When Columbia TriStar walked away from Quentin Tarantino’s second screenplay in June 1993, the script that would become Pulp Fiction did not die in a drawer. Danny DeVito’s production company, Jersey Films, bought it, and DeVito then helped carry it to the studio that finally made it.
The detail keeps resurfacing in online “today I learned” threads because it sounds wrong. The man best known as Louie De Palma on Taxi and Frank Reynolds on It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is also listed as an executive producer on one of the most imitated crime films of the 1990s.
How Jersey Films got the script
DeVito set up Jersey Films in 1991 with producer Michael Shamberg, and Stacey Sher soon joined them as an equal partner. According to the film’s documented production history, the company had tried to sign Tarantino for his next project before it had even watched Reservoir Dogs.
The result was a development deal reported at roughly $1 million. It gave A Band Apart, the new company formed by Tarantino and producer Lawrence Bender, start-up money and office space. In return Jersey took a stake in the project and the right to offer the finished script to a studio.
That studio was meant to be Columbia TriStar, which had a first-look arrangement with Jersey. Tarantino finished the screenplay in January 1993, and by February the film sat on a trade list of TriStar projects in pre-production. Four months later the studio put it into turnaround, the industry term for releasing a project it no longer wants. A studio executive later said TriStar’s chief, Mike Medavoy, found it “too demented.”
DeVito’s role after TriStar said no
With the script back on the market, DeVito bought it, and he and Bender took it to Miramax Films, which Disney had recently acquired. Miramax picked it up quickly. Shamberg later recalled that there was no real bidding war, because only Miramax made an offer.
DeVito’s influence showed up again in casting. He has recalled that Miramax suggested Daniel Day-Lewis for the lead, and that he pushed back because Tarantino wanted John Travolta and held final cut and cast approval. Travolta got the part, and an Oscar nomination with it.
What the gamble returned
The numbers explain why the story still circulates. Here is the path from rejected script to hit, using figures from the film’s production record:
- January 1993: Tarantino completes the screenplay.
- June 1993: TriStar puts it into turnaround; Jersey Films buys it back.
- Budget: set at $8.5 million, with $500,000 returned, for a final cost of about $8 million.
- May 1994: the film wins the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
- Box office: $107.93 million in the US and nearly $213 million worldwide.
- March 1995: Tarantino and Roger Avary win the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Put another way, the worldwide gross came to roughly 26 times the final production budget ($213 million divided by $8 million), before roughly $10 million in marketing is counted. It was the first film Miramax financed entirely on its own and its first to pass $100 million in the US and Canada.
The rest of the Jersey Films shelf
Pulp Fiction was not a one-off for DeVito’s company. Jersey Films also produced Get Shorty, Gattaca, Man on the Moon and Garden State, and DeVito shared a Best Picture nomination as a producer of Erin Brockovich in 2000. He later started a second company, Jersey Films 2nd Avenue, with his children Lucy and Jake.
DeVito turns 82 on November 17. Readers who want more of his recent work can revisit how he surprised 5,000 Matilda fans at the Royal Albert Hall this month, and the Tarantino-scripted world continues in our story on Timothy Olyphant’s return as James Stacy in the Cliff Booth film, which premieres on November 16.
Further reading
Image: Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons
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