The public firestorm surrounding his old friend and long-time collaborator Harvey Weinstein doesn’t seem to have diminished Hollywood’s love for Quentin Tarantino just yet, despite the fact that the director publicly revealed a few weeks ago that he “knew enough to do more than I did” about Weinstein’s alleged behavior toward women. Variety reports that multiple studios are engaging in a protracted courtship to get the Pulp Fiction director to bring his latest film over to them, now that his old home at The Weinstein Co. is a rapidly smoldering ruin of sexual harassment complaints and bankruptcy fears.
Tarantino’s reportedly shopping around a script for a film about the Manson family, set in 1969. And by “shopping around,” we mean “waiting for the people with the money to come to him, hat in hand,” because, despite the fact that his last film brought in a relatively meager $100 million in profits, Tarantino and his agents at WME have set up a pretty strict set of requirements for the big studios to even see his new script. Presumably inspired by the tantrum Tarantino threw after The Hateful Eight’s script got leaked all over the internet, he recently forced film executives to visit the WME offices in person if they wanted to see his ideas for his latest ultra-stylized splatterfest.
Tarantino’s demands—which also include a $100 million budget and generous profit-sharing requirements—have scared off some of the smaller studios, but they didn’t stop Warner Bros. from making a full-court press for his affections this week, greeting the director with a display of period-appropriate cars from the film’s expected era in the company lot. (The intended message apparently being, “Hey, look, we’ve already got these cars.”) Paramount and Sony made similar, if less elaborate, efforts, smelling the blood in the water now that Tarantino—whose career has been largely synonymous with Weinstein ever since his Reservoir Dogs days—is suddenly a free agent.