Quentin Tarantino Auctioning 7 Scenes No One Has Ever Seen From One Of His Best Movies
Quentin Tarantino is auctioning pieces of movie history.
This article is more than 2 years old
Quentin Tarantino is granting one lucky bidder paid access to never-before-seen Pulp Fiction content, a recent press release (via GlobeNewswire) reveals. The prolific writer-director is auctioning off seven uncut scenes from his first Oscar win in the form of “secret” NFTs: verifiable non-fungible assets originated by the Secret Network, the world’s first layer one blockchain specializing in private-by-default tokens. In a statement, Tarantino writes: “I’m excited to be presenting these exclusive scenes from Pulp Fiction to fans. Secret Network and secret NFTs provide a whole new world of connecting fans and artists, and I’m thrilled to be a part of that.” The extended sequences are currently being peddled on OpenSea, the largest NFT marketplace on the Internet.
Aside from previously unreleased scenes, Quentin Tarantino is also selling handwritten first drafts of the screenplay as well as exclusive commentary on Pulp Fiction and Tarantino himself. These items will also be offered as secret NFTs on OpenSea, alongside the director’s other giveaways.
Secret NFTs are the first of their kind to allow buyers and creators full control over what elements of a sale to publicize or keep under wraps. NFTs in general are public; though ownership is exclusive to the winning bidder, the content of the NFTs themselves are viewable by anyone online. SCRT Labs, the core development company behind the Secret Network, made it so any NFT’s metadata can be tweaked by either owner or seller to suit their preferred privacy settings. Both parties can now readily choose which parts of an NFT to make public or private, updating the item’s metadata accordingly. The Secret Network is the first blockchain employing data privacy by default for smart contracts, with Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction collection being SCRT Labs’s first major secret NFT undertaking.
Quentin Tarantino started his own cinematic style when he created Reservoir Dogs in 1992. Similarly, the invention of secret NFTs may already be revolutionizing copyright law and content creation more than regular NFTs already have. First introduced on the mainnet in February 2020, secret NFTs come with specialized functionality that rewrites privacy options to protect users from infringement, unnecessary exposure, and copyright issues that may still crop up with the use of standard NFTs. After all, there are many ways artworks, music, and behind-the-scenes footage can be pirated and creators unwittingly compromised, and exposure of otherwise private trade information is one of them. At the end of the day, it matters little who owns an NFT when the item itself is accessible on a worldwide scale.
Secret NFTs like Quentin Tarantino’s lot take into account the possibility of turning raw information into NFTs, a unique commodity not previously considered likely to become non-fungible tokens. Raw info would require creators and customers to hide these items in addition to keeping ownership exclusive, and NFTs weren’t previously capable of that. But thanks to SCRT Labs, privacy-by-default NFTs are finally possible and will soon hit the pipeline.
Talk about Quentin Tarantino making relevant strides in pop culture even when he’s not making movies. NFTs are the new cool when it comes to cryptocurrency, with secret NFTs being the Pulp Fiction of most old-school hardboiled crime fiction. Pulp Fiction radically changed the landscape of postmodern cinema when it came out to universal acclaim in 1994, spawning and inspiring a host of similar films; it continues to be one of Hollywood’s greatest movies and was inducted into the United States Film Registry in 2013 for “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant” content. It starred John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, and Uma Thurman in era-defining roles that shaped their careers for decades to come.
Quentin Tarantino’s NFTs are already up for bidding on OpenSea.
