Pulp Fiction Poster as a Dorm Room Staple
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In 1994, Miramax’s art team set out to make a movie poster that captured the vibe and influences of Quentin Tarantino’s indie breakout. Thirty years later, it’s still the go-to choice of freshmen across the country.
The first time David Astramskas saw Pulp Fiction, a fire erupted inside his theater. It was opening weekend, October 1994. He was a senior in high school, a self-described "huge film nerd," and an early Quentin Tarantino acolyte. The smoky interruption, just 20 minutes in, seemed like a sick prank. "I’m already like, ‘This is the most awesome movie I’ve ever seen,’" he says. "I just didn’t want to leave."
Two days later, he cut school and returned to the multiplex in Titusville, Florida. Like most moviegoers, the 17-year-old was struck by Pulp Fiction’s profane dialogue, deep references to ’70s and ’80s exploitation films, and stellar soundtrack. Over the next couple of weeks, he saw Pulp Fiction three more times.
Released 30 years ago this week, Pulp Fiction marked a seismic shift for American independent film. Its nonlinear triptych of gangster stories fused chest-stabbing violence with referential humor and spoke directly to Generation X’s pop-cultural sensibilities. It announced Tarantino as a singular voice, reinvented the movie soundtrack, and resurrected John Travolta’s career. And, under Miramax, it became the first indie to break $100 million at the U.S. box office, inspiring countless knockoffs from writers, directors, and producers eager to reproduce its blood-soaked ensemble thrills.
By the time Astramskas attended Florida State University a year later, Tarantino was no longer a niche name. Throughout college campuses, film students were monologuing passages from the Book of Ezekiel, twisting to Chubby Checker, and showing up to McDonald’s to order royales with cheese. But the movie’s widespread popularity didn’t hit him until he walked into his freshman dorm room, where his new roommate had already taped up a Pulp Fiction poster on the wall. Astramskas was surprised. What were the chances a stranger had the poster of his favorite movie? Then he walked through the rest of his residence hall: "Everyone had it."
Indeed, as Pulp Fiction took over Hollywood’s imagination, its poster took over college dorm rooms across the country. The brainchild of Miramax’s creative director, James Verdesoto, it resembles a vintage weathered paperback cover, foregrounding Uma Thurman in character as Mia Wallace lounging on a bed with her legs crossed in the air, holding a lit cigarette and staring seductively beside a pistol and pulp novel. It’s sexy, mysterious, and dangerous—a modern take on the mid-century femme fatale that could appeal to film bros and third-wave feminists alike. And perhaps most importantly, it’s a scene that never takes place in the movie itself. "It’s not like we pulled a still from the set," says David Dinerstein, Miramax’s former head of marketing. "This was a photo shoot designed specifically to provide a feeling similar to the one you would experience after seeing the film."
Three decades later, the Pulp Fiction poster remains inseparably linked to the movie’s groundbreaking success and evolving place in American culture. It’s iconic and clichéd, empowering and provocative, an annual top seller among online poster distributors and frequently purchased at college campus flea markets, where it’s still reaching new generations. To have it on your wall, whether or not you’d seen the movie, signified fandom, aspiration, and something else entirely. "Through association," Verdesoto says, "you became as cool as the movie."
In the spring of 1994, after Pulp Fiction was selected to compete at the Cannes Film Festival, Miramax executives called on their art team to brainstorm poster ideas and key art for the world premiere. As creative director, Verdesoto had been responsible for numerous fast-tracked movie campaigns over the previous several years, so he was used to cramped time frames. "We were always working on multiple movies," says creative executive Pamela Lubell. "Our deadlines were always yesterday."
Luckily, all Verdesoto really needed was the movie’s title to spark an idea. He dived into the studio’s vast personal art library and scoured Barnes & Noble with Lubell for book covers from 1940s and 1950s pulp fiction novels. The pair wanted to find a variety of frayed-edge material to compare and examine their graphic borders, alluring compositions, and rough textures. As Verdesoto describes them, the small, paperback, pocket-sized crime thrillers all shared similar features: "a girl with a gun, a bed, a doorway, alleyways, and a guy with a fedora hat." They invoked mystery and tension and were often plastered with bold-colored titles near the top.
