Rebels on the Backlot

by Sharon Waxman

  Certainly they would never grant such power to someone who had only made one small film; it was the sort of thing a studio chief might give a seasoned director with a track record of box office hits—and even then, only if the studio’s back was up against the wall. Gross points from the box office might be possible, but that also depended on the cast, and there was no way a studio was going to let a pisher like Tarantino have control over casting. As for the three-hour running time—that was guaranteed to send studio executives heading for the door. Neither the studios nor theater owners liked long running times because it meant fewer screenings each day, thus lowering box office revenues.

  On the other hand, just about every young production executive in Hollywood was chasing Tarantino’s next big script. TriStar and Jersey Films had paid Tarantino to write Pulp Fiction and had the option to make it. Jersey partner Danny DeVito had two very valuable chips in this game: a first-dollar gross deal and final cut in a development deal with TriStar Pictures, then run by Mike Medavoy.

  Jersey executive (and Tarantino’s girlfriend) Stacey Sher and Mike Simpson worked out a deal that would fulfill Tarantino’s wish list. Tarantino would direct the picture, and DeVito would sign over his final cut to Tarantino; they put the agreement in a bank vault. Jersey and Tarantino would split the first-dollar box office gross receipts; they would agree that if Medavoy did not acquiesce to Tarantino’s casting choices, he could back out of the agreement and place the film in turnaround (in other words, allow other studios to produce it). If TriStar decided not to make the movie, Tarantino would still be paid his fee. Medavoy balked at the deal, but he decided not to pass up the chance to work with Hollywood’s hottest screenwriter. Under pressure from Jersey Films, he made the deal.

  Medavoy was in his prime, at the time reveling in a powerful Hollywood job, married to the glittering socialite Patricia Duff, and schmoozing with rising Democratic star Governor Bill Clinton as a high-stakes California donor. But during the 1992 presidential campaign, Hollywood became a controversial topic, with the Republicans kicking up dust over violence in the movies and the Democrats under pressure to do the same. As far as Washington, D.C., was concerned, Reservoir Dogs, with its relentless profanity, ear-chopping sequence, and gun-wielding heroes, was pretty much the poster child for everything wrong with Hollywood. In this atmosphere, Medavoy felt he couldn’t make Pulp Fiction and still remain a close ally of Clinton. He was also skeptical that Bender would be able to make the movie for the promised $8 million budget. He passed.

  “There were two reasons,” said Medavoy. “I thought it was too violent. And I was having so many problems with [then Sony chairman] Peter Guber that I didn’t want to have to have that fight” to get Guber’s approval. “I met Quentin, and I told him that he was going to make a hit movie, but for someone else. I’d made a lot of movies by then. I wasn’t a young guy anymore.” Simpson, surprisingly, wasn’t unhappy in the least. “I always felt he [Medavoy] wouldn’t make the movie, that’s why I was so happy to make that deal,” he said. “Quentin got paid. And we had the screenplay free and clear.”

  But after the TriStar stumble, Tarantino was not eager to offer his script to other major studios. He felt, and rightly so, that the material was too incendiary for the folks who spent their time making movies like Kindergarten Cop and Batman Returns. Eventually Bender convinced Tarantino to at least try the major studios; but Tarantino’s instinct turned out to be right. They all passed. Even at New Line, the famed green-light committee passed when Ruth Vitale brought them Pulp Fiction. Former New Line production chief Mike De Luca recalled that “the powers that be said, ‘It’s an anthology film.’ I liked it, but I didn’t jump up and down. I’ve always regretted passing on it.”

  So would everyone else who did.

  Live’s Richard Gladstein had left the video company and moved to Miramax. Although Harvey Weinstein was courting Tarantino energetically, Bender and Tarantino offered Gladstein the script first. He gave Weinstein a copy of the screenplay to read on a plane from Los Angeles to New York. About an hour later, Gladstein got a phone call. It was Weinstein, in midair. “I’m forty pages in. Oh my God, I love it. Does it stay this good?” he asked. Gladstein assured him it did. “Stay in your office. I’m still reading,” said Weinstein.

  Forty-five minutes later the phone rang again. “Wait a minute,” Weinstein hollered. He’d gotten to the part where Vince Vega is shot dead on the toilet. “The main character just died. How does it end?” Gladstein reassured him. “Keep reading.” Weinstein said, “Just tell me! What? The main character—he comes back?” He hung up, and called back a minute later. “Start negotiating. We’ve got to make this.”

