http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/03/making-of-pulp-fiction-oral-history

Cinema Tarantino: The Making of Pulp Fiction

Mark Seal

In this feature story Mark Seal weaves an oral history of Pulp Fiction. It’s been almost two decades since the movie came out, but Seal does a great job of taking the reader back in time to when Quentin Tarantino wrote the script and Harvey Weinstein made it happen. Seal easily includes great quotes and anecdotes from the director, the producers, and the actors.

The beginning of the feature gives us background on Tarantino and how he started writing the script. Seal also includes dueling quotes from Tarantino and some of the people surrounding him like his typist. This shows the respect and appreciation people had for Tarantino but also reveals a little bit of the madness within.

“It was about going over it one last time and then giving it to the typist, Linda Chen, who was a really good friend of mine,” Tarantino tells me. “She really helped me.”

“His handwriting is atrocious. He’s a functional illiterate. I was averaging about 9,000 grammatical errors per page. After I would correct them, he would try to put back the errors, because he liked them.”

The article is broken up into sections and the events are pretty chronological. The reader learns how each aspect of the film fell into place. Seal goes through each actor’s journey of being included in the cult classic. Seal did a nice job of including a lot of interesting anecdotes in these sections as well as move the story along. It never lost momentum.

There are a lot of quotes, descriptions, and anecdotes in this piece which is probably why it is so long. However, this allows for the rest of the writing to be more concise and to the point.

I liked that this article ended at Oscar night with Tarantino winning the award for best original screenplay. It made the article seem tighter somehow, like all that work and all of the doubts had paid off. The last sentence, “But the future was Quentin Tarantino’s”, I think was a very strong and compelling ending because it’s short but it brings the reader back to present day where this madman’s success is so apparent.