accent in Pulp Fiction. Though Tarantino had written the part with Roth in mind, TriStar head Mike Medavoy preferred Johnny Depp or Christian Slater. Early in development, Tarantino had contemplated casting Roth as Vincent and Gary Oldman as Jules, rewriting the characters as "two English guys".

• Amanda Plummer as Yolanda/"Honey Bunny":

Tarantino wrote the role of Yolanda for Plummer to partner her with Roth onscreen. Roth had introduced Tarantino to her, saying: "I want to work with Amanda in one of your films, but she has to have a really big gun." Yolanda is Ringo's girlfriend and partner in crime.

• Maria de Medeiros as Fabienne:

Butch's girlfriend. Tarantino met de Medeiros, a Portuguese actress, while traveling with Reservoir Dogsaround the European film festival circuit. She had previously costarred with Thurman in Henry & June(1990), playing Anaïs Nin.

• Ving Rhames as Marsellus Wallace:

Before Rhames was cast, the part of Wallace was offered to Sid Haig, who had appeared in many 1970s exploitation films. Haig passed on the role. According to Bender, Rhames gave "one of the best auditions I've ever seen." His acclaimed performance led to his being cast in big-budget features such as Mission Impossible (1996), Con Air (1997), and Out of Sight (1998).

• Phil LaMarr as Marvin:

LaMarr auditioned for Tarantino because both had done a show for the Groundlings, an improv group, a few months before casting of the film began. In the audition, he read for Jules Winnfield and Brett. He described the filming experience of Pulp Fiction as "the coolest, most easygoing, fun set I've ever been on ... Tarantino was fantastic. I mean, he can be almost unbearable as a person. At a party, you can't get a word in edgewise for, like, an hour. But as a director, he is so completely open and just ... present. And he treated everybody on set well."

• Quentin Tarantino as Jimmie
• Frank Whaley as Brett:

Whaley met Tarantino while he was filming Reservoir Dogs at a lab in Sundance Institute. As he recalled, "we ended up meeting and spending time together, and I liked him, so I was really happy when he asked me to be in this movie." Regarding the reputation of his character, he said: "When I came home, I was walking on the streets of Manhattan, and people were just screaming, "Check out the big brain on Brett!" And I was, like, "What the fuck are you talking about?" But to this day, that's what people remember."

• Burr Steers as Roger/"Flock Of Seagulls"

The scene of the confrontation between Brett and Jules went through several takes due to Steers making mistakes. Steers recalled in an interview that he had found acting difficult due to the loudness of the gunshots.[35]

• Eric Stoltz as Lance:

Vincent's drug dealer. Courtney Love later said that Kurt Cobain was originally offered the role of Lance; if he had taken it, Love would have played the role of his wife. Tarantino denies that he ever met Cobain and insists he never offered him a role in the movie. Gary Oldman was the preferred choice among TriStar executives, based on his portrayal of drug-dealing pimp Drexl Spivey in Tarantino's True Romance(1993).

• Rosanna Arquette as Jody:

Lance's wife. Pam Grier read for the role, but Tarantino did not believe audiences would find it plausible for Lance to yell at her. Grier was later cast as the lead of Tarantino's Jackie Brown. Ellen DeGeneresalso read for Jody.

• Bronagh Gallagher as Trudi

Trudi is Jody's friend who does little but smoke out of a bong during the scene where Vincent has to put a needle in Mia. According to author Jason Bailey, "Quentin thought it would be funny to have this casual observer who just happened to be there. All of this was born out of the experience of, when you go to someone's house to buy drugs, there are always people who are just there." Gallagher recalled favorable experiences of working with Tarantino for the film: "Pulp Fiction was just being in the right place at the right time. After The Commitments, a couple of us got representation in LA and it was mostly rubbish. They drive you around to meet about 30 different people, but I was never the Hollywood starlet those people wanted. The only time I ever fitted into anybody's blueprint was with Tarantino. He was the man. Bring on the freaks! Bring out the people, now deemed shells, whose career is over. But he is unique. He's such a wonderful director and such a nice bloke. It was the only time I didn't feel like the odd one out over there."

