Rebels on the Backlot (11 page)

W
HILE
T
ARANTINO WAS WINNING FAME AND FORTUNE, HIS
buddy was still broke. The previous year Avary had wanted to marry his girlfriend, Gretchen. Partly to help him, Tarantino had bought Avary’s script, called
Pandemonium Reigned
, for $25,000. The script, which Avary had used as a calling card around Hollywood, was the story of a boxer who doesn’t take a fall as he’d promised. He then has to evade gangsters while returning home for an heirloom gold watch his girlfriend accidentally left behind. The boxer finds himself in ever more perilous situations as he tries to escape the gangsters he double-crossed, and runs into a pair of sadomasochists along the way. Avary hoped that he and Tarantino would rework
Pandemonium Reigned
together.

After the Cannes Festival where
Reservoir Dogs
made a stir, Tarantino, Avary, and Stacey Sher drove together to Amsterdam. Tarantino bought a massive notebook and a set of special pens and refined the ideas in Avary’s script, expanding and embellishing them in longhand. As they drove north, Tarantino would read his ideas aloud to Sher and Avary. They ended up in Paris in the middle of the night looking for gas, battling rush hours on their way;
once in Amsterdam they partied and ate French fries with mayonnaise; perhaps some marijuana was smoked, perhaps more than some. At that point, says Sher, “All of the first story was written when I was in Amsterdam, up to the gold watch.” Sher left, while Avary stayed on. He insists that the script of
Pulp Fiction
was at least half his work. “What I wrote and what he wrote are almost indefinable,” he told Peter Biskind. “We essentially raided all of our files, and took out every great scene either of us had ever written, put them on the floor, started lining them up and putting them together. I had my computer, so I would combine them into sequences. Quentin was being financed by TriStar, but I didn’t have two pennies to rub together and had to make a living, so eventually I left and went to make
Killing Zoe.”

Tarantino insists otherwise, saying he used only the middle section of
Pandemonium Reigned
in what was his own adaptation. “I really thought it would work well with my three
Pulp Fiction
stories in one. So basically I just bought the script and said, ‘What I’m going to do, Roger, is I’m going to adapt this into my work.’ And that’s what I did. Roger wasn’t with me at the typewriter or anything like that. I never collaborated with him on
Pulp Fiction.
I’ve never collaborated with another writer before, ever. Ever. I don’t even know how you would do that. …To tell you the truth I did it in not too dissimilar a way that I did with Elmore Leonard, actually, even though Elmore Leonard didn’t write
[Jackie Brown]
with me. There’s actually more of Elmore Leonard’s writing in
Jackie Brown
than there’s Roger Avary’s writing in
Pulp Fiction.”

Lawrence Bender, Scott Spiegel, and Stacey Sher remember Tarantino’s calling them from Amsterdam at all hours of the night to read bits of dialogue. And yet much of Avary’s original story remained in the final version, including many of the most indelible moments in
Pulp Fiction:
not just the entire boxer story line but the anal rape by the sadomasochists, the bizarre “gimp” on a chain scene, the gold watch, and the girlfriend who eats pie for breakfast.

Ultimately it is unclear whose handiwork
Pulp Fiction
truly is; it remains in dispute and will probably never be resolved. Tarantino’s distinctive voice comes through in the indelible dialogue of
the script. Yet he and Avary had been working inseparably for so many years that it is hard to distinguish their voices. As could be expected, Tarantino downplayed Avary’s contribution in his interviews on the subject. In the official version of
Pulp Fiction
, Avary provided only a small, minor part of the story. Mike Simpson goes by Tarantino’s version. Sher says, “There’s not a catty bone in Quentin’s body,” and he would not take credit for something that wasn’t his.

The script that emerged was pure brilliance.
Pulp Fiction
morphed into a three-part tale that was a savvy, original melding of story lines: two small-time thieves knock over a restaurant; then the story shifts to two hit men on their way to blow away drug dealers; the hit men work for the feared gangster Marsellus, who is caught up in a boxing deal gone wrong with boxer Butch Coolidge. The movie is dark and violent yet also funny and ineffably cool. The dialogue is often bizarre, also hilarious, filled with non sequiturs and brilliant slices of pop culture. And the story is told in sections, backward.

Take the scene where Vincent, a hit man, takes his boss’s girlfriend, Mia, out for dinner to a theme restaurant with waiters dressed as Hollywood greats.

Pulp Fiction
has a distinctive tone, that mix of menace and humor that is thrilling and frightening at the same time, a tone that came to be known as “Tarantinoesque.”

It was not until later that the tension between the once blood brothers Avary and Tarantino exploded over the issue of credit. According to Avary, before the film came out Tarantino called and asked him to give up his screenwriting credit. In his book,
Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film
, Peter Biskind describes Avary’s version of the story:

According to Avary, Tarantino explained that it was because he wanted to be able to say “Written and directed by Quentin Tarantino” at the end of the movie. “When you’re positioning yourself to become a media star, you don’t want people to be confused as to who the star is,” he reportedly told Avary.

When Tarantino called Avary in early 1994 to get him to give up his writing credit, he tried to convince his partner that a “story by” credit was even better, since “that middle story is yours, but this one attributes the whole story to you,” according to Avary. He replied, “No, I’m not going to sign it.” Avary felt he’d made contributions throughout the script. Says Avary, “Quentin flew into a rage,” threatening to rewrite the script and write out all his contributions so he’d get no credit at all.

