by Alex Rudolph, Contributor

Watching Pulp Fiction tells me a lot about being Quentin Tarantino-- what movies he liked in 1994, what actors he wanted to work with, what slurs he felt entitled saying. Watching Things To Do In Denver When You're Dead and 2 Days in the Valley tells me a lot about being a person who has seen Pulp Fiction.

To this day, screenwriters steal from Tarantino's early movies as shamelessly as he stole the Reservoir Dogs codename scheme from The Taking of Pelham 123. Sometimes it's abstract, an "I know it when I see it" feeling that the producers had originally pictured Samuel-L.-Jackson-in-Jules-Winfield-mode for the lead role. Sometimes it's as specific as the way extreme violence is played for laughs, or the inclusion of a killer who repeatedly lays out an intricate code. It usually isn't even "This is like the slapstick violence in Kill Bill," but "This has the same beats as the scene in Pulp Fiction where poor Phil LaMarr's head explodes in the back of that car."

And Tarantino, of course, didn't invent that at all. His most esteemed contemporaries, the Coen Brothers, had also made bizarre violence their trademark from their debut film (and had been working on set-pieces in that vein since their days of assisting Sam Raimi on his movies).

The hall-of-mirrors conversation that inevitably sprouts from the "movies that ripped off Pulp Fiction" conversation is the "movies that Pulp Fiction ripped off" one.  When Guy Ritchie made Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, he was responding to the moment Tarantino's movie had created, and, to be sure, some of the things he's taking from Pulp Fiction are things Tarantino had himself taken from, say, Alex Cox's Repo Man. Maybe Ritchie was aware of that and his influences just happened to align with Tarantino's. Maybe these two directors, in a moment of serendipity, wrote films that drew from the same cosmic consciousness and Tarantino just got his movie made first. It isn't hard to believe two people individually fell in love with Martin Scorsese's tone and Robert Altman's interconnecting short stories.

But everybody was doing this all of a sudden. Keifer Sutherland and Kevin Spacey used their cultural cache to make their directorial debuts with Pulp Fiction rip-offs, Troy Duffy sold Boondock Saints to Miramax on the unspoken promise he was going to make their next Pulp Fiction and directors like Joe Carnahan, Guy Ritchie and Doug Liman kickstarted long, varied careers by copying the smartest kid in class' test. There are also, of course, a dozen would-be auteurs who made movies like Love and a .45 and then vanished into anonymous TV work.

Young screenwriters and directors gravitated toward Pulp Fiction because it's just so much fun. You watch these interconnected stories and huge characters and you think "I could do this." You think "These people look cool in their John Woo suits and wouldn't it also be cool if I put the music in my CD player behind them as they get into car chases?"

But also, you'd have to kill the president to get as famous as Quentin Tarantino. You'd have to actually be Charles Manson or Sharon Tate to be as well-known as the guy who wrote fictionalized versions of those people in Once Upon A Time... in Hollywood. He released a book last year and the cover didn't have to say "From the director of Pulp Fiction" for the casual bookstore customer to recognize his name. That's not nothing! William Friedkin's memoir says "Legendary director of The French Connection and The Exorcist" on its cover and those films are inarguably more famous than anything Tarantino's made.

There are reasons for this beyond luck. There's marketing, there's a well-built cult of personality, there's the director's unfortunate decision to be an actor as well. The Coen brothers get interviewed on NPR and Tarantino gets interviewed on late-night TV.

And everybody wanted to be Quentin Tarantino in the 90s. After Reservoir Dogs in 1992, Pulp Fiction in 1994 and the Tony Scott-directed, Tarantino-written True Romance in 1993, Hollywood was full of people trying to use his tropes in their own ensemble crime movies. His famous backstory--enthusiastic video store clerk without a formal filmmaking education-- was inspiring and, more importantly, it was relatable. Tarantino introduced us to the royale with cheese and a thousand people got to work on their own Impossible Meat versions of the same. 

These weren't the best crime movies of the 90s. They aren't Miller's Crossing or Heat. But you can't write a history of the genre without digging through stuff like Eight Heads In A Duffel Bag, Boogie Boy, and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. I'm not going to write a history of 90s crime cinema. But I'm absolutely going to dig through this corner of it, where coincidence is king and monologues about pop culture artifacts are on everybody's lips.

Before we go too far into the movies that aped Tarantino and all the directors who wanted to be him, we have to look at those three movies that started everything.