  Later he explained the feeling of excitement. “I thought, ‘This is why I love movies,’” Weinstein said. “It was so cinematic, so smart, so funny. Taking the gangster genre and turning it on its head. Getting into the characters’ psychological lives, hilariously so. It’s a breakthrough.”

  BUT THE MOVIE WAS NOT A SLAM DUNK FOR MIRAMAX TO make. Short on cash, the budget for the film was finally slated to be $9 million, many times more than what Miramax was accustomed to. Weinstein, however, was determined to show he could make cutting-edge, important films from scratch, not just acquire them once someone else had taken the risk. “Here was a chance for us to see if we could make movies,” Weinstein recalled.

  Mike Simpson had already given a copy of Pulp Fiction to Live and the French production company CiBy 2000, partly as a negotiating goad to Miramax. Both companies showed intense interest, with Live’s Ronna Wallace forcing her way past the William Morris security guard to impress this upon Tarantino’s agents, storming into the first-floor meeting room and pitching her offer. “She made a great proposal,” Simpson admitted. But this gave Tarantino’s agent all the leverage he needed. Simpson sent Harvey Weinstein his list of demands, known as a “term sheet,” and gave Miramax a day to agree to it: a running time of two hours and forty-five minutes, first dollar of the gross, final cut for Tarantino, and John Travolta in the leading role. (Simpson so spooked Weinstein that the Miramax chief insisted on getting a signed release from TriStar saying the movie was available.)

  According to Simpson, “Harvey hit the roof” when he got the term sheet. He got his brother, Bob, Richard Gladstein, and two Miramax lawyers and placed a conference call from Manhattan to scream at Simpson, Tarantino, and lawyer Carlos Goodman in Beverly Hills. “What the fuck is this?”

  In the two-hour phone call, they went through the deal, point by point. On the issue of final cut, Weinstein said, “You can’t have final cut. NO ONE gets final cut.”

  Simpson lied. “We got final cut at TriStar, and we’ve got it at two other companies.” There was silence on the line, and Weinstein agreed.

  Two and three quarters hours’ running time? Grudgingly, Weinstein agreed. (He felt he could always cut it later, whatever the contract said.)

  First dollar of the gross? Weinstein argued, but in the end agreed. (Actually, Miramax ended up giving all the actors, who were paid scale on Pulp Fiction, one percentage point of the movie’s net profits, never thinking it would amount to anything.)

  Finally it was midnight in Los Angeles, 3:00 A.M. in New York City. Both sides were exhausted. Weinstein had caved on every demand but one, and on that one he would not budge: John Travolta. The guy had been washed up for years, Weinstein argued. He respected Tarantino’s artistic choices, but there was no way he was going to green-light with Travolta locked in as the lead character. He tried cajoling. “It’s a good idea,” he crooned. “We’ll consider him. We’ll meet him.” Pause. “But we can’t agree to this tonight.”

  Simpson hit the hold button and turned to Tarantino. “If we don’t stick it out now, Travolta will never be in this movie,” he said.

  Tarantino agreed. “I’ll walk in a second,” he said.

  Simpson released the hold button and said, “No good.”

  Weinstein was livid. He threatened to get Simpson fired.


  Simpson said, “Harvey, either you approve John Travolta to play Vince on this call, or we will not have a deal. Ronna Wallace is awake right now, waiting for me to call her. I am hanging up this phone in fifteen seconds. Once I hang up, the deal is dead.”

  He started counting: “fifteen, fourteen, thirteen …”—he, Tarantino, and Goodman could hear the phone being muffled on the other end. There was frantic whispering—“twelve, eleven, ten”—incoherent shouting, and finally the sound of Harvey Weinstein swallowing his own bile—“nine, eight, seven”—“Okay, we’ll do it,” Weinstein growled.

  Simpson had counted to four.

  WHILE MOST OF THE MAJOR STUDIOS HAD PASSED ON Pulp Fiction, in a strange turn of events, it was the home of Mickey Mouse, the studio that ruled the box office with Pretty Woman in 1990, that paid for Quentin Tarantino’s pistol-packing, blood-spattered neo-noir masterpiece. It was the first major film to be made by Miramax since being bought by Disney.