• Angela Jones as Esmeralda Villalobos:

Tarantino first saw Jones in the 1991 short film Curdled, which was later remade into a 1996 full-length motion picture which Jones also starred in and Tarantino was involved in financing. In Curdled, she portrayed a character who enjoyed cleaning up murder scenes, and this gave Tarantino the idea of a getaway cab character for Pulp Fiction.

• Duane Whitaker as Maynard, Peter Greene as Zed and Stephen Hibbert as the gimp:

According to The Daily Beast, these "three psycho hillbillies" that torture Butch in Maynard's shop's basement are a reference to the film Deliverance.

• Alexis Arquette as Fourth Man:

The character runs out of a bathroom to shoot Jules and Vincent during their cronfrontation with Marvin, Brett and Roger.[46]

• Christopher Walken as Captain Koons:

Walken appears in a single scene devoted to the Vietnam veteran's monologue about the gold watch. In 1993, Walken had appeared in another small but pivotal role in the "Sicilian scene" in True Romance.

• Julia Sweeney as Raquel:

Raquel is a woman who has a date with The Wolf during the lumberyard scene. She had been married to Hibbert during filming and the couple divorced in 1994.

• Kathy Griffin as herself:

She is a bystander during the scene where Butch runs over Marsellus. Griffin has claimed to formerly date Tarantino.

• Steve Buscemi as Buddy Holly:

Buscemi also starred as Mr. Pink in Reservoir Dogs (1992).

• Lawrence Bender as Long Hair Yuppie-Scum
• Susan Griffiths as Marilyn Monroe:

Griffths is most notable for impersonating Monroe for several films and television shows since the 1980s, such as Marilyn & Me, Growing Pains, Quantum Leap and Cybill.

• Eric Clark as James Dean:

Clark also impersonated Dean in the film Death Becomes Her (1992).

• Linda Kaye as "Shot Woman":

Kaye served as a stuntwoman in the film. She had a long friendship with Tarantino since 1982, and also appear briefly as "Shocked Woman" in Reservoir Dogs.

Production

Writing

Roger Avary wrote the first element of what would become the Pulp Fiction screenplay in the fall of 1990:

Tarantino and Avary decided to write a short, on the theory that it would be easier to get made than a feature. But they quickly realized that nobody produces shorts, so the film became a trilogy, with one section by Tarantino, one by Avary, and one by a third director who never materialized. Each eventually expanded his section into a feature-length script.

The initial inspiration was the three-part horror anthology film Black Sabbath (1963), by Italian filmmaker Mario Bava. The Tarantino–Avary project was provisionally titled "Black Mask," after the seminal hardboiledcrime fiction magazine. Tarantino's script was produced as Reservoir Dogs, his directorial debut; Avary's, titled "Pandemonium Reigns," would form the basis for the "Gold Watch" storyline of Pulp Fiction.

With work on Reservoir Dogs completed, Tarantino returned to the notion of a trilogy film: "I got the idea of doing something that novelists get a chance to do but filmmakers don't: telling three separate stories, having characters float in and out with different weights depending on the story." Tarantino explains that the idea "was basically to take like the oldest chestnuts that you've ever seen when it comes to crime stories — the oldest stories in the book ... You know, 'Vincent Vega and Marsellus Wallace's Wife' — the oldest story about ... the guy's gotta go out with the big man's wife and don't touch her. You know, you've seen the story a zillion times." "I'm using old forms of storytelling and then purposely having them run awry", he says. "Part of the trick is to take these movie characters, these genre characters and these genre situations and actually apply them to some of real life's rules and see how they unravel." In at least one case, boxer Butch Coolidge, Tarantino had in mind a specific character from a classic Hollywood crime story: "I wanted him to be basically like Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer in Aldrich's Kiss Me Deadly [1955]. I wanted him to be a bully and a jerk".