Ultimately Avary signed the agreement when Quentin promised him a sum of money that would equal Writers Guild residuals and increased his back end participation in the profits. Avary had maxed out his credit cards making
Killing Zoe
and needed the financial security.

According to one person close to the deal, the agreement had a confidentiality clause in which Avary, along with the money, agreed not to talk about the deal. If so, it was an agreement that Avary finally breached in Biskind’s book. Not that it was exactly a secret; he whined frequently about being cheated out of the credit on his Web site, as if he didn’t know that he’d actively given it up.

T
HE QUESTION OF
T
ARANTINO’S ABILITY TO WRITE WITHOUT
the support of a partner became a real question over the years. When Tarantino first gave his manager, Cathyrn Jaymes, the script to
From Dusk Till Dawn
, she thought it was so bad she didn’t want to send it out. When she finally did, angry producers and agents called back and said, “What is this piece of crap? Quentin didn’t write this, did he?” After the success of
Reservoir Dogs
veteran movie and television director Barry Levinson invited Tarantino to write a couple of episodes of his acclaimed drama
Homicide.
Tarantino agreed but never came through. He’d call his various representatives and plead, “Get me out of it. I can’t do it.”

This is not to say Tarantino’s is not a towering talent, only that his gift is more in synthesis and adaptation rather than in creating stories from nothing. His staunchest defenders, like Lawrence
Bender, would continue to insist he was “an originator.” He isn’t. But he is a brilliant adapter indeed.

The
Pulp Fiction
incident put a permanent chill on Tarantino and Avary’s relationship. Tarantino, who claimed that Avary hadn’t repaid a $5,000 debt, believed his pal was honing in on his shining moment. Avary thought Tarantino was hogging the limelight. He complained to Tarantino: “You’re gonna be Martin Scorsese, and I’m [only] gonna be Paul Schrader.” To which Tarantino thought, “What’s so bad about being Paul Schrader?”

After
Pulp Fiction
was done, the two former best friends did not speak for years. Avary told Biskind, “For me, that was the moment when the fun of being two young guys coming up together, and writing for each other, completely vanished. I love Quentin, but things were never really the same between us after that. In that moment I realized that the 90s were no different from the 80s or 70s. This business has a way of taking friendship and love and passion and excitement for just creating, taking that idealism, and just shattering it.”

I
N THE WAKE OF
R
ESERVOIR
D
OGS
, T
ARANTINO’S AGENT
, Mike Simpson, had his client write a list of everything he wanted on his next movie deal. There were five things. He wanted to be well paid. This should’ve been obvious, since Tarantino was terminally broke. He wanted (and would get) $400,000. He also wanted a percentage of the box office gross. Tarantino wanted final cut—the power to determine the final version of the film. He wanted to have a running time of three hours. And he wanted to choose the cast.

These were fairly impossible demands, even for a buzzed-about young ingenue. Asking for gross points was significant, because most movie studios would only grant percentage points of the box office net profits, calculated after the studio had deducted all its own expenses. (Usually there are no profits left after the calculations were done; this is known as “Hollywood accounting.”) Final cut was something studios increasingly just didn’t grant. The provision
boxed them into the artistic whims of the director, and studios couldn’t afford that sort of luxury, not when the cost of movies averaged $34 million per film for production and another $16 million for advertising, according to the Motion Picture Association of America.

Certainly they would never grant such power to someone who had only made one small film; it was the sort of thing a studio chief might give a seasoned director with a track record of box office hits—and even then, only if the studio’s back was up against the wall. Gross points from the box office might be possible, but that also depended on the cast, and there was no way a studio was going to let a pisher like Tarantino have control over casting. As for the three-hour running time—that was guaranteed to send studio executives heading for the door. Neither the studios nor theater owners liked long running times because it meant fewer screenings each day, thus lowering box office revenues.

On the other hand, just about every young production executive in Hollywood was chasing Tarantino’s next big script. TriStar and Jersey Films had paid Tarantino to write
Pulp Fiction
and had the option to make it. Jersey partner Danny DeVito had two very valuable chips in this game: a first-dollar gross deal and final cut in a development deal with TriStar Pictures, then run by Mike Medavoy.

Jersey executive (and Tarantino’s girlfriend) Stacey Sher and Mike Simpson worked out a deal that would fulfill Tarantino’s wish list. Tarantino would direct the picture, and DeVito would sign over his final cut to Tarantino; they put the agreement in a bank vault. Jersey and Tarantino would split the first-dollar box office gross receipts; they would agree that if Medavoy did not acquiesce to Tarantino’s casting choices, he could back out of the agreement and place the film in turnaround (in other words, allow other studios to produce it). If TriStar decided not to make the movie, Tarantino would still be paid his fee. Medavoy balked at the deal, but he decided not to pass up the chance to work with Hollywood’s hottest screenwriter. Under pressure from Jersey Films, he made the deal.

Medavoy was in his prime, at the time reveling in a powerful
Hollywood job, married to the glittering socialite Patricia Duff, and schmoozing with rising Democratic star Governor Bill Clinton as a high-stakes California donor. But during the 1992 presidential campaign, Hollywood became a controversial topic, with the Republicans kicking up dust over violence in the movies and the Democrats under pressure to do the same. As far as Washington, D.C., was concerned,
Reservoir Dogs
, with its relentless profanity, ear-chopping sequence, and gun-wielding heroes, was pretty much the poster child for everything wrong with Hollywood. In this atmosphere, Medavoy felt he couldn’t make
Pulp Fiction
and still remain a close ally of Clinton. He was also skeptical that Bender would be able to make the movie for the promised $8 million budget. He passed.