Reservoir Dogs is good and Pulp Fiction is better. Watching them together, the former feels like a rough draft of the latter. Tarantino had pet concepts and he nailed them down quickly. There are the "People think it's one way but it's really like this" discussions of pop culture theories, there's jarring violence, there are ensemble casts and long, drawn out slowburn scenes. There's that dialogue where everybody's trying to sound cool, with a recycled Mamet tic that leads everybody to repeat themselves, especially if they're pissed. The suits with skinny black ties, the trunk shots, the non-linear storytelling. Quentin Tarantino showing up and talking like he's going to get an electric shock if he doesn't say "all right?" or "okay?" at the end of every sentence.

That element-- the extended director cameo-- didn't make it into many of the imitations, the Impossible Royales. Joe Carnahan starred in his first fake Tarantino movie, but the people making these things usually knew they couldn't act. Tarantino, with his Elvis ego, knew no such limits. The dialogue in the opening scene of Reservoir Dogs is probably overwritten, but it could be that Tarantino's just that bad of a performer. It's possible he'd make anything sound bad. One element that made it into the imitations, though, was the grand overreach.

Half the characters at this table reveal themselves to be casually racist by the time the opening credits roll. I'm not going to argue about whether Tarantino himself is racist. The world doesn't need another essay about that anymore than it needs another take on how Martin Scorsese feels about Marvel movies. Smarter people have already done the arguing. I think it's clear you can write a shitty character without being a shitty person yourself. I also think it's clear when a person really wants to give himself an excuse to use certain slurs. Decide for yourself. Based purely on the number of times those slurs are used, though, you can tell this white writer-director in his late 20s thinks that bigotry is a key element of crime fiction. These are bad characters who talk badly about the bad things they do. You know what other movie has a ton of racism? Pulp Fiction. You know what other other movie has a ton of racism? True Romance. I think Tarantino was overreaching here. He thought he was smarter and more capable than he actually was, and that meant writing a bunch of stuff he would be incapable of explaining in the future.

(The racism itself is a Tarantino tropes almost nobody copied in their Pulp Fiction remakes. Brett Ratner is maybe the only contemporary white director who shares Tarantino's weird overly-comfortable use of the "n" word, but Ratner's movies usually steal more from Shane Black than anybody. And now he doesn't make movies anymore, so hey, that's a win.)

That grand overreach everywhere in the imitations. It appeared when directors filmed self-consciously shocking scenes, followed stylistic impulses because they could and not because the impulse lent itself to any of their film's themes, shot monologues that went nowhere. Like Tarantino, they did things that seemed interesting and smart but didn't have the talent to back it up. Tarantino would eventually get better about this, but movies are static and his flubs are always going to be in these first couple movies.

Reservoir Dogs still works for me. The Tim Roth/Harvey Keitel relationship is great, both in characterization and in each actor's ability to play it. Nobody's ever gotten shot in the gut better than Tim Roth. If he wasn't selling it this well, if he didn't have that demented screaming voice, it'd take a lot longer to get us on board with the stakes of the failed jewelry store robbery. Keitel, famous for playing hardasses, seems as compassionate as a person would be for a blood relative. The movie slows down way too much a few times, primarily around the Roth character's backstory, but the performances are generally good enough to see you through. Michael Madsen, for example, is so magnetic I forget how little he has to do. His flashback is wasted time. Still, the way he walks to his car and back in the middle of the torture scene is exciting in itself. Steve Buscemi and Chris Penn similarly go a long way with one-note roles.

Pulp Fiction is bigger in every way. The tension-building is still terrific. Reservoir Dogs has two great slowburn scenes, but this one has a half-dozen. Tarantino doesn't get enough credit for his ability to draw a scene out. Like all of his stand-by abilities, he can overdo it (Kill Bill 2, for my money, stretches a few of those long setpieces to the point of boredom). The last scene, and especially Samuel L. Jackson reexamining his motives and where he stands in his own monologue, is as well-written as anything else made in the 90s. Bruce Willis carefully makes his way back to his old apartment over seven or eight wordless minutes and it's captivating.

The movie is good enough and goes enough different places that the stupid parts of the dialogue don't bother me. Uma Thurman playing "hot and cold" with John Travolta and substituting "on fire" with "disco" or anything Eric Stoltz and Tarantino's characters say or the cab scene during Bruce Willis' story work to the extent that they end, that there's good dialogue around the corner. One of the smart things about opening and closing in the diner is that you lead in and lead out with the strongest material. I can trust you to take me somewhere good after that opening scene.