Tarantino went to work on the script for Pulp Fiction in Amsterdam in March 1992, possibly at the Winston Hotel in the Red Light District. He was joined there by Avary, who contributed "Pandemonium Reigns" to the project and participated in its rewriting as well as the development of the new storylines that would link up with it. Two scenes originally written by Avary for the True Romance screenplay, exclusively credited to Tarantino, were incorporated into the opening of "The Bonnie Situation": the "miraculous" missed shots by the hidden gunman and the rear seat automobile killing. The notion of the crimeworld "cleaner" that became the heart of the episode was inspired by a short, Curdled, that Tarantino saw at a film festival. He cast the lead actress, Angela Jones, in Pulp Fiction and later backed the filmmakers' production of a feature-length version of Curdled. The script included a couple of made-up commercial brands that would feature often in later Tarantino films: Big Kahuna burgers (a Big Kahuna soda cup appears in Reservoir Dogs) and Red Apple cigarettes. As he worked on the script, Tarantino also accompanied Reservoir Dogs around the European film festivals. Released in the U.S. in October 1992, the picture was a critical and commercial success. In January 1993, the Pulp Fiction script was complete.

Financing

Tarantino and his producer, Lawrence Bender, brought the script to Jersey Film. Before even seeing Reservoir Dogs, Jersey had attempted to sign Tarantino for his next project. Ultimately a development deal worth around $1 million had been struck: The deal gave A Band Apart, Bender and Tarantino's newly formed production company, initial financing and office facilities; Jersey got a share of the project and the right to shop the script to a studio. Jersey had a distribution and "first look" deal with Columbia TriStar, which paid Tarantino for the right to consider exercising its option. In February, Pulp Fiction appeared on a Variety list of films in pre-production at TriStar. In June, however, the studio put the script into turnaround. According to a studio executive, TriStar chief Mike Medavoy found it "too demented". There were suggestions that TriStar was resistant to back a film featuring a heroin user; there were also indications that the studio simply saw the project as too low-budget for its desired star-driven image. Avary — who was about to start shooting his own directorial debut, Killing Zoe — has said that TriStar's objections were comprehensive, encompassing the script's fundamental structure. He characterizes the studio's position: "'This is the worst thing ever written. 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!'"

Bender brought the script to Miramax, the formerly independent studio that had recently been acquired by Disney. Harvey Weinstein — co-chairman of Miramax, along with his brother, Bob — was instantly enthralled by the script and the company picked it up. Pulp Fiction, the first Miramax project to get a green light after the Disney acquisition, was budgeted at $8.5 million. It became the first movie that Miramax completely financed. Helping hold costs down was the plan Bender executed to pay all the main actors the same amount per week, regardless of their industry status. The biggest star to sign on to the project was Bruce Willis. Though he had recently appeared in several big-budget flops, he was still a major overseas draw. On the strength of his name, Miramax garnered $11 million for the film's worldwide rights, virtually ensuring its profitability.

Filming

Principal photography commenced on September 20, 1993. The lead offscreen talent had all worked with Tarantino on Reservoir Dogs — cinematographer Andrzej Sekuła, film editor Sally Menke, production designer David Wasco, and costume designer Betsy Heimann. According to Tarantino, "[W]e had $8 million. I wanted it to look like a $20–25 million movie. I wanted it to look like an epic. It's an epic in everything — in invention, in ambition, in length, in scope, in everything except the price tag." The film, he says, was shot "on 50 ASA film stock, which is the slowest stock they make. The reason we use it is that it creates an almost no-grain image, it's lustrous. It's the closest thing we have to 50s Technicolor." The largest chunk of the budget — $150,000 — went to creating the Jack Rabbit Slim's set. It was built in a Culver City warehouse, where it was joined by several other sets, as well as the film's production offices. The diner sequence was shot on location in Hawthorne at the Hawthorne Grill, known for its Googie architecture. For the costumes, Tarantino took his inspiration from French director Jean-Pierre Melville, who believed that the clothes his characters wore were their symbolic suits of armor. Tarantino cast himself in a modest-sized role as he had in Reservoir Dogs. One of his pop totems, Fruit Brute, a long-discontinued General Mills cereal, also returned from the earlier film. The shoot wrapped on November 30. Before Pulp Fiction's premiere, Tarantino convinced Avary to forfeit his agreed-on cowriting credit and accept a "story by" credit, so the line "Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino" could be used in advertising and onscreen.

