How Sony Won Tarantino’s ‘Once Upon A Time In Hollywood’: Book Excerpt

Editor’s note: From the moment 1992’s Reservoir Dogs launched him like a supernova, Quentin Tarantino‘s career was intertwined with Harvey and Bob Weinstein. From Pulp Fiction to Inglourious Basterds, Kill Bill and the rest, Tarantino stayed monogamous as their cornerstone auteur until The Weinstein Company imploded and it was time for him to seek a new studio to hang his hat. This created the most hotly contested courtship Hollywood had seen in years. In a chapter from his new book The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood, author Jay Glennie details the seduction process and how Tom Rothman‘s passion — which included ensuring Tarantino retained the deal he had across all his films (including Django Unchained which Sony released internationally), that gives him back his copyright after 20 years — won Sony not only that global hit movie, but also most likely the 10th and final film Tarantino is working on now.

Chapter 6: Studio Search

“Whatever it f*cking takes…” – Tom Rothman

“We had to tell Bob that we had to go,” Mike Simpson laments. “It was a tough decision.”

Bob was Bob Weinstein, and Mike and Quentin had felt that there might be a possibility that The Weinstein Company might survive its impending financial plight to come on board the Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood journey.

“We kept on holding it back,” Simpson recalls. “I’m not sure exactly where we were in all that, but for sure, we held up going forward with Sony Columbia for at least a month, is the way I remember it. Harvey was out of the picture. He would not be involved, but the company, with Bob and the other executives and the people, some hundred people, working at the Weinstein Company every day, people that nobody knows but we all knew, those people were going to get hurt. We were trying to see if there was a way that they could be kept in the mix, but at a certain point it became clear that they were going to go under. There was nothing we could do about being able to stop that process.”

The following March, the Weinstein Company would begin mediation, which would result in its liquidation by the time of the movie’s release.

Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood would be the first Quentin Tarantino movie with a major studio overseeing the complete release. The fringe studios were not part of the mix. Rather, the duo of Simpson and Carlos Goodman gave their financial presentation to the interested major studios.

“We have a guy who is an analyst wizard with Excel spreadsheets, and he’s worked with a lot of different studios,” Simpson says. “He knows how they do their projections and their formulas. He does all of our models for movies.”

“We had all of Quentin’s rights — all of his deal points that are pretty substantial and intricate and involved,” Goodman recalls. “I remember Mike and I presented to Fox, which at the time I’m pretty sure was Emma Watts. We also presented to Jim Gianopulos at Paramount, and we went along to Warner Brothers and presented to Toby Emmerich and his businesspeople.”

Out of courtesy, Disney was contacted, but Simpson knew that the movie would not be in its wheelhouse. He recalls too that Universal didn’t step up on this occasion.

Sony, they did not have to visit. Sony was still scorching after the success of Django Unchained. Sony knew the score. One of the first to place his hat firmly in the ring was Tom Rothman, head of the studio.

“Part of being in the movie business, part of being the head of a studio, is listening to the winds,” Rothman says. “Well, we heard that Quentin was now liberated from the Weinstein Company. Suddenly, there is an open field. We had known for some months, maybe a year, that he was working on his next movie. There were rumors that it was going to be a Manson movie, but you really didn’t know. I didn’t care. And that is because, as I told Quentin, as I told Mike Simpson, and as I told my team, I was going to get that movie or die trying.”

(L-R) Tom Rothman, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt on set

Courtesy of Insight & The Story Factory

(L-R) Manson Family girls Sadie (Mikey Madison), Katie (Madisen Beaty) and Snake (Sydney Sweeney)

Courtesy of Insight & The Story Factory

The picture-car team sourced every period vehicle in this shot

Courtesy of Insight & The Story Factory

(L-R) Quentin Tarantino and Bob Richardson on location

Courtesy of Insight & The Story Factory

The poster for the fictional 1961 Western ‘Comanche Uprising’

Courtesy of Insight & The Story Factory

______

It was personal for Rothman.

