‘People would just fall at his feet’: Margaret Cho on Tarantino’s post-Pulp Fiction fame
Margaret Cho looks back at when Quentin Tarantino became Hollywood’s center of attention after Pulp Fiction — and the specific spark she remembers is the real kicker.
At Directors Guild events in the mid-’90s, Margaret Cho says she watched rooms literally rise for Quentin Tarantino. As his Pulp Fiction fame detonated, even Billy Wilder and Martin Scorsese stood with their tables to greet him when he walked in.
“People would just fall at his feet, go crazy, try to get him aside,” Cho recalled on the Dinky Podcast. “I was really freaked out by it, ” since “nobody should have that much power.”
Cho says their first date was at Hollywood ’s Musso & Frank, where the conversation was steeped in old-studio lore. Despite the frenzy around him, she remembers Tarantino rolling up to big nights in a dented Geo Metro, handing it to the valet while actors angled to pitch him scripts at the curb.
Life in the blast radius
Dating him felt like film school, Cho says. After Tarantino bought out inventory from his old video- store job at Video Archives, she remembers the two of them tearing through about 8,000 movies.
The Denny’s pitch
John Cusack added his own time-capsule story: on the Happy Sad Confused podcast, he said Tarantino once performed the entire plot of Pulp Fiction for him at a Denny’s booth — no script pages, just a marathon, animated pitch over dinner.
Cusack said their chat even detoured into home-theater talk, with Tarantino geeking out about a new TV and screening room. Decades later, Cusack still calls it a cool story to have witnessed.
Host Josh Horowitz noted that Tarantino reportedly had Cusack at the top of his list for the part Eric Stoltz eventually played. Cusack said the offer never reached him — so he never turned it down — and Horowitz joked the director might still have the number saved, waiting for a callback.
Cho’s full conversation is set to post on the Dinky Podcast on Nov. 3.