October 14, 1994: "Pulp Fiction" Premieres

October 14, 1994: A big day for movie premieres. Pulp Fiction premieres. It has a sports connection, with Bruce Willis playing a boxer. Willis' character ends up killing John Travolta's -- but not in the ring. Willis and Travolta both made big comebacks in this Quentin Tarantino film. But both have habits of following up big comebacks with laughably bad films. The film also raises Samuel L. Jackson to superstar status.

Someone made the point that Willis, the 1988 action star, killing Travolta, the 1977 blockbuster star, was a metaphor for the action films of the 1980s ending the "New Hollywood" era that began, essentially, with Arthur Penn's Bonnie and Clyde in 1967 and ending with Martin Scorcese's Raging Bull in 1980.

In a 2014 episode of the YouTube series Epic Rap Battles of History, rapper Michael "Wax" Jones played Tarantino. It became a "battle royale" of film directors, with "Nice" Peter Shukoff playing Steven Spielberg and Michael Bay, while "Epic" Lloyd Ahlquist played Alfred Hitchcock, and rapper Ruggles Outbound played Stanley Kubrick.

*

Hoop Dreams premieres. It is a documentary directed by Steve James, about two boys in Chicago who love basketball, William Gates and Arthur Agee. They struggled through their crime-ridden neighborhood and their development as high school players.

After the documentary, Gates went to Marquette University, played there for 4 seasons, and went undrafted. He became a minister. Arthur Agee went to Arkansas State University, also went undrafted, and played a season for the minor-league Winnipeg Cyclones. He went into media, and he and Gates reunited to start a podcast in 2021.

And Exit to Eden premieres, based very loosely on the novel by Anne Rice, which was not a comedy. But when you've got Dan Aykroyd and Rosie O'Donnell playing cops, what are you going to do?

There are 2 great lines in this film about a BDSM resort island. Aykroyd yells to O'Donnell, "How can we be the only people on this island without handcuffs?" And O'Donnell is faced by a shirtless, very chiseled man, who asks her, "How can I fulfill your fantasy?" She says, "Go paint my house."

She was a lot thinner then.

That's all that's worth it from this movie. There, I just saved you 1 hour, 56 minutes, 2 dollars and 99 cents.

*

October 14, 1994 was a Friday. Jared Goff, the quarterback who led the Los Angeles Rams to (but not to win) Super Bowl LIII, was born.

Football was in midweek. Baseball's postseason was canceled due to the Strike of '94. The NHL was in lockout. And the NBA season hadn't started yet. So there were no scores on this historic day.