  Largely due to the success of sex, lies, and videotape and The Crying Game, major Hollywood studios had begun to pay serious attention to what had previously been a dark, quiet corner of the moviemaking world, independent film. Jeffrey Katzenberg, the wunder-executive at Disney who had revived its moribund animation division to spectacular success in the 1990s, had the idea of acquiring Miramax. The Weinsteins, he could see, were making daring, culturally significant movies. Their movies got rivers of free ink in the press, and they were nominated for the Oscars. Miramax made the kinds of cultural cutting-edge movies that neither of Disney’s Burbank-based studio divisions, Buena Vista and Hollywood Pictures, knew how to make. The independent studio seemed like a brilliant addition to the studio’s assets.

  Katzenberg projected that the independent film world was a growing market, serving the serious moviegoers that Disney did not reach. He believed it was possible for a merger to give the independent studio the benefits of association with a major studio, while leaving the very different cultures of the two companies intact. Then Disney executive Chris McGurk helped broker the deal, and served as a kind of minder of the Weinsteins’ after the purchase. He recalled sitting with Harvey Weinstein at a restaurant table scribbling the Weinsteins’ wish-list for autonomy. “Neither of us thought it would be possible,” he said, “but it was.”

  At the time Katzenberg believed he would soon be named Eisner’s number two in the corporation. But within a year, Eisner informed Katzenberg he would not get the job. He instead named Michael Ovitz as his deputy, and Katzenberg left Disney in a state of rage over what he regarded as Eisner’s betrayal. Soon after that Katzenberg started a new studio, DreamWorks SKG, with colleagues David Geffen and Steven Spielberg. (He subsequently filed a lawsuit to reclaim profits promised in his contract, which he won.)

  For Disney, the acquisition was a savvy way to create relationships with emerging filmmaking talent, and more important, with movie stars who liked to be in prestigious, Oscar-winning productions like Miramax’s The Piano and My Left Foot. In addition, Katzenberg had his eye on the indie studio’s substantive library, already numbering some five hundred films, which Disney could spin out for cash in pay cable and video revenue streams.

  In the spring of 1993 the Weinstein brothers sold their homegrown company to the Walt Disney Corporation for the sum of somewhere between $60 million and $80 million, the final figure depending on their meeting certain financial thresholds (Weinstein later put the sum at $80 million). For the Weinstein brothers, the acquisition guaranteed them desperately needed financial stability. They had been struggling against a tide of cash crises for too long, skating on the financial knife-edge for years. Selling to Disney meant selling their vaunted independence, but as Harvey Weinstein explained simply, “It was eighty million dollars.” To two brothers who grew up scraping by, that was a lot of dough. It would also allow Harvey Weinstein to finally prove he could envision great movies and make them—not just recognize and acquire quality movies at film festivals.

  From that moment on the notoriously single-minded Harvey Weinstein would have to answer to a corporate boss, though even while tethered to Mickey Mouse there was a limit to the amount of supervision he would tolerate. But the word independent would from this moment on come to signify an attitude rather than the actual financial or artistic independence of a film.

  THOUGH VERY DIFFERENT PERSONALLY (AND PHYSICALLY: Weinstein is a tanker to Katzenberg’s tugboat), Katzenberg and Weinstein hit it off, immediately acknowledging a mutual respect. But in making the deal, the Weinsteins sought to preserve a modicum of their cherished independence. Harvey Weinstein says he made sure the word autonomy appeared on every page of the contract with Disney. Under the terms of the acquisition, the brothers could green-light movies with budgets under $12.5 million without approval from their corporate minders, up to a $70 million annual cap. They could not however, release any NC-17 or X-rated movies. Weinstein insists the cultures of the two companies had no trouble meshing; Disney was at the peak of its renaissance in the 1990s, rife with talented executives and a renewed sense of momentum. After the acquisition, Frank Wells, then Eisner’s number-two, “would write us handwritten notes—‘Congratulations on the Oscars’—he was the most gracious man in the world. We had such a good time with Jeffrey [Katzenberg]. We had Chris McGurk, we had Bill Mechanic, who really helped us grow our international business…. Every day was paradise. You talk about a corporate culture. Jeffrey invited us to every meeting. Rich Frank was in charge of TV. It wasn’t a culture shock—it was yes, we did different things, but they were all receptive. They were the 1927 Yankees, like one of those legendary baseball teams. The bench strength at Disney” was, Weinstein says, amazing.

