Hey there, it's Kathy. I just wanted to let you know that you can listen to History of the 90s

early and ad-free on Amazon music included with Prime.

In 1992, a 30-year-old filmmaker spent three months in Amsterdam, hold up in a one-room

apartment with no phone or fax, finishing the movie script he'd been working on

for years.

Scribbled on the pages of a dozen school notebooks, the screenplay told the overlapping

and out-of-sequence tale of a community of criminals on the fringes of Los Angeles.

When it premiered two years later, the indie movie redefined what type of stories

Hollywood could tell, and it became an unexpected commercial hit. But it wasn't the only movie

pushing boundaries that year. There were plenty of great directors putting out some of their

best work, with films that took chances while still entertaining audiences.

I'm Kathy Kinsora, and this is History of the 90s. In this episode, we look back at some of the best

movies of 1994. Seven years before Quentin Tarantino finished his script for Pulp Fiction,

he was a 23-year-old part-time actor in high school dropout, broke without an apartment of his own.

In between acting gigs, he worked at a video rental store in suburban L.A.

That's where he came up with the idea for a movie that would alter the course of mainstream cinema.

With the help of Roger Avery, another clerk at the video store, they set to work on a screenplay

that Tarantino says combined three different common movie cliches.

The boxer who is supposed to throw a fight but doesn't.

The mob guy who is supposed to take the boss's wife out for the evening.

And two hitmen who are supposed to kill someone.

As Tarantino was writing his sections of the screenplay, he began hearing a set of bizarre

...