The insane rejection letter Quentin Tarantino received for ‘True Romance’
Between his debut feature Reservoir Dogs heralding the arrival of a dynamic new talent on the scene and Pulp Fiction firmly establishing him as one of the brightest new directors, Quentin Tarantino was left with no option but to tout his services across Hollywood.
As well as performing uncredited rewrites and script doctoring on movies like neo-noir thriller Past Midnight, submarine blockbuster Crimson Tide, slapstick comedy It’s Pat, and Michael Bay’s pyrotechnic extravaganza The Rock, he begrudgingly sold his screenplay for Natural Born Killers. In addition to that, he also handed off True Romance for Tony Scott to direct.
Even at that, when Tarantino was in the process of shopping his script around Tinseltown, not everyone who read it was won over by star-crossed lovers Clarence and Alabama. Heisting a suitcase full of cocaine and hitting the road to both turn a quick profit, they embark on a dangerous quest to evade the criminals hellbent on retrieving their merchandise.
One rejection, in particular, stands out, based on both the acclaim that greeted True Romance upon its eventual release in September of 1993 – even if it did bomb at the box office – and the signature stylistic flourishes that would soon become hallmarks of Tarantino’s filmography.
As regaled by Vanity Fair, one studio rep wrote directly to the filmmaker’s then-manager with an assessment of True Romance that could very generously be described as scathing: “How dare you send me this fucking piece of shit. You must be out of your fucking mind. You want to know how I feel about it? Here’s your fucking piece of shit back. Fuck you.”
Reflecting on the hardships of being a jobbing writer to Maxim, Tarantino helped shed some light on why certain industry figures wouldn’t have been immediately grabbed by his penmanship: “When you’re a nobody, it’s murder to get anyone to read your scripts. So my thing was making the first page fantastic, with dialogue that grabbed you right away,” he said. “The original True Romance script started with a long discussion about cunnilingus. Most people said the script was racist and that the grotesque violence would make people sick.”
Tarantino even admitted that Scott’s ending was better than the one he’d written, not that he didn’t put up a fight beforehand: “I tried like hell to convince Tony to let Clarence die because that’s what I wrote, and it wasn’t open for conjecture.” he exclaimed. “When I watched the movie, I realised that Tony was right. He always saw it as a fairy tale love story, and in that capacity, it works magnificently.”
The meeting of minds worked a treat for both, with the release of Pulp Fiction the following year elevating Tarantino into the directorial stratosphere and no doubt leaving the studio rep who trashed True Romance regretting their decision.
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