Los Angeles Times - November 29, 2005
Claudia Eller

But for pure drama, it's hard to beat the tortuous journey of "Rent," the musical adaptation that opened in theaters last week. Since the film rights to the award-winning Broadway show were sold in 1996, the project has been buffeted by clashing egos, missed opportunities and unnatural disaster.

"My proper title on this movie should not be producer, it should be Sisyphus," said Jane Rosenthal, the movie's longest-suffering advocate, who recalls how the events of Sept. 11, 2001, derailed a key meeting on the project with Miramax chief Harvey Weinstein.

To be a breakout hit, the movie, which cost its backers, Revolution Studios and Sony Pictures, nearly $50 million to produce and at least $27 million to market, will have to appeal not only to its cult following but also to millions of people unfamiliar with the show.

Although the show has had a successful national tour, for years some studio chiefs felt its gritty subject matter would limit the size of its audience. Even with the backing of director Chris Columbus it was tough to persuade anyone to gamble on "Rent."

An uphill battle

No one says success will be easy. "Rent" features such characters as a drag queen, a drug-addicted sadomasochistic dancer and a lesbian couple. Set in the 1980s, the plot depicts the struggles of squatter artists in a dingy loft in New York's East Village as they cling to friendship and love in the face of AIDS and poverty. Although rated PG-13, it's hardly middle-of-the-road fare.

The show's beginnings are rooted in tragedy.

In the early morning of Jan. 25, 1996, less than 24 hours before "Rent" was to have its first preview at the off-Broadway New York Theater Workshop, the show's 35-year-old author and composer, Jonathan Larson, died of an aortic aneurysm at his Greenwich Village home.

Larson's sister Julie recalls how surreal a time it was. As the show became a hit and several Hollywood studios clamored to buy the rights, she and her parents struggled to weigh competing offers while also trying to grieve.

At first, Julie said, the family wasn't sure whether the musical would translate to film, and they agonized over what her brother would have wanted.

When a bidding war broke out, the family chose Miramax.

Rosenthal and her partner at Tribeca Films, Robert DeNiro, were asked by Miramax's Weinstein to produce the film. Rosenthal hired screenwriter Stephen Chbosky to adapt the material and began talking to directors. But it wasn't until Spike Lee expressed interest that the project got traction.

Throughout the summer of 2001, Lee worked on the script with Chbosky. He put together a budget and had begun casting when things went awry.

Rosenthal said money was the problem: Weinstein wanted a proposed budget of $28 million cut to $20 million. Weinstein says the script just wasn't good enough. "I'm pretty snobby about the writing," Weinstein said in an interview. "Whatever Spike said about our differences, it was about the script and the script only."

Lee declined to be interviewed, other than to say he wished the film well. Whatever made Weinstein balk, Lee was furious and quit the project.

Desperate to save the project, Rosenthal resolved to meet with Weinstein. On the morning she was to see him at the Tribeca office building where both their companies are housed, the attacks on the World Trade Center towers occurred just 1 1/2 blocks away.

"That meeting never happened," she said.

In the months after 9/11, the project foundered. Weinstein wanted Rosenthal to land a financial partner to share the risk. But she had trouble finding one.

"Because of the subject matter -- the homosexual relationships and AIDS -- Harvey always thought we should do it for a price," meaning he wanted to limit his financial risk, she said. "We shopped it everywhere: HBO Films, Warner Bros., Universal."

Instead, in 2003, Weinstein secretly approached NBC about making a TV movie of "Rent." When the producers and the Larson family discovered that Weinstein had gone behind that their backs, they were appalled.

But the Larsons had a contract that would rein in Weinstein. In signing over the rights, they had secured veto power over who would be producer and director and a guarantee that no TV project could go forward without their permission.

It was the ill-fated TV pitch that prompted director Columbus to take action. He had expressed interest in the project earlier, but when he heard that "Rent" was being courted by the small screen, he said he couldn't sit still. "I was stunned," he said.

Let's meet

Columbus told his agent to set up a meeting with Rosenthal. Columbus also sought out the Larsons, who were understandably wary.

"Here we go again," Julie Larson remembers thinking. "The fear kicked in." But after spending just 10 minutes with the director, she recalls, "I felt this was right. He just got it."

There was one problem. Weinstein and his brother, Bob, were by now in the midst of splitting from their corporate parent, Walt Disney Co. They weren't financing new movies.

Weinstein let Columbus take what by then had become his passion project to Warner Bros., where the director has a production deal. But Warner Bros. was reluctant to bankroll "Rent."

"They would only make it for a price of $20 million," recalled Columbus. "I couldn't see doing it that way."

Columbus slipped a copy of the "Rent" script to Joe Roth, who had his own production company, Revolution. He loved it and told Columbus something he had been longing to hear: yes.

Roth called Weinstein, who agreed to let the rights go for $4 million.

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