“If we’re doing a deep dive, you might as well get a deep cut, because the superficial shit has been said,” Rothman says. “The truth is, I have had a many-decades-long crush on Quentin, right?”

Before he was appointed chairman and CEO of Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, the Baltimore native and former vice president of Columbia Pictures, president of the Samuel Goldwyn Company, and president of 20th Century Fox was a founding board member of the Sundance Institute’s Filmmaker (now Director’s) Lab.

“The first film that I ever produced was Jim Jarmusch’s Down by Law,” Rothman recalls. “Not many studio heads can say they came up via the independent-film world. When Bob Redford decided to apply the Sundance Institute Foundation to sponsor juvenile filmmakers — one of the many great things that Bob did, by the way — I was part of the reading committee.

“So in the early nineties, I was reading all these scripts,” he adds. “Now, most of them were not great, and then I read Quentin’s Reservoir Dogs script. Well, it has to be nearly thirty-five years ago, but I can still recall the experience of the words levitating off the page. My goodness, the story just leaped. The character specificity — Mr. White, Mr. Pink — and the voice were utterly and entirely distinctive. I was, like, what the f*ck was this? There was a lot of hand wringing, but I’m like this: ‘If this lab exists for anything, it is this dude.’”

Rothman subsequently tried to buy Pulp Fiction during his tenure at the Samuel Goldwyn Company but lost out to Miramax. While at 20th Century Fox, he bid for the split rights on Django Unchained, but they too escaped his grasp. Quentin had become the one filmmaker he wanted.

“I have had the privilege in my long career to have worked with pretty much every great signature director of our generation,” Rothman says. “Many of them, I’ve made multiple movies with. I’ve made multiple movies with Ang Lee, Baz Luhrmann, Danny Boyle, Steven Spielberg, Bob Zemeckis. Many of the greats that I’ve admired, I’ve had the privilege to work with. But never Quentin, so when that call came from Mike, I knew that I had to make it work.”

_______

After the Hateful Eight script leak, Simpson put added security in place, and that meant Quentin’s fresh script would not be sent out to the studios. If the studios wished to read the script, they would have to do so under strict conditions at the William Morris office. These fresh procedures did cause friction. Some noses were put out of joint, but as Simpson explains, “Normal procedure would be that a filmmaker would approach the studio on bended knees and reach up to kiss the anointed ring. So, I had to tell them, ‘Well, OK, normally, that’s what happens, but that’s not happening this time. Not if you want the new Quentin Tarantino movie.’”

There was no nose out of joint for Rothman. There are formalities in Hollywood. The town turns and rotates on these social norms. There is such a thing as the weekend read: Scripts go out over the weekend and everyone reads them in the comfort of their home in their favored chair. That’s just the way it has always worked.

“That’s not how it works for our guy,” Rothman says. “It has such drama and romance to it when it comes to our guy. The normal way of doing things is not how it works for our guy. No, for our guy, you get a call from Mike, and when Mike Simpson calls, you travel to the William Morris office. There are rules to read the new Quentin Tarantino script.”

So at this early juncture, all reading would take in a secure environment. No cell phones or pens were permitted — this was the only way forward. In return, the William Morris Agency would ensure complete discretion for any prospective partners. There would be seclusion in a private room, a coffee, juice —whatever was needed.

Tom Rothman had taken his seat in what he recalls were the “most uncomfortable chairs that have ever been invented.” He was in the William Morris conference room, just down the hall from Mike Simpson’s office. There were some snacks and some water, but what he was most concerned with was to get his hands on Quentin’s script.

Rothman was there with the group’s co-presidents, who he calls his “prized lieutenants.” Taking their uncomfortable seats were Josh Greenstein, president of marketing and production; Sanford Panitch, president of production; and Steven O’Dell, president of international marketing.

That day was a first for all in the room. Even after a long affiliation, it would be the first time that they had read a script in the same room as their boss.