That's part of why Tarantino imitations are usually more fun to watch than the fake Die Hards and fake Before Sunrises that were filling theaters around this same era-- the ensemble casts and stacks of subplots mean that you're usually given at least one or two things that work, even if the rest of the film doesn't. You know if a fake Jaws is going to suck ten minutes in. The story isn't going anywhere unexpected. Throw a Pulp Fiction amount of stuff against the wall and something is going to stick. 

True Romance is the worst of the three early Tarantino movies, really only influential because of its proximity to the other two. It's also the best-looking if you, like me, are fond of Tony Scott's smoky neon rooms. In the film's most famous scene, Christian Slater's Clarence Worley heads to the home base of Gary Oldman's bizarre pimp Drexl Spivey and, once a fight breaks out, is thrown against a wall of backlit fish tanks. There is no reason for the fish tanks to be there, other than how good they'll look when they crash apart and water flies everywhere. Tarantino thought he was directing a realistic movie when he made Reservoir Dogs, but Tony Scott was able to look at the True Romance script and recognize that this kind of material could be turned into pure spectacle just as easily as it could be played straight.

Most of the problems with True Romance seem to originate at script-level, but Scott's pedigree gets in the way a little, too. For one thing, it came two years after The Last Boy Scout, a Shane Black-written classic that has better action and better dialogue. It's not even close. True Romance was Scott's sixth movie, and not all of the preceding efforts were good, but his style had defined the Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer world before Michael Bay came along and made it less coherent. Tarantino was writing a sloppy, early version of his own style, without Scott in mind, and that ultimately led to a movie where two men's similar-but-distinct excesses never completely flowed together.

In the film's DVD commentary, Tarantino cops to the whole True Romance story being a self-insert fantasy. The biggest difference between the writer and his protagonist is that one worked in a video store and the other in a comic shop. He wrote an Alice in Wonderland story about what would happen if he was suddenly thrown into the kinds of movies he loved, and that's weird. It's at least spiritually adjacent to a guy making you watch him masturbate, which is something Tarantino does a lot. I mean, he wrote a scene in From Dusk 'Til Dawn where Salma Hayek sticks her foot in his mouth. Still, knowing a young guy was writing his desires out on the page makes the film easier to accept. I buy that a loner nerd can take out everybody in his way because that's what a loner nerd would want to do. It's dream logic. From one angle, True Romance may be the most influential of the three movies-- making one of these things seemed more doable

True Romance and its more accomplished sister films hit big. They were also derivative of other, often better movies. That's the other Tarantino conversation you've seen and maybe had a million times: he ripped stuff off. He took great dialogue from Charley Varrick and put it into his movie, and I'd watch Charly Varick over Pulp Fiction in almost any circumstance. He grabbed a dozen things from Repo Man, down to the fake product names, and there are only a dozen or so movies as good as Repo Man. But people weren't trying to make Charley Varrick and Repo Man rip-offs in 1995. Tarantino's re-used tropes had nothing to do with how influential they would become. The movies were fun. People didn't care where a few lines of dialogue came from. It's the same reason the Rolling Stones have more imitators than Howlin' Wolf.

This entry in the column was necessary to get out of the way. Next time, we can start having fun. My plan is to do eight of these, covering a good spread of fake Tarantino movies from the 31 years since Reservoir Dogs came out. We'll look at what works and what doesn't, what leads to viable careers and what barely exists as the memory of a VHS cover in a demolished video store. A lot of movies get copied, but few get copied this much and few left such watchable films in their wake. I could sleep through Bourne Identity and Fast and the Furious rip-offs, but I can't wait to drown in the excess of eight fake Tarantinos.

I've been making a list of Impossible Royale With Cheese movies for a while now-- I had pitched this column years ago, but then work and wedding planning and life stuff built up. In that time, the list has swelled to 115 films. Some of them are straight rip-offs and some of them were in the wrong place at the wrong time. But that's big. That's on the cusp of trend and subgenre. Next time, we'll talk about Things to Do in Denver When You're Dead, the first big Impossible Royale With Cheese. After that, it's a whole wide world of ensemble casts shooting themselves in the face. Who knows where we'll end up?