Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction Almost Got an NC-17 Rating For an Originally Repugnant Scene

Summary:

• Quentin Tarantino may be one of the most proclaimed directors of modern Hollywood, but his movies sometimes aren’t perceived quite well by some viewers due to the director’s love for extremely violent scenes.
• Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, which brought its creator to international fame back in 1994, had to be deprived of one of its toughest scenes to eventually make it to the world’s cinemas.
• Apart from the official version for such a decision, one of the movie’s actors think the scene could’ve also influenced the viewers’ opinion about Pulp Fiction’s main character.

Being one of the most influential movie directors of the modern times, Quentin Tarantino is still not that widely recognized, mostly due to the explicit way of making his films harder to watch with all the violence shown in there.

Despite being a fan of something that isn’t accepted by all of the moviegoers, Tarantino nonetheless earned himself immense international fame by bringing his crime thriller Pulp Fiction to the screen back in 1994.

Being the director’s true magnus opus today, back then the movie was almost banned from the theaters due to its extremely explicit scene.

Following several simultaneous stories in quite a random order, Pulp Fiction once arrives at the point of showing John Travolta’s Vincent Vega accidentally shooting Marvin, portrayed by Phil LaMarr, right in the head while they’re both staying in the car.

The following sequence is limited to capturing just splashes of blood going down the car’s windshield later on proceeding to Vincent and his colleague Jules Winnfield trying to cover the former’s deed.

While the scene was relatively bearable regarding its violent nature, it turns out that initially it all was supposed to be much tougher, just like Tarantino likes it. Several years ago Marvin’s actor Phil LaMarr revealed that, according to the script, he should’ve received Vincent’s bullet in the neck which would have certainly made his death much more agonizing.

Vincent then was supposed to shoot Marvin once again, in the head this time, to end Marvin’s suffering.

According to LaMarr, there might actually be several reasons behind Tarantino’s decision to cut the scene down. The first one was obviously due to MMPA’s strong disagreement to let the movie be released in theaters with a less tough rating than NC-17, the one that doesn’t allow moviegoers under 17 watch the film.

LaMarr himself believes that the director also got to realize that the original scene could’ve deprived Vincent Vega of all of the viewers’ sympathy after he would’ve shown how extremely violent he could be.

Though the actor’s theory makes pretty much a lot of sense, the final decision to sacrifice the original scene was most likely related to Tarantino’s desire to see Pulp Fiction shining in the box office. Fair to say the sacrifice was worth the shot.

Source: Vanity Fair