“It was like being in the library at college and your college tutor is there over your shoulder,” O’Dell recalls with a laugh.

Prior to going into the room, Rothman pulled his prized lieutenants together. It was the time to make a pact: There would be no talking among the group in the room, no “Oohs,” no “Just you wait to read this part.” It was agreed that they would go in under the pretext that they were alone in the room. The other part of their pact was, no pillow talk. What they read stayed in the room. Their teams could know what they needed to know, but the specifics stayed in the room until the appropriate time. There weren’t many true secrets in the town, and the four in the room were part of a infrequent breed: They would leave having read an original copy of a Quentin Tarantino screenplay.

This agreement was crucial to Rothman. He did not want to hear any spoilers.

“So here’s the interesting thing,” Rothman says. “One of the reasons I’m kind of OK at my job in film is that I’m dyslexic. And dyslexia is an odd thing. It hurts you in some ways and helps you in others. But it really helps you understand structure and story and all that kind of stuff, but because of that, I’m an extremely slow reader.”

“Now, Quentin Tarantino’s scripts, generally speaking, are not short,” he adds. “So I sit down and I say,
‘Everybody be aware that I’m going to be here longer than you — this is going to take me a little while.’ My colleagues there read much faster than me, so they are going to be ahead of me.”

______

Greenstein looked across at his boss, who was still reading intently, so, pushing back in his seat, he tried to take in what he had just read.

“Are you finished already?” Rothman inquired.

Like Rothman, Greenstein went back a ways with Quentin. He had run marketing for Bob Weinstein’s Dimension Films and had worked on the trailer for Kill Bill. The day the trailer was locked was the day of the 2003 New York City blackout. He had to deliver the cut of the trailer to a hotel some sixty blocks away. No issue — the plan was for him to jump in a cab. But, as he made his way from the Dimension offices, New York streets were gridlocked. It was chaos as the power started to return. He had no choice but to walk uptown. It took him four hours.

“Again, no issue,” Greenstein says. “For Quentin, you walk. To me, he is the pinnacle, and what I had just read I was wowed by. I had never read anything like it — the details, the character work, the settings. It is like you’re reading a novel. We read scripts for a living, and nobody writes scripts like Quentin. To read the script that day was a treat — I was blown away.”

But he had questions: Was there enough going on? He told himself, “Well, it’s Quentin. He’s got it all in his head. He’s going to make the ending feel spectacular and heart pounding, and you’re going to care about these characters. This is like nothing I’ve ever read. Quentin is going to do something that is so much more elevated and unique.”

Sanford Panitch did not want to rush. Like Tom Rothman, he was a tardy reader, but there was the additional fear of the pleasure he was experiencing coming to an end.

“Quentin’s scripts are just so dense and just so delicious,” he says. “I didn’t want to miss anything. You feel it was written for the reader. It was just so much fun.”

“Reading the screenplay that day made you realize how lucky we are because it was a joy to read,” O’Dell adds.

Keeping to the pact, Greenstein left the William Morris conference room silently and made his way back to the studio, leaving Rothman, Panitch, and O’Dell to carry on reading. While he was traveling, however, Greenstein’s one overriding feeling was one of gentle disappointment — born not of discontent but of impatience.

“I was, like, ‘F*ck! I want to see this goddamn movie right now!” he recalls. “It was that good and that vivid. I was just sad that if we won it, I was going to have to wait over a year to see the movie!”

O’Dell was next to finish and quietly made his leave.

“I knew that I had been privy to something incredibly special,” he recalls.

Then it was Sanford Panitch’s turn to leave. Rothman was on his own.

“I drove back knowing I had read something extraordinary,” Panitch says.

As predicted, by the time Rothman had finished his reading, the pretty Southern Californian sun was setting, sending its orange and red atmospheric hues through the window. Placing the screenplay back into its protected metal ring binder, he saw a lithe on in Mike Simpson’s office in an otherwise seemingly deserted building. After knocking, he entered the room and said, “Whatever it takes, Mike — whatever it takes. Let us audition for Quentin.”

