Jason Bailey - Pulp Fiction: The Complete Story of Quentin Tarantinos Masterpiece

Cannes. Stephane Cardinale / Sygma / Corbis

The film was called Pulp Fiction, and itd exploded across Cannes that May with similar brute force. Director Quentin Tarantino arrived at the prestigious international film festival with the swagger of a rock star. Though his first film, Reservoir Dogs, had underperformed in the States, it was a giant hit in Europe, its engagements in London and Paris running on for months, even years. When his new picture debuted late in the festival, it landed in the Palais des Festivals like a dirty bomb. This was something big, grand, loud, rude, and altogether thrilling.

Audiences and critics alike went wild for its heady brew of dark humor, pop-infused chatter, gangster cool, and narrative dexterity. It became Cannes hottest ticket, and when the festival jury (headed by Clint Eastwood, star of Tarantinos favorite film, The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly) gathered to select the award winners, they handed Pulp Fiction the festivals highest honor. At the ceremony, an irate woman at the back of the auditorium disrupted the proceedings to shout Scandal! Scandal! in French. Tarantino responded by hoisting his middle finger. As the crowd cheered, he explained, I dont make movies that bring people together. I make movies that split people apart.

Be that as it may, when the picture hit theaters that fall, it sure felt like a film that brought people together. Young audiences, intellectuals, cinephiles, and popcorn chewers alike were gripped by Pulp fever, buoyed by the films cleverness, rocked by its bursts of violence, endlessly quoting its punchy dialogue. Tarantino had captured the early-nineties zeitgeist in his triptych of throwback crime stories, and audiences ate it up like a Royale with Cheese.

But back to that trailer. Down in my basement apartment in Kansas, I kept rewinding and re-viewing it, over and over again, intoxicated by its images, enraptured by its energy, enthralled by the promises it madeand would ultimately keep, the six times I watched the film during its original theatrical run (which was easier than it sounds; it ran nearly a full year in our market) and countless more once it hit VHS. Like so many other men my age, I didnt just like Quentin Tarantino, I wanted to be him, to parlay my own video store geekhood into a moviemaking career, and I was inspired by his success to make my own films. But they werent my own, not really; they were my attempts to make Tarantino films, with wisecracking, pop cultureobsessed, pistol-packing cool cats in ties and sunglasses navigating painstakingly nonlinear timelines.

I couldnt recreate Fictions magic, of course. None of us could, not even the man himself. Im not the kind of guy that wants to put Pulp Fiction into perspective twenty years later, Tarantino said recently. But I do. What was it about that movie, at that moment, that was so powerful? The gunshots blazing through the screen in that first trailer were more than a shrewd marketing touch. They were the sound of a starter pistol, marking the launch of a new kind of director and a new type of picture, one that was a simultaneous snapshot of what film had been, what it was now, and what it could be. The movies never knew what hit em.