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.
BEFORE THE CANNES FESTIVAL, MIRAMAX 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:
Vincent: You know what they call a Quarter Pounder with Cheese in Paris?
Jules: They don’t call it a Quarter Pounder with Cheese?
Vincent: No, they got the metric system there, they wouldn’t know what the fuck a Quarter Pounder is.
Jules: What’d they call it?
Vincent: Royale with cheese.
Jules: Royale with Cheese. What’d they call a big Mac?
Vincent: Big Mac’s a Big Mac, but they call it le Big Mac.
Jules: What do they call a Whopper?
Vincent: I dunno, I didn’t go into a Burger King.
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.”
PULP FICTION CEMENTED MIRAMAX’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.
“When I first saw Pulp Fiction, I felt completely blown away. Excited. Capable of doing what I wanted to do,” said Paul Thomas Anderson, who saw the movie at 10:00 A.M. at Cannes. “I felt an explosion of how creative that movie was. It was an inspiration.”
“I thought he really shook everything up,” said David O. Russell. “I loved the way he told the story. But without that Sam Jackson thing at the end, I wouldn’t have liked it as much. …If you don’t have Sam Jackson’s transformation at the end, I don’t give a shit about Pulp Fiction, including with the structure and all that shit. It’s just great filmmaking.” The movie injected a jolt of adrenaline into Hollywood’s cookie-cutter system. As the 1990s progressed, the rebel generation of filmmakers emerged to bend the risk-averse studios to their will.
BY THE WINTER OF 1994, MIRAMAX REALIZED THAT THEY had a real shot at the Oscars with Pulp Fiction, though the favorite was likely to be another surprise hit of the year, Forrest Gump. Concerned about winning over the older, conservative voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Weinstein sent out videotapes of Pulp Fiction with the volume turned down in every scene that featured gunplay. He also sent a booklet about the film that included an essay written by a film professor at the University of Texas, whom he’d hired to write about the film’s place in the continuum of film noir.
Pulp Fiction ultimately received seven nominations, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay for Tarantino and Roger Avary. At the Golden Globes, presented well before the Oscars, Tarantino alone won
for Best Screenplay and failed to mention Avary in his acceptance speech. This prompted Avary’s wife, Gretchen, to curse him out in front of the attendees. On the night before the Oscar ceremonies, at the Independent Spirit Awards—a small ceremony for independent film—Pulp Fiction won the prizes for Best Feature, Best Male Lead, and Best Screenplay. Another film also won a couple of statues at the Spirit Awards: writer-director David O. Russell’s Spanking the Monkey, a dark comedy about incest, won Best First Feature and Best First Screenplay. Russell’s film may not have shared Tarantino’s penchant for violence, but it had the same droll take on a sinister situation that seemed undeniably fresh and was somehow of a piece with Tarantino’s irreverence.
As expected, Pulp Fiction lost at the Oscars in the Best Picture category to the heart-warming Forrest Gump, but Tarantino and Avary won for Best Screenplay in front of an audience of millions. It was Tarantino’s thirty-second birthday.
Back in Studio City, Cathryn Jaymes watched the Oscars by herself with a mixture of sadness and pride. She hadn’t expected Tarantino to thank her in his speech. She only noted that he didn’t thank his agent either, or for that matter, his mother. “I was trying to think, maybe I should say a whole lot of stuff, right here, right now, just get it out of my system,” he said. “You know, all year long, everything roiling up and everything, just blow it all, just tonight, just say everything.” Then he paused. “But I’m not. Thanks.” This was followed by Avary’s notorious comment after thanking his “beautiful wife, Gretchen”: “I really have to pee right now, so I’m gonna go.” Then Tarantino headed back to his suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel with former girlfriend Grace Lovelace and her sister, Laura, Rand Vossler from the old days at Video Archives, and a few other friends. There was birthday cake and Dom Perignon, a night of triumph.
Chapter 3
Hard Times on Hard Eight;
Flirting with the Indies;
Schizopolis, The Experiment
1994–1995
It took a particular kind of hubris for twenty-five-year-old, first-time filmmaker Paul Thomas Anderson to shoot a two-and-a-half-hour version of his ninety-five-page script, finish the edit, screen a version for the financial backers and say, that’s my cut. I’m not touching a frame. It took a certain level of bravado for him to be thrown off his first film twice.
That was the kind of hubris Paul Thomas Anderson seemed to be born with.
He came from a show business family, his father a larger-than-life figure who dominated the family nest of nine children from two marriages. Ernie Anderson was tall and skinny (like Paul), a gregarious, charismatic character whose every other word was “cocksucker.” “My dad was an amazing, creative, lovable guy,” Anderson recalled. Paul adored him. Born in Massachusetts, Ernie Anderson had started out in radio, where he met Tim Conway, the variety show comic, and worked with him on television in Cleveland. Anderson became a local cult figure for creating a television character, “Ghoulardi,” wearing a fright wig and lab coat to introduce late-night schlock horror TV. His Ghoulardi character became a staple for WJW-TV’s Friday night horror movie show Shock Theater, where he was known for shouting at characters, reading fan and hate mail, blowing up model cars with firecrackers, smoking cigarettes profusely, tossing rubber chickens, and talking on an old-fashioned telephone. He had five children from his first marriage, to Marguerite Anderson, and met his second wife, Edwina Gough, in Cleveland. Then in 1966 Ernie Anderson moved the family to Los Angeles, the vast suburban hinterland called the San Fernando Valley. The second marriage produced four children: three girls and Paul, who was the second oldest, born on June 26, 1970. (Many databases erroneously list Anderson’s birthday as January 1, 1970.) Ernie Anderson made a good living as the promotional voice of ABC. His deep baritone became known to millions of television viewers on The Love Boat (the “Loooove Boat”) and America’s Funniest Home Videos. When the trailer was cut for his son’s first feature, Hard Eight, Ernie Anderson did the intro voice-over: “Starring John C. Reilly as….”
