Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  Then there was the part of Jules, the Ezekiel-quoting hit man, which Tarantino had written with Samuel L. Jackson in mind. Jackson, who knew the role had been written for him, came in and read for the part, thinking the role was already his, which it was. But, as Weinstein heard, Jackson “gave the worst audition in the world,” and Tarantino continued to audition actors. An unknown actor named Paul Calderon blew him away. There was no contest; he was better than Jackson. Lawrence Bender called Jackson’s agent to give him the bad news. Weinstein says he got wind of the imminent casting change and asked Tarantino to hold off, then called Jackson. “You are about to lose this role,” he warned the actor. “You’re gonna have to audition. And you’re gonna have to blow his balls off.” Jackson claims he never thought he was auditioning the first time, and called his agent to deliver this message: “Was I supposed to have been auditioning? Now I’ll blow you away.” He flew in from New York to audition for Tarantino, Bender, and Richard Gladstein. This time he delivered the goods. Calderon got a bit part instead.

  Meanwhile, a lot of women were being considered for the part of Mia, Marsellus’s girlfriend. Meg Ryan and Michelle Pfeiffer were being pitched by their agents. Rosanna Arquette tested for the role, and Holly Hunter was a candidate. Uma Thurman’s CAA agent, Jay Moloney, called Lawrence Bender to pitch his client for the part; the producers turned him down, saying they didn’t think she was right for it. Moloney was undeterred; he turned around and called Tarantino’s manager, Cathryn Jaymes, and said, “I’m calling to follow up on a meeting with Quentin to set up a meeting with Uma.” Jaymes, who didn’t know otherwise, set up the meeting. By the time Tarantino told Jaymes that he had had no intention of scheduling a meeting with Thurman, it was too late to call Moloney and cancel without insulting him.

  So Tarantino met Thurman and decided she was precisely what he had had in mind for Mia after all. Moreover, he decided she was the muse he’d been looking for. Thurman then turned down the role. Tarantino had to call and beg her to reconsider, which finally she did.

  Perhaps coincidentally, at around the time Tarantino was casting the film, he broke up with Sher at her apartment, right after she read Pulp Fiction. It was hard for him to ignore that he’d become the hottest thing in town, and it seemed as if he needed a cooler girlfriend; he soon took up with Uma Thurman (though that didn’t last long, either). Sher is philosophical about it. “Like any [Hollywood] relationship, a big white light shined on it,” she reflected. “I knew too much, there were too many people kissing his ass. I thought I was ready to have a serious relationship.” Early on, they needed each other. “I believed in him. He believed in me. We were in love.” She knew Tarantino well enough by that time to understand that he kept searching for strong mother and father figures, and that the instability of his childhood was continually replayed in his relationships.

  When Tarantino’s stepfather Curt Zastoupil left his mother, Connie, Tarantino felt he lost the only stable father figure he had known. Sher, who supported him through the straits of early success, felt that “We had [had] a child together; it’s called Pulp Fiction. It’s the product of our relationship.” As for Connie, she thought Stacey was the one who got away. “That’s the daughter-in-law I wanted. She’s Jewish. She knows how to treat a mother. Gentiles didn’t get it right,” she said.

  BY ALL ACCOUNTS THE SHOOT OF PULP FICTION WAS A RELAXED affair, with Tarantino skipping around the set like a kid at an amusement park. “His excitement was contagious,” recalled producer Richard Gladstein. A Vanity Fair writer encountered Tarantino in situ in a stained Speed Racer T-shirt and baggy jeans, looking “as if he hasn’t shaved or bathed in days, possibly weeks,” which given Tarantino’s personal hygiene habits was entirely possible. Tarantino and Eric Stoltz, who played the drug dealer Lance, wore their bathrobes for days at a time to give them a lived-in authenticity, with Tarantino telling his interviewer, “I did everything in that bathrobe. I ate. I drank. I masturbated in that bathrobe.”