Once his team read the script and saw some of the movie’s rough cuts, Verdesoto started sketching out paperback cover ideas that designer Tod Tarhan mocked up digitally. Most of them centered Mia with that pulp novel and cigarette and a cunning look in her eye. One specifically featured her glancing over her shoulder at two men inside a doorway, with a bright red and yellow title and a green circular stamp highlighting Tarantino’s name. To Verdesoto, capturing the movie’s plot wasn’t a huge concern. He was going after a mood. "We were more focusing on the tone of replicating the title and what it really represented as a new idea in the pop culture marketplace," Verdesoto says.
While the decision to create a poster based around pulpy covers made aesthetic and stylistic sense, keeping the design focused on one person had practical purposes, too. Considering the movie’s nonlinear structure, multiple story lines, dozens of characters, and handful of stars, accommodating everything and everyone would have cluttered the frame. "If you’re going to provide [the cast] equal likeness, it’s typically not going to be a very arresting piece of key art or a poster," Dinerstein says. "We were trying to hone this down and say, what can we do that’s iconic that will represent sort of the feeling for this movie?"
After getting sketch approval from Bob and Harvey Weinstein, Tarantino, and producer Lawrence Bender, Lubell orchestrated a photo shoot in Los Angeles with photographer Firooz Zahedi and the entire cast. The goal was to capture group shots for publicity material and individual shots with Thurman for the poster. The initial plan was to have Thurman wear the same sort of white men’s button-down shirt that Mia wears in the movie, but Thurman argued for something sleeker—a black shirt, skirt, and heels. That didn’t match the sketch, but "I think she made a really, really good decision," Lubell says. "If she was in a white shirt, it would pop too much." Lubell also let Thurman borrow her own red-stained glass necklace after the wardrobe team forgot to bring jewelry. "It takes a village," she says with a laugh.
Throughout the day, Zahedi captured a host of images with Thurman sitting cross-legged and lying on the bed, pointing the gun up to her chin with a cigarette in her mouth. Verdesoto was pleased with the spread of photos but narrowed in on one in which Thurman was lying prone, with the gun out of her hand. "It was just that right angle of her face, the cigarette, the twist of the body, and the scale, the proportion of depth that’s created with the legs," he says. It also matched the composition he and Tarhan had sketched, but with an orange-lit glow he never accounted for in their drawings. "This is a pose that was very specifically designed to be iconic," Dinerstein says.
In the buildup to the festival, the art team packaged the photo shoot results—specifically Thurman’s pose—into a variety of promotional graphics, stylized like ripped posters that exposed the actors’ names. Miramax used the artwork for luncheons, parties, and theaters, providing a taste of its hard-boiled neo-noir without the full credits. When the movie eventually won the Palme d’Or, the team used the same ripped-poster concept, added its winning credentials, and substituted its stars’ names with definitions of the word "pulp" ("a soft, moist, shapeless mass of matter") for another summer teaser.
As the movie traveled the festival circuit that season, culminating in an opening-night run at the New York Film Festival, Verdesoto and Tarhan put the final touches on an official poster. They scarred the edges of the image in white scratches, with the bottom-right corner made to look nearly torn off. And as in the teasers, they used Thurman’s same pose beneath a red banner filled with the movie’s cast and crew, along with a bright yellow title. "That was just kind of an exaggerated pop of color that was lifted from the pulp novels from that era," Verdesoto says.
Ahead of its official opening on October 14, Miramax sent the poster to 1,100 theaters across the country. It didn’t have a long shelf life. Almost immediately, Lucky Strike threatened to sue the studio for using its name and logo on the cigarette pack lying beside Thurman. Miramax eventually recalled them while the art team produced a second run. The replacement blurred out the cigarette box this time but also changed and enlarged the title font, added the cast’s credits on its left side, propped up a new gun on Thurman’s pillow, and swapped out Norman Bligh’s novel Harlot in Her Heart with a fake paperback called Pulp Fiction.
