“Part of the fun of Pulp,” Tarantino said, “is that if you’re hip to movies, you’re watching the boxing movie Body and Soul and then suddenly the characters turn a corner and they’re in the middle of Deliverance. The pawnshop was actually the Crown Pawn Shop, at 20933 Roscoe Blvd., in the Canoga Park district of Los Angeles - still in business today. And the creepy Zed was portrayed by Peter Greene, also seen as the villain in The Mask.
Maynard was played by the Texan actor and playwright Duane Whitaker, who later wrote the sequel to Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn. Underneath the Gimp’s head-to-toe leather was Stephen Hibbert, a comedy writer ( Animaniacs) and actor ( Austin Powers) then married to Julia Sweeney (the SNL alum who also appeared in Pulp Fiction - Tarantino did some work on the screenplay for her movie It’s Pat). The Private Lives of Liza Minnelli (The Rainbow Ends Here) Once they take Marsellus into the adjoining room, Butch knocks out the Gimp with a single punch, and heads upstairs to freedom. Maynard is joined by his cousin, Zed, and their leather-clad servant, the Gimp Zed decides that they will rape Marsellus first. Marsellus and Butch awaken in the pawnshop’s basement, tied to chairs and equipped with red ball gags. A limping chase on foot leads them both into a pawnshop, where Butch punches out Marsellus and the proprietor, Maynard, concusses Butch. The next morning, Butch heads to his apartment to fetch a watch while there, he kills Vincent (John Travolta) and hits Marsellus with the car. The setup: the boxer Butch Coolidge (played by a 39-year-old Bruce Willis) double-crosses crime boss Marsellus Wallace (Ving Rhames) instead of throwing a prizefight, he bets on himself and wins. No scene upended more expectations than the pawn shop sequence (SPOILER ALERT - if you haven’t ever seen the movie, this is the moment when you should stop reading and go do that.
But when Quentin Tarantino’s film debuted at the Cannes Film Festival in May 1994, it thrilled and shocked the audience in equal measures.
Pulp Fiction has become so canonized as a modern classic, it’s easy to forget how transgressive it was on its release twenty years ago.