A Quarter-Century Rift: Avary and Tarantino’s Long Falling-Out and the Strange Reconciliation

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A Quarter-Century Rift: Avary and Tarantino’s Long Falling-Out and the Strange Reconciliation

Roger Avary & Quentin Tarantino / 1990s-2020s

Roger Avary and Quentin Tarantino were close collaborators in the early 1990s—Avary contributed the Butch Coolidge/gold watch storyline to what became Pulp Fiction—but the two endured a highly publicized falling-out that lasted nearly twenty-five years. The precise causes were never fully litigated in public, but the rupture was long enough that industry gossip pronounced the partnership over. The reconciliation was as odd as the split: Tarantino said he heard Avary on a 2019 Bret Easton Ellis podcast, which led to renewed contact. By 2021 the pair announced The Video Archives Podcast, a nostalgia-driven series recorded amid real VHS copies from the old Video Archives store; the first episode premiered July 19, 2022, and even Avary’s daughter Gala served as the show’s announcer. The arc—from Oscar-winning collaborators to years-long estrangement and then a public on-air reunion—became one of the more unusual personal sagas to issue from the Pulp Fiction orbit.