No film score was composed for Pulp Fiction; Quentin Tarantino instead used an eclectic assortment of surf music, rock and roll, soul, and pop songs. Dick Dale's rendition of "Misirlou" plays during the opening credits. Tarantino chose surf music as the basic musical style for the film, but not, he insists, because of its association with surfing culture: "To me it just sounds like rock and roll, even Morricone music. It sounds like rock and roll spaghetti Western music." Some of the songs were suggested to Tarantino by his friends Chuck Kelley and Laura Lovelace, who were credited as music consultants. Lovelace also appeared in the film as Laura, a waitress; she reprises the role in Jackie Brown. The soundtrack album, Music from the Motion Picture Pulp Fiction, was released along with the film in 1994. The album peaked on the Billboard 200 chart at number 21. The single, Urge Overkill's cover of the Neil Diamond song "Girl, You'll Be a Woman Soon", reached number 59.

Estella Tincknell describes how the particular combination of well-known and obscure recordings helps establish the film as a "self-consciously 'cool' text. [The] use of the mono-tracked, beat-heavy style of early 1960s U.S. 'underground' pop mixed with 'classic' ballads such as Dusty Springfield's 'Son of a Preacher Man' is crucial to the film's postmodern knowingness." She contrasts the soundtrack with that of Forrest Gump, the highest-grossing film of 1994, which also relies on period pop recordings: "[T]he version of 'the sixties' offered by Pulp Fiction ... is certainly not that of the publicly recognized counter-culture featured in Forrest Gump, but is, rather, a more genuinely marginal form of sub-culture based around a lifestyle — surfing, 'hanging' — that is resolutely apolitical." The soundtrack is central, she says, to the film's engagement with the "younger, cinematically knowledgeable spectator" it solicits.

Reception

Release and box office

Pulp Fiction premiered in May 1994 at the Cannes Film Festival. The Weinsteins "hit the beach like commandos", bringing the picture's entire cast over. The film was unveiled at a midnight hour screening and caused a sensation. It won the Palme d'Or, the festival's top prize, generating a further wave of publicity.

The first U.S. review of the film was published on May 23 in industry trade magazine Variety. Todd McCarthy called Pulp Fiction a "spectacularly entertaining piece of pop culture ... a startling, massive success."  From Cannes forward, Tarantino was on the road continuously, promoting the film. Over the next few months it played in smaller festivals around Europe, building buzz: Nottingham, Munich, Taormina, Locarno, Norway, and San Sebastián. Tarantino later said, "One thing that's cool is that by breaking up the linear structure, when I watch the film with an audience, it does break [the audience's] alpha state. It's like, all of a sudden, 'I gotta watch this ... I gotta pay attention.' You can almost feel everybody moving in their seats. It's actually fun to watch an audience in some ways chase after a movie." In late September, it opened the New York Film Festival. The New York Times published its review the day of the opening. Janet Maslin called the film a "triumphant, cleverly disorienting journey through a demimonde that springs entirely from Mr. Tarantino's ripe imagination, a landscape of danger, shock, hilarity and vibrant local color ... [He] has come up with a work of such depth, wit and blazing originality that it places him in the front ranks of American film makers."

On October 14, 1994, Pulp Fiction went into general release in the United States. As Peter Biskind describes, "It was not platformed, that is, it did not open in a handful of theaters and roll out slowly as word of mouth built, the traditional way of releasing an indie film; it went wide immediately, into 1,100 theaters." In the eyes of some cultural critics, Reservoir Dogs had given Tarantino a reputation for glamorizing violence. Miramax played with the issue in its marketing campaign: "You won't know the facts till you've seen the fiction", went one slogan. Pulp Fiction was the top-grossing film at the box office its first weekend, edging out a Sylvester Stallone vehicle, The Specialist, which was in its second week and playing at more than twice as many theaters. Against its budget of $8.5 million and about $10 million in marketing costs, Pulp Fictionwound up grossing $107.93 million at the U.S. box office, making it the first "indie" film to surpass $100 million. Worldwide, it took in nearly $213 million. In terms of domestic grosses, it was the tenth biggest film of 1994, even though it played on substantially fewer screens than any other film in the top 20. Popular engagement with the film, such as speculation about the contents of the precious briefcase, "indicates the kind of cult status that Pulp Fiction achieved almost immediately." As MovieMaker puts it, "The movie was nothing less than a national cultural phenomenon." Abroad, as well: In Britain, where it opened a week after its U.S. release, not only was the film a big hit, but in book form its screenplay became the most successful in UK publishing history, a top-ten bestseller.