Simpson saw that all-too-rare phenomenon in Hollywood — somebody had no desire to screw around.

“Look, we had a very tough deal,” Quentin says. “It was aggressive, and Tom said yes to all of the points. He agreed to everything, and he wanted it on record that he had and that it should be taken into account that he had not dicked us around.

“Oh, he had one more stipulation,” he adds. “He wanted to be the first studio that we met with.”

On the drive back to his studio, Rothman tried to assimilate what he had just read. He had been transported back to the experience of reading Reservoir Dogs for the first time. Like that script, this was a truly original piece of work.

“It was not a tight, traditionally structured, three-act propulsive narrative,” Rothman recalls. “That it was not! No, what it was, was the most fabulously affluent and inviting universe that I would say I have ever read. I’m a guy who, after all these years, what do I read: three or four scripts every week for fifty-two weeks a year for thirty years — so thousands — and every once in a blue moon, you get one that is both entirely unique and completely compelling, and that’s what this was. But it wasn’t basic. It wasn’t obvious. It was a deeply unconventional work. It didn’t have a established narrative structure, number one, and number two, it had some super f*cking volatility in it. You’re going to f*ck with the Mansons and the Manson murders? Holy shit! You’re going to tell an alternative history about that?

“And here’s the other thing that’s essential to know,” he adds. “There was no cast attached!”

“At this point, it was just a script, and it was also all set in Los Angeles, the most expensive place on Earth to make a movie, which is why, unfortunately, not many movies are made here anymore,” Rothman says. “So you knew was this wasn’t going to be cheap.”

When he arrived at his office — where Louis B. Mayer had sat — Sanford Panitch, Josh Greenstein, and their teams were waiting for Rothman.

“Can we get casting first?”

“I doubt it.”

Now, the rumor was that Leonardo DiCaprio was interested, but as Rothman said, “When you’re the biggest movie star in the world, you’re supposedly interested in lots of things.”

The questioning continued.

“Well, it’s long. Would he cut it down some?”

“I doubt it.”

“It’s to do with the Mansons, right? It’s a scary subject matter.”

“Yeah, yeah it is. But it is so much more than that.” Rothman brought proceedings to a close. He knew that on offer was the rarest of things: a supremely original work from a writer–director. To find a great screenplay was infrequent, but then you have to find a great director, so to find both was extremely infrequent. It was just the perfect combination.

The boss told them, “It’s everything you say, and more, but let’s suck it up and get our act together and win the day, because we’re doing this movie, whatever it f*cking takes.”

______

After the readings, there were three studios left standing: Paramount, Warner Bros., and Sony.

Paramount was keen, but issues with the California tax credits saw Jim Gianopulos pull out. Simpson remembered it being a case of the company being incorporated in Delaware, and therefore, what little in the way of California tax credits they could monetize had already been eaten up by other Paramount productions.

“Look, Jim was cool,” Quentin says. “He is a good guy and was and is a fan. He couldn’t do it for a boring but understandable reasons, but he was a fan of ours, so he said to use Paramount as a stalking horse —you know, ‘We can’t do it, but keep us in the mix, as though we have chips in the pot.’”

So that left two: Warner Bros. and Sony — and, as Rothman had requested, the Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood team visited his studio first.

As Quentin made his way into Culver City, heading to 10202 West Washington Boulevard, the history of Columbia Pictures was not lost on him. The parent company, Sony Pictures Motion Picture Group, may well now own the immense convoluted, formally the home of MGM, but Quentin knew all too well that Columbia Pictures was the house that Harry Cohn, Columbia’s president and production chief, had built.

Quentin, a film historian, was all over the history of his hometown and eager to learn the plans the present incumbent entrusted with running Columbia Pictures had for his movie.

