“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.” 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. Harvey calls it “the first independent movie that broke all the rules. 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. Pulp Fiction resuscitated the career of John Travolta, made stars of Samuel L. After I would correct them, he would try to put back the errors, because he liked them.” I was averaging about 9,000 grammatical errors per page. 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. Chen always had to pick him up, since he couldn’t drive as a result of unpaid parking tickets. Then came more urgent calls, asking her to join him for midnight dinners. “It began with calls where he was just reading pages to me,” she continues. “Quentin found this dynamic of genius writer and secret weapon amusing. “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 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. When Tarantino met Chen, she was working as a typist and unofficial script consultant for Robert Towne, the venerable screenwriter of, most notably, Chinatown. “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. 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. 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.
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