  Tarantino used a handheld camera for the first time during Travolta’s famous dance scene, and didn’t use a video monitor to watch the action. “You need to be there, not the back of your fucking head across the room buried in the monitor,” he told the magazine. Of course, there were limits to such dedication. Ving Rhames had to chasten Tarantino when the director lay down on the ground, under the camera, during the anal rape scene, as Rhames shot another character in the groin. “I had to say, ‘Look, cut. Uh, Quentin, don’t do that. You’re destroying my concentration,’” the actor recalled. But the Miramax executives were impressed. Harvey and Bob Weinstein came to the set and were so taken by the footage that they offered Tarantino and Bender an overall two-picture development deal.

  Though Tarantino wasn’t talking to his old friend Craig Hamann anymore, he wasn’t above calling and asking for a favor. Hamann was a recovering drug addict, so Tarantino asked for help in counseling Uma Thurman on how to act when she snorted the heroin. Hamann, ever willing, told her not to go limp right away, but to respond to an initial rush, and only after a few minutes to collapse in a state of drugged unconsciousness. Hamann also came down to the set at Quentin’s request to counsel John Travolta on one of the signature scenes of the film, when Travolta as Vincent jams a syringe of Adrenalin directly into Thurman’s heart to bring her out of an overdose. Hamann had overdosed as a teenager, and though he’d been revived with a syringe of salt water to a vein, he’d seen plenty of others overdose and be jolted with Adrenalin. The lines from the scene (“You’re giving her an injection of Adrenalin right to her heart…”) spoken by Lance were actually Hamann’s verbatim instructions to the actors.

  Stoltz remembers Tarantino flopping around on the floor in rehearsal for the cast. “I remember Quentin saying something like, ‘It’s like when you shot a panther or trap a tiger and they go berserk before they calm down.’” They did take after take, with Tarantino riling up Travolta, Thurman, Stoltz, and Arquette; the needle scene was actually filmed backward, starting with the needle in Thurman’s chest, then Travolta pulled it out, with the camera whipping upward.

  That scene became one of the most talked-about moments in the film, included on a list of Premiere magazine’s “100 Most Memorable Movie Scenes”—and no wonder. At the opening screening of the film at the New York Film Festival in September 1994 a man seated in the orchestra section keeled over in a dead faint when he saw the syringe plunge (though later there was some question as to whether Harvey Weinstein had had the moment staged). “I thought that someone had had a heart attack or something, and I was quite anxious,” said Eric Stoltz later. “I was sitting next to Quentin, and I said, ‘What if this guy dies from seeing this scene? I feel kind of responsible.’ And Quentin leaned over and said, ‘You know, Eric, when they screened Jaws a man had a heart attack and died, and they told that to Steven Spielberg and he said, good, that means the movie works.’ I wasn’t exactly reassured.”

  Typically, Tarantino never thanked Hamann for his efforts—much less paid him—nor did he acknowledge his contribution in the movie’s credits. Bad manners had become a real habit with Tarantino.

  ON MONDAY, JANUARY 17, 1994, AN EARTH-QUAKE measuring 6.7 on the Richter scale struck the densely populated San Fernando Valley in northern Los Angeles. The earthquake, while relatively mild, caused a shocking amount of damage, killing fifty-seven people and injuring another one thousand five hundred. Freeways collapsed, thousands of homes and businesses were left without electricity for days, and thousands of residents were left homeless. Cathryn Jaymes was sitting amid the rubble of her living room in Studio City when the phone rang. It was Quentin Tarantino. She braced herself; three days earlier Tarantino’s business manager, Mark Friedman—whom she’d hired—had called to peremptorily fire her after ten years of managing Tarantino’s career.

  Jaymes’s house was a mess; broken glass was everywhere. Her refrigerator had slid across the floor and crashed through her kitchen window. Jaymes thought Tarantino was calling to see
how she was, or at least to apologize for not calling her himself the previous Friday. She felt it was the least she could expect after she’d worked so hard for his success all this time. But not at all; Tarantino wasn’t calling to apologize, and he never even mentioned the earthquake.

  “I’m calling to ask you a favor,” said Tarantino.

  “How dare you?” demanded Jaymes. “You just fired me. No more favors. And in case you hadn’t noticed, there’s been an earthquake.”