  Unfortunately the honeymoon did not last long. After Frank Wells was killed in a skiing accident in 1994 and Katzenberg left in 1995, Weinstein dealt directly with Disney chief Michael Eisner, and their relationship rapidly deteriorated. Katzenberg’s replacement, Joe Roth, did not initially mesh well with the abrasive New Yorker, either. Roth was shocked at Weinstein’s lack of courtesy. (Roth has recently recalled the relationship more fondly.) Weinstein came to look on Disney as the bad guys, an attitude that worsened radically over time. “Whenever Disney puts the noose on, either Bob or I will ride into town and shoot the noose right off, and shoot a couple of them,” he said with some bravado in 2003. But Disney’s investment proved to be hugely lucrative. In less than a decade, Miramax would be valued at as much as $1 billion.

  Not that there weren’t culture clashes. It was McGurk who had to call Eisner and tell him that Miramax was releasing the controversial movie Priest on Good Friday in 1994. The film told the intense, emotional story of a secretly gay priest who faces a crisis of faith and morality after a young girl confesses about her incestuous father. Eisner told him to make it go away (referring to the controversy). McGurk did, though some headlines were unavoidable. Later, either as a result of the acquisition, age, or even fatigue, Weinstein began to shy away from releasing the controversial movies he once embraced.

  But not in 1993. Instead, Pulp Fiction was the first major film to get a green light after the Disney acquisition, at a budget of $8.5 million. Weinstein says he never asked permission but sent Jeffrey Katzenberg the script as a courtesy, and then called him.

  “I’m going to make this movie,” he told Katzenberg. And according to Weinstein, Katzenberg replied: “Holy shit, this fucking thing. It’s brilliantly written, but you’re out of your mind.” Weinstein was happy. Katzenberg, he said, “recognized it was great. He said, ‘It’s undeniably great.’ But he then realized the relationship was ‘Fasten your seat belt.’” In retrospect, Weinstein realized that Disney probably bought Miramax because it imagined years of making movies like Enchanted April and My Left Foot, quality art movies that didn’t raise controversy. And Weinstein was not about to ask permission to make Tarantino’s movie. “I said, ‘Jeffrey, I sent it to you as a courtesy. I’m making it. Welcome to the wonderful world of autonomy.’” Recalled Wei
nstein, “And Jeffrey laughed and to his credit said, ‘Go ahead.’”

  In truth, Katzenberg was less than thrilled about the lack of bankable stars in the cast, but given the relatively modest budget, he deferred to Weinstein (besides, he was busy making The Lion King). “Make sure you keep the United Kingdom rights,” he told Weinstein—good advice, because Tarantino was even more popular in Great Britain than he was in the United States.

  TARANTINO HAD JOHN TRAVOLTA IN MIND EARLY ON FOR THE part of Vincent, the hit man. There were many actors from the past, stars of yesteryear, whom the director idolized—almost fetishized—and Travolta was one of them. When Tarantino was working in Europe, Cathryn Jaymes found him one of his first decent apartments in Hollywood. To convince him to take it she pointed out that Travolta had lived there when he was a star on Welcome Back Kotter. (Travolta visited Tarantino after signing on to Pulp Fiction and was surprised to realize he knew the apartment.)

  Once the script to Pulp was finished, Tarantino flew to Florida, where the fallen movie star—at this point best known for his talking baby movies, Look Who’s Talking—lived. Tarantino told Travolta that he’d written a lead role in his next movie for the actor. At first Travolta refused to believe such a thing could be possible. “Why are you torturing me?” he insisted. Tarantino finally convinced him, but Travolta still refused to believe it could ever happen. “No studio will ever let you cast me,” he told the director. He was almost right, of course.

  The problem with casting Travolta was not just financial. Pulp Fiction had already gone out to every talent agency in Hollywood, and agents everywhere wanted their clients for the half-dozen juicy roles the story offered. Both Bruce Willis and Daniel Day-Lewis wanted the role of Vincent Vega. Weinstein favored Day-Lewis, a huge star at the time after winning an Oscar for My Left Foot and starring in The Last of the Mohicans and The Age of Innocence. The actor complained that Weinstein didn’t send him his best stuff. As for Travolta, Weinstein said, “I didn’t see how he’d play a hood.” For the role of the boxer, Avary had always wanted Matt Dillon, but Tarantino was less convinced. So, apparently, was Dillon, who asked for a day to think about starring as Butch Coolidge. Too long; by the time Dillon called the next day to say he wanted the role, it was too late. Tarantino had just met Bruce Willis at Harvey Keitel’s house on the beach in Santa Monica; they took a walk, during which Willis recited much of the dialogue from Reservoir Dogs. He was soon cast as the boxer.