“I always call them Columbia,” Quentin says. “Look, the history is there with the whole Harry Cohn era. He was probably the toughest of those old moguls. The thing about him that was really cool was that through his teeth, he dragged Columbia out of Poverty Row and into the majors. It was a very class-conscious town, and they did not want him to do that, but he did it. So, yeah, I was fully invested in their history.”

Rothman looked around his conference room and could see that his team was ready. After his first reading of Quentin’s screenplay, he had told Mike Simpson, “Mike, we’ll audition. Let us audition. You, Quentin, David Heyman. Look, I know he has a relationship with Warner’s, but all of you come in and we’ll make a full marketing-distribution presentation to you. Come in and we’ll sing for our supper. We’ll be ready.”

This proved to be music to Simpson’s ears. Rothman was a man he respected, and to hear of his unbridled enthusiasm only underlined that respect.

Yes, undoubtedly, Rothman knew his team was ready. They had spent the week fruitfully, working around the clock. Sony Columbia Pictures was just about to commit to putting together a multimillion-dollar budget to win the right to work with Quentin and the sense of desire to prevail was palpable.

“It was a big act of belief at this point,” Rothman says. “But I had been a Quentin Tarantino believer from a distance my whole career, right? We had this whole thing where, of course, the team hadn’t read it, so I had to pitch it multiple times: I had to pitch it to the creative ad people, I had to pitch it to the media people, the PR people, I had to say, ‘Now go away and think about it. This is what it is.’ And they were all, like, ‘Who’s in it?’ And I’m, like, ‘I don’t know, but it’ll be somebody good. It’s Quentin Tarantino!’”

Exchanging pleasantries with the Sony team, the Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood crew of Quentin, Mike Simpson, David Heyman, Shannon McIntosh, and Georgia Kacandes took their seats in Tom Rothman’s personal conference room.

“Quentin, you take a seat here at the head of the table,” Rothman insisted.

Shannon McIntosh looked around a room full of friends from her years in the industry, feeling great warmth in the room.

“Tom introduced everybody,” McIntosh says, “and it was great to see Hannah Minghella was there — we had worked together on the release of Django Unchained. Josh [Greenstein] and I had been in the trenches at Miramax when he assisted Bob at Dimension. So, people we knew well.”

Rothman started off the proceedings. It was immediately obvious to the Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood team that his intention was 100 percent to make it happen for his studio.

Each member of the Sony Columbia group took it in turn to introduce themselves, and everyone professed their love of working on the release of Django Unchained for Sony Columbia Pictures.

Quentin heard the love they had for his film with declarations like “Working on Django Unchained was one of the greatest moments of my life” and “I worked on Django Unchained, and every day, I was so glad that I worked for this company.”

“I think this struck Quentin,” Sanford Panitch observes, “just how many people were still part of our family who had worked on his most financially successful film.

“It certainly struck me. I had gone into the meeting determined to have the lady with the torch playing on the opening credits of Quentin’s movie and having his new film as part of our legacy, but Django was already part of the company’s legacy. For the guys who had worked on the distribution of the movie it was their movie and they were so proud to have played their part in its success and it was one of the greatest parts of their careers. We really wanted to show that we wanted to be once again in the Quentin Tarantino business.”

Rothman remembered his team presenting one of the “great marketing pitches ever because it was full of really creative ideas. It wasn’t just, ‘Oh, we’re going to book it in four thousand theaters.’ It was very creative. There were a lot of ideas that actually ended up, a year and a half later, being used.”

The members of the Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood team were indeed impressed with the pitch, but Quentin had eyes for only one man: Tom Rothman.

“Look, the way I remember it was that Tom had his entire team there, and he didn’t let them speak — he did all of the talking!” Quentin says. “I know that wasn’t the case, but Tom knows his shit, and he had a string of chilly hits, you know. He had a string of hits that weren’t tied to franchises. So I really liked that, yeah, because that’s what I would do.