Critical response

The response of major American film reviewers was widely favorable. Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Timesdescribed it as "so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it — the noses of those zombie writers who take 'screenwriting' classes that teach them the formulas for 'hit films.'" Richard Corliss of TIME wrote, "It towers over the year's other movies as majestically and menacingly as a gang lord at a preschool. It dares Hollywood films to be this smart about going this far. If good directors accept Tarantino's implicit challenge, the movie theater could again be a great place to live in." In Newsweek, David Ansen wrote, "The miracle of Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction is how, being composed of secondhand, debased parts, it succeeds in gleaming like something new." "You get intoxicated by it," wrote Entertainment Weekly's Owen Gleiberman, "high on the rediscovery of how pleasurable a movie can be. I'm not sure I've ever encountered a filmmaker who combined discipline and control with sheer wild-ass joy the way that Tarantino does." "There's a special kick that comes from watching something this thrillingly alive", wrote Peter Travers of Rolling Stone. "Pulp Fiction is indisputably great." Overall, the film attained exceptionally high ratings among U.S. reviewers: a 94% score based on 78 reviews at Rotten Tomatoes with an average rating of 9.1/10, the site's consensus reading, "One of the most influential films of the 1990s, Pulp Fiction is a delirious post-modern mix of neo-noir thrills, pitch-black humor, and pop-culture touchstones". It has an average score of 94/100 based on 24 reviews on Metacritic.

The Los Angeles Times was one of the few major news outlets to publish a negative review on the film's opening weekend. Kenneth Turan wrote, "The writer-director appears to be straining for his effects. Some sequences, especially one involving bondage harnesses and homosexual rape, have the uncomfortable feeling of creative desperation, of someone who's afraid of losing his reputation scrambling for any way to offend sensibilities." Some who reviewed it in the following weeks took more exception to the predominant critical reaction than to Pulp Fiction itself. While not panning the film, Stanley Kauffmann of The New Republic felt that "the way that [it] has been so widely ravened up and drooled over verges on the disgusting. Pulp Fiction nourishes, abets, cultural slumming." Responding to comparisons between Tarantino's film and the work of French New Wave director Jean-Luc Godard, especially his first, most famous feature, Jonathan Rosenbaum of the Chicago Reader wrote, "The fact that Pulp Fiction is garnering more extravagant raves than Breathless ever did tells you plenty about which kind of cultural references are regarded as more fruitful — namely, the ones we already have and don't wish to expand." Observing in the National Review that "[n]o film arrives with more advance hype", John Simon was unswayed: "titillation cures neither hollowness nor shallowness".

Debate about the film spread beyond the review pages. Violence was often the theme. In The Washington Post, Donna Britt described how she was happy not to see Pulp Fiction on a recent weekend and thus avoid "discussing the rousing scene in which a gunshot sprays somebody's brains around a car interior". Some commentators took exception to the film's frequent use of the word "nigger". In the Chicago Tribune, Todd Boyd argued that the word's recurrence "has the ability to signify the ultimate level of hipness for white males who have historically used their perception of black masculinity as the embodiment of cool". In Britain, James Wood, writing in The Guardian, set the tone for much subsequent criticism: "Tarantino represents the final triumph of postmodernism, which is to empty the artwork of all content, thus avoiding its capacity to do anything except helplessly represent our agonies ... Only in this age could a writer as talented as Tarantino produce artworks so vacuous, so entirely stripped of any politics, metaphysics, or moral interest."