Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction Was Almost Made In A Completely Different Format

Everyone knows that "Pulp Fiction," Quentin Tarantino's beloved, acclaimed 1994 ensemble film, is told across a scattered, non-linear narrative where the stories end up linking together in wholly unexpected ways. But apparently, the original idea was quite different.

In a sprawling oral history of the film in Variety commemorating the movie's 30th anniversary, Roger Avary, who co-wrote the story with Tarantino, said there was initially a totally different format for the project. "The original idea for 'Pulp Fiction' was, we're going to make three short films with three different filmmakers. I'm going to make one, Quentin's going to make one and we hit a pal, Adam Rifkin, who was going to make one. I wrote a script called 'Pandemonium Reigns,' and along the way, my little short film expanded into a feature-length script. 'Reservoir Dogs' expanded into a feature-length script. Adam just never wrote his, and 'Pulp Fiction' for a while was something that wasn't going to happen."

Eventually, they scored a deal with Danny DeVito, who ended up working as an executive producer on "Pulp Fiction" and had a larger deal with TriStar Entertainment; as the "It's Always Sunny" actor recalls, he wanted to get this version of "Pulp Fiction" going pretty quickly. "After about six minutes of talking with Quentin, I said, 'I want to make a deal right now,'" DeVito said. "There was a little Quentin pause, and he said yes. And I made a deal with him. I hadn't seen 'Reservoir Dogs' yet because it was still being made."

As Roger Avary tells it, after "Reservoir Dogs" came out, everything changed for Quentin Tarantino ... and during the process, the writer-director decided he wanted to approach "Pulp Fiction" a bit differently. "And then Quentin does 'Reservoir Dogs' and he's getting all sorts of offers to do really cool studio projects. But he basically came back and called me one day and said, 'I keep thinking about 'Pulp Fiction,' and I think I want to make it as one movie and direct it all myself.'"

What happened to Avary's part of the script, which you might recall was titled "Pandemonium Reigns?" As Avary said, the two writers "took my script [to 'Pandemonium Reigns'] and we collapsed it back down, and then we went to Amsterdam and we took all the scenes that we'd ever written that hadn't been already put into movies. And out came eventually 'Pulp Fiction.'" Years later, Tarantino would work on a two-part film with Robert Rodriguez ("Grindhouse," made up of Tarantino's "Death Proof" and Rodriguez's "Planet Terror"), but the multi-story project he originally conceived with Roger Avary apparently wasn't meant to be. 

As executive producer Danny DeVito recounts in the Variety piece, he got the chance to read the final draft of the "Pulp Fiction" script and loved it, though he was a bit shocked at the length. "I spoke to [Tarantino] during that year, checking in, just 'How's everything? Is it coming along?' And then, there was a doorbell ring, and there was a package, a manila envelope with 155 pages in it," DeVito recalled. "I swear to God, I always like to think it was still warm. And the top page read, "Pulp Fiction by Quentin Tarantino, final draft."

DeVito sat down to read it and was on board immediately, though the length definitely concerned him. "I tucked myself into a sofa with a cup of tea and I laughed my ass off," the actor, director, and producer said. "I loved it from the very beginning to the very end. The big question was that it was 155 pages. I had this woman I worked with, Wilma, who was my script supervisor, and she used to time things for me. You usually go a page a minute, and the final running time of the movie was 154 minutes." DeVito's luckier he didn't read an earlier draft of Tarantino's Oscar-winning script; apparently, one of those ran around 500 pages, so he got off lucky.