  He attempted conciliation. “I want you to know you were a terrific manager,” Tarantino explained. “I appreciate it. But your job is done. I don’t need you anymore.” He paused. “You know I’ve always been selfish. I don’t need to pay a manager anymore, I have an agent. I am not going to get another manager. Look, I can get kings and queens on the phones now. I don’t need you. What makes you think I’d stay with you anyway?”

  Jaymes was stunned. “Because you promised you would,” she said.

  Tarantino replied: “Promises are made to be broken. Nobody keeps their promises. Nobody has to keep their promises.”

  Not in Hollywood, anyway.

  Tarantino’s spokeswoman Bumble Ward says that the director believes he did not betray Jaymes, saying that he stayed with her for two years longer than he felt he needed her, “Cathryn is a great person, but she didn’t get me the jobs. Therefore it wasn’t necessary for me to have a manager,” he said through Ward. “I didn’t betray Cathryn. I like Cathryn.”

  PULP FICTION DEBUTED AT THE CANNES FILM FESTIVAL IN 1994. Harvey Weinstein had refused to show it before the festival, ratcheting up curiosity. On the day Tarantino arrived in the south of France, his movie stars in tow, somebody remarked that it seemed like The Wild Bunch had hit the Croisette, the promenade along the beach. The stars were here for Tarantino, and this time Cannes was waiting for him. They remembered Reservoir Dogs, and the word was that Pulp Fiction was the festival film not to be missed.

  You could hardly miss Tarantino. He appeared in the southern port unshaven, his lanky, overcaffeinated frame slouching toward the Carlton Hotel. He hadn’t slept in weeks, and had finished the film in the days before the festival. Behind him, stepping out of an armada of black liveried festival luxury vans, came Bruce Willis, with his shades and fabulous smirk, John Travolta, eyeing the crowd with a hungry charisma, and Uma Thurman, a drowsy-eyed goddess who, for the next several days, would be the princess of pulp.

  Miramax had set the buzz machine in motion. Before the official screening they showed the movie to a group of influential press at Cannes—Chicago Sun-Times’s Roger Ebert, Time’s Richard Schickel, the New Yorker’s David Denby—and the signs were good. Comments were beginning to trickle out: Tarantino was “a poet of violence”; his movie was “a smartly intoxicating cocktail of rampage and meditation.” Tarantino fairly seduced Janet Maslin of the New York Times with his mix of high energy and low-rent charm, gabbing his way to her heart over a four-hour tête-à-tête lunch. They talked; they bonded; they went shopping.

  At an exclusive luncheon at the Hôtel du Cap down the coast, Tarantino dazzled the critics with his glib mix of trash talk, middlebrow manners, and cinematic erudition. (Typical Tarantino patter on movies: “Any time you try to get across a big idea, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. First you need to make a good movie. And in the process, if there’s something in it that comes across, that’s great. And it shouldn’t be this big idea. It should be a small idea, from which everyone can get something different.” Tarantino on food: “Breakfast cereal is one of my favorite foods, because it’s so easy to fix and it tastes so incredibly great. Cap’n Crunch is, of course, the crème de la crème.”)

  The night before the official screening, Bender and Tarantino had gone to the festival palace to run the movie and discovered that in one of the reels, the lips were out of sync with the dialogue for two full minutes. Tarantino had missed it during postproduction; it was too late to do anything about it. As the big moment approached on Saturday night, Cannes’s particular form of hysteria was at a fever pitch. Huge crowds lined the Croisette all the way from the Carlton, where Tarantino was staying, to the festival palace a half mile away.

  Harvey Weinstein gathered the cast to have a drink at the Carlton and then everyone piled into a line of limousines to drive to the screening. It looked like a presidential motorcade. Tarantino and Bender had gone out and bought Armani tuxedos for the occasion. As the director, producer, and moguls stepped from the limousines with Willis, Travolta, Jackson, Thurman, and the rest of the entourage, they were greeted by a screaming wall of fans and an army of paparazzi. “JOHN!” “BRUCE!” “QUENTIN!” The bodyguards shoved against the phalanx of cameras and the wild-eyed crowd. Tarantino thought, “This is what it’s like to be a rock star.” Five minutes into the screening the audience began to react, shouting, yelling. “It was like New Cinema had arrived,” said Weinstein. “Like a truck had pulled up and delivered it.”

