Quentin Tarantino took movie goers by storm with his hard boiled stories, off beat characters and snappy dialogue. A lot of his early work stemmed from one 500 page script, broken down into pieces for multiple films. All happening under the umbrella of what would become a wider “Tarantino Verse”.

This almost mythical script was written in 1987 with friend and co worker Roger Avary, while they worked as video clerks at Video Archives. The script would go on to be the concept of Natural Born Killers, True Romance and some aspects of Pulp Fiction.

The original title “The Open Road” was an early screenplay of Roger Avarys about an “odd couple relationship between a uptight business man and a wild female hitchhiker.”

Avary struggled on finishing his 50 page script and turned to his co worker Quentin for help. Quentin returned with over 500 handwritten pages, which Avary described as “The Bible of Pop Culture. Because of its heavy dialogue and references.

“[Quentin] transformed it into something much more brilliant that will eventually become the bits and pieces that make up the foundations of “True Romance”, “Natural Born Killers”, and “Pulp Fiction”.

– Roger Avary

Quentin had transformed the business man into Clarence a comic book store clerk and the hitchhiker into a call girl named Alabama.

At one point in Quentin’s script The character Clarence was writing a story while on the run across the country with his wife Alabama, and that story within the story was Natural Born Killers.

One of the biggest differences between the original version of Natural Born Killers and Oliver Stone’s final product is that in Quentin’s the main character was Wayne Gale (ultimately played by Robert Downey Jr), accompanied by his crew Scott (cameraman), Roger (soundman), and Julie (assistant).

Their first appearance was in a restaurant described as “adorned with the standard Denny’s décor” with the characters’ actions “to be played at a rapid-fire His Girl Friday pace”. This scene was changed and used for Pumpkin (Tim Roth) and Honey Bunny’s (Amanda Plummer) introduction in Pulp Fiction, which happens at a diner with the aforementioned characteristics and at a similar pace.

As long as the script was, neither Quentin or Roger knew how to end this 500 page story. So instead it was broken up into separate screenplays, One became True Romance which was sold to director Tony Scott. The other became Natural Born Killers which was sold to Warner Bros and was directed by Oliver Stone. Much to Quentin’s dismay Oliver Stone rewrote a lot of his original script for the film.