“Yellowstone” creator Taylor Sheridan has called out the Hollywood snobs at HBO who passed on his now-smash hit show.
Sheridan says Hollywood executives turned down his modern Western show and lost hundreds of millions in the process.
Sheridan said: “I was a fair actor, but that’s all I was ever going to be.
“Hollywood will tell you what you’re supposed to do if you listen.
“If you’re banging your head against the wall for 20 years trying to be an actor, maybe you shouldn’t be an actor.
“But the first thing I ever wrote [the pilot for Mayor of Kingstown in 2011] got me meetings at every major network, at every agency.
“I had multiple people trying to buy it.”
He said he pitched “Yellowstone” as “The Godfather in Montana,” and HBO got on board.
Sheridan says:
“They said, ‘We want Robert Redford.’
“They said, ‘If you can get us Robert Redford, we’ll greenlight the pilot.’
“I drive to Sundance and spend the day with him and he agrees to play John Dutton.
“I call the senior vice president in charge of production and say, ‘I got him!’ ‘You got who?’ ‘Robert Redford.’ ‘What?!‘ ‘You said if I got Robert Redford, you’d greenlight the show.’”
“And he says — and you can’t make this sh*t up — ‘We meant a Robert Redford type.’
“We go to lunch in some snazzy place in West L.A.
“And Yellowstone co-creator John Linson finally asks: ‘Why don’t you want to make it?’
“And the VP goes: ‘Look, it just feels so Middle America. We’re HBO, we’re avant-garde, we’re trendsetters. This feels like a step backward. And frankly, I’ve got to be honest, I don’t think anyone should be living out there in rural Montana. It should be a park or something.’
“I thought I had tricked people by showing a world worth protecting.
“But when the show is over, that notion will go away and there will be a new shiny penny everyone watches.
“So I felt like I didn’t accomplish anything — which, for me, is really important.”
“Most ranches there had already been carved up,” he added.
“They’d already lost it.”
Media/entertainment elites are even dumber and less talented than you think.
Taylor Sheridan offers some keen insights and useful lessons learned in @THR interview. pic.twitter.com/gqFUIvN0y5
— Dan Proft (@DanProft) June 22, 2023