  The prescreening pandemonium was to be expected, perhaps, but even Tarantino was amazed when he emerged from the screening at midnight. From the landing of the modernist, bunkerlike palace, he could see that the huge crowd was still waiting for him three hours after he’d gone into the building. Exultant, he stood up among the floodlights on the edge of the stairs and a raucous cheer went up. The director saluted his new acolytes like the odd movie hero-geek he had become.

  Miramax continued to oil the buzz machine. They worried about the influential Maslin’s review, and had timed showing her the movie so they could bury the review if it was negative. They needn’t have worried. It turned out to be the sort of copy you feature on posters: “Pulp Fiction remains bracingly off-kilter as it mixes lurid, outrageous elements with sweetly appealing ones, to the point where the viewer never has the faintest idea what to expect,” she wrote near the end of the festival. “If that sounds random, it isn’t: Mr. Tarantino has also devised a graceful circular structure that sustains his film’s bold ambitions and two-and-a-half-hour running time. The storytelling is solid and the time flies.” Harvey Weinstein was not about to let this go to waste. He found out what hotel rooms the members of the Cannes jury were staying in and slipped a copy of Maslin’s movie review under their doors just before they went to vote.

  Five days later, Pulp Fiction won the Palme d’Or. Festival director Gilles Jacob had hinted at this when he told Harvey Weinstein to make sure he came to the closing ceremony (most of the festivalgoers clear out before the last day). Clint Eastwood headed the jury that year, and when Bender ran into Eastwood’s then girlfriend, Frances Fisher, on the way into the ceremony, she whispered, “Congratulations, I’m really happy for you.” But as the awards progressed, Pulp Fiction won nothing—not Best Director, not Best Actor—and the group’s spirits sank. They knew that the violence and the vulgar language—constant use of the “n” word, constant use of the “f” word—had not pleased some of the more conservative members of the audience. Perhaps the jury didn’t get the film. But when the final award was announced, it was Pulp Fiction after all. As Tarantino stood at the podium to accept, a woman in the audience let loose. She booed loudly and shouted, “Pulp Fiction is shit! Kieslowski! Kieslowski!” The Polish director Krzystof Kieslowski also had a film in competition. In true bad-boy fashion, Tarantino—on live television—gave her the finger.

  WHILE QUENTIN WAS BUSY FENDING OFF THE PAPARAZZI AND starlets at the festival palace in Cannes, twenty-three-year-old Paul Thomas Anderson was nursing twenty-dollar drinks at the bar of the Carlton, taking in the spectacle with something very much like envy. He was a mere tourist at Cannes, not even in the humble ranks Tarantino had been in two years before when he brought Reservoir Dogs to the festival. But he was a tourist with a plan. Anderson had flown out from Los Angeles at the suggestion of his agent, John Lesher, who let the young Anderson sleep on the couch in his suite.

  Anderson had no particular reason to be at Cannes, but he did have a script called Sydney (which would later be Hard Eight). He ha
d worked on it at the Filmmakers Lab in Park City, Utah, and had every intention of getting it made. Those who met him at Cannes remember an intense young man on the hustle, intent on meeting every producer and rainmaker he could, always with a cocktail and cigarette in his hand. Amid the Tarantino-mania, Anderson was as enamored of the hot young director as anyone else.

  But it wasn’t Pulp Fiction that captured his imagination; it was another movie that premiered at Cannes, Sleep with Me, in which Tarantino had a memorable cameo. In the film Tarantino gives a hilarious, unhinged interpretation of the homosexual subtext of Top Gun, that quintessential movie of the 1980s, and Anderson was electrified by it. Tarantino plays a character named Sid who tells a partygoer: “Top Gun is fucking great. What is Top Gun? You think it’s a story about a bunch of fighter pilots…. It is a story about a man’s struggle with his own homosexuality. It is! That is what Top Gun is about, man. You’ve got Maverick, all right? He’s on the edge, man. He’s right on the fucking line, all right? And you’ve got Iceman, and all his crew. They’re gay, they represent the gay man, all right? And they’re saying, go, go the gay way, go the gay way. He could go both ways.”