Pulp Fiction
Screenwriting

With Pulp Fiction screenwriting entered a whole new era. Tarantino put a bomb under the cherished, well-thumbed bible for screenwriting and blasted it into oblivion.

Well, not quite. There are still plenty of editions of the rulebook out there being pedalled by the gurus and ploddingly waded through by aspiring screenwriters and kept at the elbows of experienced ones.

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Tarantino - A Ground-Breaking Screenwriter

The movie, with a production budget of $8m grossed over $100 at the US box office - unprecendeted for an indpendent movie. The screenplay won the Oscar, the Golden Globe, the National Society of Film Critics, and a slew of other awards. The movie was nominated for seven Oscars and won the coveted Palme D'Or - the highest accolade at Cannes - beating the hot favorite, Kryzysztof Kieslowski's brilliant Three Colours Red.

It is the most influential film of the last twenty years.

The script was irresistible to the actors who were asked to play in the movie. Samuel L Jackson said it was the best script he'd ever read. Bruce Willis altered the schedules of two other movies to make sure he could play the role of Butch.

Tarantino wanted John Travolta whose career had taken a nose-dive, and Travolta won an Oscar nomination. Uma Thurman,, fresh from her virginal role in Dangerous Liaisons, played the gang boss's heroin-addled wife, and won an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Supporting Role.

Two revered actor heavyweights were happy to take relatively minor supporting roles - Harvey Kietel, who'd appeared in tarantino's first film Reservoir Dogs, Wolf, the boss's clean-up man, and Christopher Walken, the acclaimed Academy Award, BAFTA, and Screen Actors Guild Award-winner appears in one scene.

The greatest irony about this astonishingly original script is how many other films it references. From Stanley Kubrick to blaxploitation, to Trauffaut's Jules et Jim, Hitchock's Psycho, Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita, Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, Jean Luc Godard's Bande A Parte, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and a host of execrable B movies.

Tarantino cites a long list of influences from legendary director Howard Hawks to Jean-Pierre Melville, Scorsese, Sam Fuller, Sergio Leone and Brian de Palma.

The references, the influences - they're all there, but Pulp Fiction is triumphantly a script written in Tarantino's own unique voice.

And there's more. Tarantino took the most overworked genre in films, the crime movie, used all its cliched stereotypes - the mob boss, the gangster's moll, the hit men, the boxer who throws a fight - and reinvented it all into something we'd never seen before.

At a time when action movies were being strapped into plot straitjackets, tiresomely plodding through A to B to C, and gagged with "Show, Don't Tell" dictums that make anything longer than a one-liner a cardinal sin, Tarantino audaciously deconstructed traditional linear narrative with three interlocking stories that are not presented in chronological order so that the middle of the story happens after its ending.

The dialogue of Pulp Fiction has made it one of the most quotable movies of all time.

The movie is drenched with dialogue - gloriously sizzling with humour, stuffed with profanities and poetry and meditations on pot bellies, divine intervention, hamburgers, foot massages, sex, and rebirth and redemption.

But none of this fully explains why Tarantino's Pulp Fiction script is widely considered a masterpiece. It's what he created for the solid underpinning of this work that plays a fundamental role in this.

Pulp Fiction's radical transformation of the formulaic Hollywood scriptwriting paradigm was a lot more than mindlessly taking a pair of scissors to slice up his structure so that Z comes after A and the hero gets killed in the middle of the story but he's still on screen till the end, and scatter-gunning the script with diamond-sharp language.

Through all the pitch-perfect juxtaposition of violence and farcical black comedy, the monologues shot through with vulgarity and poetry, the cheesy pop culture, the lurid, drug-fuelled world of low-life, lavish-spending gangland there is a strong current of unexpected moral questioning.

Two amoral characters debate the moral justification for the actions of their boss maiming one of his hoods for giving his wife a foot massage, before going to take out some college kids. The ugly, brutal reality of what a beautiful young woman looks like when she's overdosed and the cool, ultra affluent, seductive lifestyle of a smart and gorgeous hip babe suddenly seems tawdry and tragic.

This is one of the reasons for the award-winnng success of Pulp Fiction. Screenwriting that packs a moral punch.

But Tarantino's explosive, ground-breaking Pulp Fiction screenwriting has spawned a plethora of appalling, cringe-awful, copy-cat movies by wannabe and even experienced screenwriters. Proving that if you're going to break the rules, you need a lot more than a chopping knife to split up a story and gross-out dialogue to write a great movie.

Click here for news about Tarantino's new movie
Inglourious Basterds now shooting

Continue to Pulp Fiction : Masterclass in Dialogue Part One

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