In late 1992, Quentin Tarantino left Amsterdam, where he had spent three months, off

and on, in a one-room apartment with no phone or fax, writing the script that would
become Pulp Fiction, about a community of criminals on the fringe of Los Angeles.
Written in a dozen school notebooks, which the 30-year-old Tarantino took on the plane
to Los Angeles, the screenplay was a mess—hundreds of pages of indecipherable
handwriting. “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.”

When Tarantino met Chen, she was working as a typist and unofficial script consultant
for Robert Towne, the venerable screenwriter of, most notably, Chinatown. “Quentin
was fascinated by the way I worked with Towne and his team,” she says, explaining that
she “basically lived” at Towne’s condominium, typing, researching, and offering
feedback in the preparation of his movie The Two Jakes. “He would ask the guys for
advice, and if they were vague or disparate, he would say, ‘What did the Chink think?’ ”
she recalls. “Quentin found this dynamic of genius writer and secret weapon amusing.

“It began with calls where he was just reading pages to me,” she continues. Then came
more urgent calls, asking her to join him for midnight dinners. Chen always had to pick
him up, since he couldn’t drive as a result of unpaid parking tickets. She knew Tarantino
was a “mad genius.” He has said that his first drafts look like “the diaries of a madman,”
but Chen says they’re even worse. “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 producer, Lawrence Bender, and TriStar Pictures, which had invested $900,000 to
develop the project, were pressing Tarantino to deliver the script, which was late. Chen,
who was dog-sitting for a screenwriter in his Beverly Hills home, invited Tarantino to
move in. He arrived “with only the clothes on his back,” she says, and he crashed on the
couch. Chen worked without pay on the condition that Tarantino would rabbit-sit
Honey Bunny, her pet, when she went on location. (Tarantino refused, and the rabbit
later died; Tarantino named the character in Pulp Fiction played by Amanda Plummer
in homage to it.)

His screenplay of 159 pages was completed in May 1993. “On the cover, Quentin had me
type ‘MAY 1993 LAST DRAFT,’ which was his way of signaling that there would be no
further notes or revisions at the studio’s behest,” says Chen.

“Did you ever feel like you were working on a modern cinematic masterpiece?,” I ask.

“Not at all,” she replies. However, she did go on to be the unit photographer on the film.

When Pulp Fiction thundered into theaters a year later, Stanley Crouch in the Los

Angeles Times called it “a high point in a low age.” Time declared, “It hits you like a shot
of adrenaline straight to the heart.” In Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman said it
was “nothing less than the reinvention of mainstream American cinema.”
Made for $8.5 million, it earned $214 million worldwide, making it the top-grossing
independent film at the time. Roger Ebert called it “the most influential” movie of the
1990s, “so well-written in a scruffy, fanzine way that you want to rub noses in it—the
noses of those zombie writers who take ‘screenwriting’ classes that teach them the
formulas for ‘hit films.’ ”

Pulp Fiction resuscitated the career of John Travolta, made stars of Samuel L. Jackson
and Uma Thurman, gave Bruce Willis new muscle at the box office, and turned Harvey
and Bob Weinstein, of Miramax, into giants of independent cinema. Harvey calls it “the
first independent movie that broke all the rules. It set a new dial on the movie clock.”

“It must be hard to believe that Mr. Tarantino, a mostly self-taught, mostly untested
talent who spent his formative years working in a video store, has come up with a work
of such depth, wit and blazing originality that it places him in the front ranks of
American filmmakers,” wrote Janet Maslin in The New York Times. “You don’t merely
enter a theater to see Pulp Fiction: you go down a rabbit hole.” Jon Ronson, critic
for The Independent, in England, proclaimed, “Not since the advent of Citizen Kane …
has one man appeared from relative obscurity to redefine the art of movie-making.”

“I Watch Movies”