It was written long before 1993 and was his first full length screenplay. It started as a short film he wrote in the mid 80's, My Best Friend's Birthday. He then adapted that script into a 500 page screenplay which he would end up splitting into 2 seperate screenplays, True Romance and Natural Born Killers. Tony Scott wanted to direct both True Romance and Resevoir Dogs, but Tarantino said he could only choose 1. I don't think Tony has ever given the reason why he chose True Romance, but my guess is because Resevoir Dogs is a complete ripoff of Ringo Lam's 1987 movie City On Fire. That would begin a long career of Tarantino ripping off other director's films.
The only part of the script that was changed was the final scene. Tarantino's version has Clarence dying. Scott's response to this,
“I was criticized for making it such a sweet and romantic end, but honestly, in my heart of hearts, I did this for creative reasons and not for commercial reasons. I wasn’t a sell-out. This was how I believed the movie should end, and I wanted to see my characters survive and live happily ever after, because, for me, the movie is a strange nursery rhyme, and I want my characters to continue on to live happily ever after.”
Besides that, the script is verbatim to Tarantino's screenplay minus a few ad libbed lines by Brad Pitt.
I used to think this way, but as I continue to watch more and more old films, I realize what a crock of shit it all is. You think Pulp Fiction created imitators? Tarantino himself is an imitator. The "iconic" dance scene directly ripped off from Federico Fellini's film 8 1/2. Or having a storyline centered around what's inside a briefcase which is directly ripped off from the 1955 movie Kiss Me Deadly. I'll go further with a quote from an article by David Foster Wallace as I cannot articulate myself as well as he can.
"The Band-Aid on the neck of Pulp Fiction's Marcellus Wallace-unexplained, visually incongruous, and featured prominently in three separate setups-is textbook Lynch. As are the long, self-consciously mundane dialogues on foot massages, pork bellies, TV pilots, etc. that punctuate Pulp Fiction's violence, a violence whose creepy-comic stylization is also Lynchian. The peculiar narrative tone of Tarantino's films-the thing that makes them seem at once strident and obscure, not-quite-clear in a haunting way-is Lynch's; Lynch invented this tone. It seems to me fair to say that the commercial Hollywood phenomenon that is Mr. Quentin Tarantino would not exist without David Lynch as a touchstone, a set of allusive codes and contexts in the viewers midbrain. In a way, what Tarantino has done with the French New Wave and with Lynch is what Pat Boone did with rhythm and blues: He's found (ingeniously) a way to take what is ragged and distinctive and menacing about their work and homogenize it, churn it until it's smooth and cool and hygienic enough for mass consumption. Reservoir Dogs, for example, with its comically banal lunch chatter, creepily otiose code names, and intrusive soundtrack of campy pop from decades past, is a Lynch movie made commercial, i.e., fast, linear, and with what was idiosyncratically surreal now made fashionably (i.e., "hiply") surreal."
@CindyO's Bottom Boy It's a great movie with some very iconic scenes and characters like Drexl Spivey and the Sicilian Scene but it's not without it's flaws IMO.