After making more than $213 million at the global box office, the awards soon followed. Pulp Fiction earned seven Oscar nominations (including Best Picture), Tarantino won Best Original Screenplay, and Verdesoto’s team won a Key Art Award (a celebration of the best movie advertising) for the poster. "I take a tremendous amount of pride in that poster, but people would not have remembered it if the film was not a successful film at the box office," Dinerstein says. "They sort of go hand in hand."
Even if Pulp Fiction had fizzled financially during its theatrical run, there were plenty of reasons for college kids in the mid-’90s to latch on to it. The endless profanity, the unexpected ultraviolence, the pseudo-intellectual dialogue, the sexually explicit material, the delicious needle drops. Tarantino had merged all of his sensibilities, influences, and video-rental background into dialogue with one another, becoming a rock-star influencer not only for young filmmakers and students eager to attain similar subversive success but also for a generation thirsty to separate themselves.
So how did you prove you were a card-carrying member of the cult of Tarantino? You bought a Pulp Fiction poster.
There was plenty of time to become a believer, too: The movie reached students in stages, becoming available to rent on VHS in 1995 and then to purchase in 1996, before debuting on television and entering the DVD market in 1997. Over those three years, as Tarantino developed more subscribers to his provocative style, it became easy to acquire Pulp posters from the early adopters. "One good thing about trying to acquire posters back then is most people didn’t live in a dorm for more than two years," Astramkas says. "Everyone’s throwing stuff on classified ads or just trading things or giving them away at the end of each semester, as long as they didn’t rip."
As much the Pulp poster was an ode to its director, it also had a deeper power. According to Chris Hansen, a film and media professor at Baylor University, it became a symbol of your identity and personality. "One of the things I try to tell my students when they’re shooting locations is not to shoot everything in your apartment, because all that we’re going to see are movie posters," he says. "Your locations tell us a lot about who your characters are—and if all we see are movie posters, and we know it’s your apartment, then all your characters are just filmmaking students, because that’s what film students put in their rooms."
Hansen was a graduate film student when he saw Pulp for the first time. As an aspiring filmmaker, he remembers emerging from his local theater in Virginia ready to throw out all the screenwriting lessons he’d learned. "The possibilities were just endless," he says. That night, he stood outside "pontificating" about the movie’s thrills with his friends for an hour. "I just remember talking and talking to the point that I probably was getting annoying because it just fired my neurons," Hansen says. "You came out thinking, ‘Oh, you can do that? You can break all these rules?’ That was the spirit of it—this kind of ‘screw you’ attitude, we can do whatever we want."
Now an avid movie poster collector, Hansen admits he used to have a clichéd Marilyn Monroe poster in his undergrad dorm in the late ’80s. Had he attended college when Pulp was released, Thurman would have been on his wall. "You don’t have to love the movie, you don’t have to love Tarantino, and you don’t have to love the independent cinema movement of the ’90s," he says, "but her laying on the bed in that provocative pose with the gun … it makes her a Marilyn Monroe figure for another generation."
As he considers the poster’s effect on a bunch of mostly male 20-somethings, Dinerstein agrees. Mia Wallace (a character modeled after French New Wave actress Anna Karina) is charismatic, stylish, and unpredictable—fiercely independent yet deeply flawed. A modern woman who seems plucked from the past. Even if you knew her only from the poster, those slippery attributes emanated from her sultry stare and pose. "It’s a pinup to some degree, right? But it’s a pinup where you can get away with art," Dinserstein says. "You have a sexy woman. It’s dangerous. It’s pulpy, and it can lead to conversation. There is an excuse for guys to have it on their walls, and women are cool to have it on their walls because she’s represented as a badass in this film."
Mostly, the poster felt like a real work of art and looked nothing like its contemporary (and future) competition. Throughout the decade and into the 21st century, photography and movie stills became the primary sources for posters. As the Film/Art Gallery recently wrote, "the introduction of Photoshop offered designers the opportunity to craft more intricate, hyper-real, detail-rich designs," arguing that this era "gave birth to the modern, ensemble-style movie poster." The Pulp poster, meanwhile, wasn’t illustrated, centered only one character, and didn’t give away anything about the plot.