Growing up in a rambling house in North Hollywood, Paul Thomas Anderson—known as Paulie or P.T. to close friends and family—was surrounded by the chaos of numerous children, eighteen dogs, and his father’s showbiz friends. “The first batch of kids would come in and out; it was always shifting. There were always older kids; I was in the younger group,” Anderson recalled. “I had great sisters but they were tough. We were all tough. We were just fighters; we all fought all the time.” There were always colorful characters in and around the Anderson house, a steady stream of Hollywood’s working stiffs who never pierced through to a mass audience or real celebrity. Bob Ridgely, a nutty character actor who worked in Mel Brooks’s movies, was often around; he later played the colonel in Boogie Nights.
Amid this chaos, Anderson found his father’s basement stash of porn at the age of nine and watched it obsessively throughout his teens. Every chance he got Anderson would sneak a look at seventies’ porn films like The Opening of Misty Beethoven. This would have a profound effect on him, providing fodder for one of his first, best films. In general porn movie productions were part of the landscape in the Valley. All the kids in the neighborhood knew that the white van that pulled up to a house down the street was shooting porno. “It wasn’t that dark and dirty,” said Anderson.
Like many of those drawn to entertainment, Ernie Anderson tended to suck up a lot of the energy and attention in the Anderson home. Many have described him as extremely self-absorbed, treating his kids as appendages to his needs. But he was fun to be around. The filmmaker once told an interviewer that his first three movies “reflected his life in small, intimate, personal ways that I wouldn’t want to reveal. But you can be sure there’s a lot of my dad in these movies.” Paul Anderson’s mother is described by Anderson’s friends as cold and belittling of her son’s precocious talents. He immortalized her in the icily dismissive character who questions Dirk Diggler’s ability to amount to anything in Boogie Nights. Anderson doesn’t like to talk about her much. “She had a tough upbringing. She was Irish. We had our fights, but that was so long ago. We get along all right,” Anderson said in 2004. She would haul the children to church “when things were not swinging her way,” he said.
Luckily, though, Anderson seemed to have plenty of inner resources. He counts a desire to make movies among his very earliest memories, seeing The Wizard of Oz at age five or so. “I loved to write as a kid, and I wrote all the time,” he recalled. When he was seven years old, he wrote in a notebook: “My name is Paul Anderson. I want to be a writer, producer, director, special effects man. I know how to do everything and I know everything. Please hire me.” He was enchanted by the movies. His inner life began to revolve around them—his outer life, too. After he saw ET, he began dressing up as the Henry Thomas character—another towheaded boy from the Valley—and tried to ride his bike into the clouds. A little older, he saw Rocky, and started eating five eggs a day for breakfast and running every morning. His father bought him a Betamax camera and by age twelve, Paul was already making home movies, five-to ten-minute documentary-style pieces that he would edit on a pair of VCRs at home, adding music to the background. He tells those who ask him, “I never had a backup plan other than directing films. Every time I eat mashed potatoes I still think of Close Encounters.” Strangely enough, Paul Thomas Anderson was the only one in the family to go into show business. One sister became a librarian, a half-brother became an auto mechanic, while another was a stay-at-home dad. Two of his half-brothers died in adulthood of complications from diabetes.
SCHOOL WAS ANOTHER MATTER ENTIRELY. ANDERSON WAS far too headstrong and too much in a hurry to stick around for much schooling. “I was distracted. I never liked the schools I went to. I was tempermental, and I was too impatient to be out of there,” he explained. “When I look back, I still think I was right. Most schools teach fear. ‘If you don’t learn this something bad is going to happen.’ I responded terribly to that.” He was kicked out of more than one schoo
l for truancy and getting into fights. He attended an upper-class private school called the Buckley School in the Valley until fifth grade, but his problems with authority led to the end of that. Then he was sent to Campbell Hall, a school for kids with behavioral issues. That didn’t prove successful, either, and in frustration Anderson’s parents sent him to Cardinal Cushing, a school for problem kids located outside of Boston, Massachusetts, where Anderson repeated the tenth grade. “It was rough. It was scary to be away from home. I was with a group of rough kids, and there were a lot of drugs,” he recalled. That experience finally scared him straight, and Anderson returned home for the last two years of high school, finishing at Montclair College Prep, in Reseda.
Anderson spent two semesters at Emerson College as an English major before dropping out, and then got into the prestigious New York University Film School. He dropped out after two days, deciding they had nothing to teach him. Instead Anderson took the tuition money and headed to California to seek his fortune. He worked as a messenger and production assistant on television shows (including one called Quiz Kid Challenge that later showed up in the script of Magnolia). In his spare time, Anderson wrote and shot a short film called Cigarettes and Coffee, which starred Philip Baker Hall, a character actor he’d met while working as a production assistant on a PBS special about political correctness. The short focused on five characters interacting in a Las Vegas diner, with Hall as the main character, Sydney, an aging gambler who takes a young man under his wing and teaches him about gambling and survival. The film premiered at the 1993 Sundance Film Festival. Anderson decided to expand the short into a feature-length film called Sydney, and was accepted to the Sundance Filmmakers Lab to work on the project. It was at the lab that he met John Lyons, a casting director volunteering his expertise, who became Anderson’s producer on the film.
Rebels on the Backlot Page 11
