Watching Pulp Fiction the Way Tarantino Intended: In His Own Theater

On the Wednesday following the 2024 U.S. election, an employee at the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles introduced a 30th-anniversary screening of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction by reminding the packed audience that the movie they were about to see would be projected on film, specifically a brand-new 35-millimeter print. Because, he continued, we were in “the world’s greatest theater, the New Beverly Cinema, where it’s always on film. Okay? That’s one thing you can count on in this sick sad world. If it’s on our calendar, it’s playing on real actual film.”

The local theater scene is one of the best things about living in Los Angeles — beyond the multiplexes, dozens of independent movie houses around town specialize not in new releases, but in classic and/or cult film. And one of the most well-known of these theaters is the New Beverly, which originally began screening movies in the 1950s and was purchased by Tarantino in 2007.

The New Bev is held up as a literal “temple to cinema,” as the aforementioned employee referred to it during his introduction, and since Tarantino’s acquisition, the joint has become a leading force in keeping actual film projection alive. “As long as I’m alive, and as long as I’m rich, the New Bev will be showing double features in 35mm,” the theater’s official website quotes Tarantino as saying.

Director Kevin Smith, who has recently entered the ranks of being a movie theater owner himself, noted in a recent interview with Consequence that emphasizing film projection was a privilege very specific to Tarantino: “He’s a rich movie theater owner, because he only shows 35-millimeter prints that come from his library. I love Quentin, he’s the gold standard and whatnot, but if I tried to live off 35-millimeter prints in suburban New Jersey, that wouldn’t do it for us. [Moviegoers there] don’t care whether it’s on 35 or in digital.”

In Los Angeles, that’s a different story, and locals benefit from Tarantino’s passion for the format. There are lots of touches that make the New Bev feel like it belongs to a cinephile, especially if you’re one of those film nerds who dreams of owning their own movie theater. (If you’re a film nerd and you haven’t thought about owning your own movie theater, you’re lying.) The popcorn is top-notch, freshly popped, and quite reasonably priced. You can’t get “a glass of beer, like in a bar” the way that Pulp Fiction’s Vincent (John Travolta) describes getting at a movie theater in Amsterdam. But there’s still a fun range of sodas available, and the “Okja dog” is one of the best veggie hot dogs I’ve ever had.

While there’s plenty of Tarantino memorabilia featured in the lobby, especially homages to Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, it’s not exclusively a home for Tarantino films — in recent years I’ve gone there to see movies including The Muppet Christmas Carol, Bound, Set It Off, Sneakers, Field of Dreams, Speed Racer, and Mad Max: Fury Road. (Those last two were a double feature, and it was awesome.)

That said, there was something special about seeing arguably Tarantino’s most famous film in the conditions he would consider the most optimal. And it came with a pre-show (also projected on film) featuring, in chronological order:

• A “commercial” for Red Apple Cigarettes (the preferred tobacco brand of the Tarantino-verse), including James Marsden’s deleted cameo as Burt Reynolds from Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood.
• The animated short Red Hot Riding Hood, a sexed-up post-modern spin on the fairy tale directed by legendary Tex Avery. The New Bev always screens a cartoon before its feature selections, a choice usually driven by some thematic relevance: For example, a baseball-focused short played before a recent matinee of Field of Dreams. My belief is that Red Hot Riding Hood was picked because of its lupine antagonist, a nod to Pulp Fiction’s Winston Wolf (Harvey Keitel).
• Three movie trailers: Leon: The Professional, Reality Bites, and Ed Wood. These trailers don’t reflect upcoming releases, but instead are meant to deliver some sort of thematic point — in this case, all three films were released in 1994, plunging the audience into that era.
• And then, following Tarantino’s favorite old-school Our Feature Presentation intro, the film itself.

The surprising thing about watching Pulp Fiction with a fully engaged crowd is that it’s not a movie designed to elicit a massive reaction from the audience. So much of the humor, while outstanding, is dry enough to inspire chuckles, not guffaws, and its biggest reveals — especially the non-chronological storytelling structure, which leads to the shocking mid-film death of John Travolta — don’t necessarily elicit gasps. (Okay, in fairness, the movie is 30 years old and 90 percent of this crowd, minimum, knew it was coming.)

However, the one element that was definitely improved by the theatrical experience was everything to do with the gold watch Butch (Bruce Willis) inherited from his father. First, Captain Koons’s (Christopher Walken) monologue about the watch’s long journey across time does build to comic genius by the end — starting with the line “he hid it, in the one place he knew he could hide something: his ass,” followed by the reveal that Koons also “hid this uncomfortable piece of metal up my ass for two years,” and then buttoned with Koons extending the aforementioned watch to the young boy. Great laughs throughout.

But really it’s later, when Butch finds out that Fabienne (Maria de Medeiros) forgot to bring it with her when she packed up his stuff, that the real payoff occurs: “You know what my father went through to give me that watch?” Willis’s nuanced delivery really slaps the audience back to remembering what, exactly, his father did do to give him that watch, and while it wasn’t a huge laugh at first, the way it built was pretty delicious.

That’s the magic of revival houses, the way they give second or third or fourth life to great movies, offering you a whole new perspective on something you’ve maybe only seen on a significantly smaller screen. (As a ’90s kid, I cannot tell you how many times I’ve seen Pulp Fiction over the past 30 years, but I have no memory of ever getting to see it in a theater before this week.) And the new 35mm print, should you have a chance to watch it, is damn clean, the warmth of Andrzej Sekula’s cinematography really highlighted by the format.

Thirty years later, what’s most striking about Pulp Fiction is that all of Tarantino’s retro touches — from the needle drops to everything going on with Jack Rabbit Slim’s — lend the movie a timeless quality that we maybe didn’t appreciate during its original release. There’s something singular about the world he creates on screen that translates directly to the very theater it was screened in: A throwback to a different time that still manages to feel vibrant and alive. It gives the film a very specific kind of immortality — an immortality enabled by the temples in which it’s worshipped.