Though, as he thinks about all the small accessories surrounding Mia on the bed, Verdesoto makes a comical admission—and another guess at why the poster stood out: "I feel like we were the beginning of Easter eggs in movie posters."
Look around nearly every online movie poster vendor today, and you’ll likely see the Pulp Fiction poster under its "Most Popular" or "Bestselling" categories. In the 30 years since it was plastered on theater walls, it has existed in the pantheon of dorm-room poster staples, alongside The Godfather, Abbey Road, John Belushi "College," Scarface, Bob Marley, Jurassic Park, and Starry Night. Since David Wallach took over as owner of Movieposters.com about a decade ago, he says he’s sold an average of 1,500 Pulp Fiction poster reprints each year, consistently making it a top-15 poster in their inventory. "It still resonates with so many people," he says. "It stayed in people’s minds, they watched it as a kid, and they want to keep reliving that by having that poster up on their wall."
The sales haven’t slowed down at universities, either. An annual fixture on college campuses and one of the largest manufacturers and publishers of posters in the country, the College Poster Sale Company promises to "offer our students the largest, the most diverse selection." Still, the Pulp poster has a cachet with younger buyers, maintaining its status as a top-20-selling item for the organization. "It’s been steady the last five years, and it’s really taken on another life cycle," says Blake Liguori, one of the company’s event coordinators. "You’re finally on your own. You have a dorm room that’s blank. You wanna fill it up with stuff and express yourself." That’s true no matter what generation you’re from.
According to Liguori, the company, which has been around for about five decades, analyzes its yearly sales and cross-checks its inventory from movie studios to determine what should keep being sold at various campus flea markets. "You’ve gotta keep things fresh, but you’ll have to also take into mind these evergreen items," he says. The Pulp Fiction poster, he adds, is in the same sales ballpark as Fight Club, another movie that "had a resurgence this year," along with Parasite, Chance the Rapper, Dua Lipa, Jimi Hendrix, and the Pyramid of Greatness from Parks and Recreation. Ironically, the Pulp poster has also had to compete with "Duo Guns," the other popular Pulp Fiction poster that features a black-and-white photo of Samuel L. Jackson and Travolta pointing their guns beside each other. "I did see that image a lot as a poster, too," Hansen remembers. "I just always thought it’s a little more straightforward." Most of those 24x36 reprints cost close to $20, but there are plenty of collectors willing to shell out for classic, first-edition Pulp posters. The ultra-rare originals with the Lucky Strike branding have been priced by some distributors at over $7,000.
Still, even as the poster has remained a hot item, its perception has changed over the past decade. Partly due to its oversaturation, it has become an easy target for its association with toxic film and frat bros eager to tout their (almost always minimal) cinematic credentials and modern masculine taste. A decade ago, the movie was ranked "the second worst movie poster you can choose" by Elite Daily, who equated the poster’s hypothetical buyer to "a film major who’s never actually been behind a camera before and thinks his or her taste in cinema is refined after seeing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon a bunch of times."
That might discourage some—and has encouraged plenty of others to create their own unique versions to sell on sites like Etsy—but perceptions keep changing. Considering that the movie poster has become outdated and its sales are in decline, thanks in large part to the growth of streaming movies and digital trailers, the Pulp poster will likely persist as a classic. At least, as long as the movie persists as one, too. Lubell isn’t worried: "I just think people will always love that film," she says.
She has some recent anecdotal proof. Every Sunday, she walks by a flea market on the Upper West Side, where she lives. Last month, as she perused tables, she passed some poster sellers on the outskirts of Columbus Avenue and spotted an original Pulp poster. The vendor had marked it for $25. "I was like, ‘What?’ I said, ‘If you want to make money, you need to bump that up—this is a collector’s item!’" A couple weeks later, she saw the same vendor and asked if he’d had any luck.
"Thank you so much," he told her. "I sold the poster for $100."
Jake Kring-Schreifels is a sports and entertainment writer based in New York. His work has also appeared in Esquire.com, GQ.com, and The New York Times.
https://www.theringer.com/movies/2024/10/10/24266131/pulp-fiction-poster-history-dorm-rooms