“It was fantastic,” the filmmaker recalls. “No, Tom was ready to go. He was, like, ‘This is our movie for the summer. This is our movie for the year. We are going to show that you don’t need to do a known IP franchise movie to make a hit. We’re gonna be the creative people in Hollywood this year. People say that this type of thing is dead. We are gonna show them that it is not!’ He wanted this movie in his filmography and wanted the town to know that ‘This is what we can make.’”

Sanford Panitch realized that his boss of many years now had a competitor to go toe-to-toe with.

“Tom is also a real student of film,” Panitch says, “and he is usually the smartest guy in the room when it comes to film — I’m always taking notes on which films to watch when I am around him — but I don’t think I have ever encountered somebody with the encyclopedic capacity of film like Quentin. To witness the ping-pong of film between the two of them, Tom and Quentin, and the reverence they have for the strange job we do is something to behold. You cannot even believe the things they know. It just felt like a comfortable dynamic between the two of them.”

Shannon McIntosh also saw the bourgeoning friendship between the huge presences, adding, “Tom could be his own one-man band, he is entertaining and he’s also tall. All his team were excited, but it was Tom’s show.”

As they were leaving, Mike Simpson took Tom Rothman aside. There was one thing he wanted cleared up before they went to meet with Warner Bros.

“Now, I need to know one thing, and it doesn’t need to be in the contract, but when is your deal up?”

“As a matter of fact, I just renewed it a few months ago for another five years.”

“I think we can get this movie made in five years,” Simpson said, laughing.

Sanford Panitch realized he had left his notepad on the table. Making his way back to the conference room, he found Quentin there, alone, readying himself to take the elevator. The pair traveled down to reception together.

“Hey, Sanford, do you happen to know where I can grab a drink around here?”

It was closing in on 6 p.m. — so not an unreasonable request. Panitch had just the location in mind.

“Sure! Right across the street from the Thalberg Building is the Backstage Bar. It is very you — it could have featured in one of your movies. I think you’ll enjoy it!”

“It sounds perfect!”

Quentin and his entourage ventured to the Backstage, a bar with Hollywood history seeping from its pores. Margaritas were ordered, and the debrief began.

“We now had to wait to see if we were to be invited to the party with Quentin,” Panitch says.

_____

Quentin had not made up his mind on the spot, because there was another player in town. The other studio placing its hat in the ring left nobody in any doubt as to how much it wanted to release the fresh Quentin Tarantino movie worldwide.

“Warner Bros. went all out,” Quentin recalls. “We go to have our meeting, and Toby Emmerich had set off one section of the lot, and there was all of these period cars parked, and everybody who was walking around is dressed in sixties outfits, and people are playing out scenes, and it is the idea that I walked into a place and it is 1969.

“We go into the boardroom,” he adds, “and they had hors d’oeuvres from 1969, like Oysters Rockefeller. They had Musso & Frank’s catering with their stuff, and they came up with about four different cocktails based on the characters. We all drank cocktails and all got f*cking drunk, all right? Warners had large posters: Rick’s movie posters, even Brandy. I mean, it almost felt like I should say yes to them because they went to so much trouble.

“Warner’s really laid it out,” Quentin says. “There was no question about that — they really went for it. They were big competition and went all out.”

The impressed Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood team decamped to a bar in Burbank to discuss the merits of both pitches. There was a difference the thickness of cigarette paper between the two studios. The bad column was virtually blank. Both studios had fantastic teams, huge worldwide distribution, so no need to sell the movie piecemeal, country by country.

David Heyman, recalling his incredibly successful relationship with Warner Bros. with the releases of the Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts series, I Am Legend, Gravity, and Paddington, said, “I made a case for Warner’s. I mean, I worked with Warner’s and knew the people there, and actually, their presentation was, I would say, stronger. Sue Kroll, who is now at Amazon MGM, made a breathtaking presentation.”

Quentin heard his producer. “David had a relationship with Warner,” he says. “He was a Warner guy.”

At this juncture, however, Quentin had a nagging doubt: “I completely respect Toby Emmerich, but it was an captivating thing, because he let his head of marketing, Sue Kroll, do most of the talking. Now, that is not a dumb idea in itself, because I don’t need Warner Bros. to make my movie. I’m going to make my movie. I need Warner Brothers to sell it, so there is nothing wrong with that. It is not a dumb idea. It is intelligent. I don’t need them to make a movie — they know I know how to make a f*cking movie, and I definitely know how to make a movie that I have written and that they like and wanna make.

“But I really responded to Tom Rothman and how he commanded the room,” he adds. “This was his company, his studio, and he would be across everything, and you saw a man who wouldn’t let his team get a word in edgewise, and I like a bit of a bully. What can I say? I like a forceful man in my corner.

“Well, we wanted to find out who the real players in this game were,” he concludes, “and it came down to these two studios.”

Ultimately, it was Quentin’s decision, but aside from the merits of both studios, there was one point in the term sheet that needed confirmation.

“I had a deal point that Warner Bros. just couldn’t go for,” he recalls. “I have had this deal point in place since Jackie Brown, and that is, in twenty years, I get the negative. I own the movie. Tom said yes to this immediately.”

“At the end of the day, I think that Sony Columbia would have won anyway because Tom Rothman was the deciding factor,” says Quentin. “He told me that Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood was the kind of movie that he got into the industry to champion.”

When Mike Simpson asked Tom Rothman about his future at Sony, he demonstrated that he knew how crucial Rothman’s tenure there was going to be for Quentin.

“It was key, key, key that he would be heading up the studio come the release of the movie,” Simpson says.

“Look, there was no reason he wouldn’t be, because Tom has a history of staying. You know, he stayed at places. He was at Fox for a long time before he joined Sony Columbia, but you got to ask and you’ve got to know.”

Georgia Kacandes was reading the room the day of the pitch, and she could sense that Rothman’s personality was truly connecting with Quentin.

“Quentin doesn’t need anybody in his corner,” she says. “Quentin is Quentin, but he knew that Tom, the head of the studio, would be in his corner. Sometimes you forget how powerful these guys are. And the interesting thing about Quentin is, he actually wants to have the conversation with Tom. He wants to really talk through directly with Tom what the movie is going to be worth if he does this or this — all the distribution and finances. Nobody messes with an auteur director.”

It was a feeling Shannon McIntosh also picked up on, and despite Warner’s impressive pitch, and whether or not the studio would have agreed on ownership of the film’s negative, she always felt that it would come down to be Quentin wishing to work with Tom Rothman.

“I think I always felt it was going to be Sony Columbia,” she says. “It was clear that Quentin was the filmmaker that Tom wanted to work with, and that’s not to say he wasn’t working with other great filmmakers, but you just sensed that Tom was going to do anything to win this one and that everyone at the studio as a collective really got and understood the movie Quentin wanted to make. It wasn’t just lip service.”

Sanford Panitch places the win for the studio solely at the feet of Tom Rothman, saying, “Tom is a chairman who will take a bet on a movie that doesn’t make sense. A legacy of a great movie studio chairman is one who says, ‘Why do we have these jobs if we are not going to back the filmmaker?’ That is just one of the great things about Tom. He is the last of the true studio chiefs.”

Tom Rothman wanted Quentin to leave the room with no doubt about just how much his studio was going to back him as an artist — assurance that its complete devotion to that task would be unparalleled.

“I just knew that this movie was going to be one of Quentin’s greatest achievements,” Rothman says. “It would be right up there in the pantheon, and I wanted him to know that our studio aspired to be, in some measure, a part of that and support that. So I think he felt that.”

Quentin did.

“Tom is my guy.”

Sony would oversee the worldwide release of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.

Excerpt © 2025 Insight Editions.
Provided courtesy of Insight Editions & The Story Factory, from Jay Glennie’s The Making of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (publishing October 28, 2025)