Tribeca CEO and co-founder Jane Rosenthal on partnering with De Niro and the future of film

Jane Rosenthal’s stint as a movie studio executive at Disney in the 1980s, working for industry titans like Jeffrey Katzenburg and Michael Eisner, was formative.?

“I learned an enormous amount,” she told me. “They were really building up a studio and Jeffrey brought a huge amount of discipline to it. It was an amazing time to be there and to see that transition between the old school and the new.”

Yet, Disney back then was marked by a bluntly workaholic, openly male-dominated culture. Rosenthal was told early on, “don't bother coming in on Sunday if you're not here on Saturday”. She recalls that if she dared arrive at the studio parking lot after 7.30am, male colleagues would say, “good afternoon, oh, good to see you here!”?

It was at Disney that Rosenthal got to work with a director named Martin Scorsese who in turn introduced her to an actor she calls Bob, but most of us know simply as De Niro.?

Since co-founding Tribeca Productions in 1989, De Niro and Rosenthal have since gone on to develop and produce an extraordinary range of blockbuster and arthouse films while cultivating a veritable empire of entrepreneurial operations under the Tribeca brand.?

This week, the group’s flagship event, the Tribeca Festival , takes over Manhattan for the 23rd year from June 5-16 with more than 600 events, including 86 World Premiere films, attracting some 130,000 attendees.?

The festival now includes television screenings (11 series this year), audio storytelling, games, media and ad industry discussions, artificial intelligence and an immersive art exhibit.

For De Niro fans, an extensive De Niro Con program highlights his extensive career and is denoted by the 50th anniversary screening of “Mean Streets” with the actor and his director Martin Scorsese appearing to discuss the film and the rapper Nas moderating.

The event was founded in the wake of 2001’s devastating September 11 attacks as a way to help usher in the process of reviving New York’s ailing downtown.?

“I fell in love with New York through the movies and we felt New York needed the movies to help recover,” Rosenthal told me, as we sat in her Tribeca office one recent morning. “Downtown had become a construction site at the time, you'd sit here and you'd hear if they found (remains). You'd hear the sound of the fire trucks coming and if it was they were coming to pick up their lost brothers, you would hear just one long sound. That was still a constant.”

Who: Jane Rosenthal

Resume: Co-Founder-CEO Tribeca Enterprises, Film Producer. Board member of TE, JR's Art Can Save the World; Child Mind Institute; Global Citizens; 911 Museum and Memorial; Deans Council NYU School of the Arts

Politically inclined: Rosenthal began her working life at 16, as an intern at the Rhode Island House of Representatives. Politics didn’t stick as a career option though and after turning to film school and documentary filmmaking at NYU, she landed at CBS in Manhattan, helping produce the legendary NFL Today show. At just 21, she relocated to Los Angeles and spent several years producing dozens of television movies.?

“There’s a saying in basketball, that when you're shooting, you have to make your age,” she says of the time. “It's like, how many points can you get? Well, you have to make your age. So in my big negotiation with CBS, I think they offered me $18,000 or so. So I said, I have to ‘make my age’. I got $21,000.”?

After four years producing television movies, she was ready to move on. Her first pitstop after CBS was the Universal film studio, but several mentors had begun pitching her television and feature film credentials to Michael Eisner and Jeffrey Katzenburg at Disney.

“I was on a treadmill at CBS, but it was really a form of graduate school in terms of what I was learning and who I was working with,” she told me. “Those lessons and the people I got to work with are still with me to this day.”?

Here in her own words – lightly edited for space and clarity – Rosenthal talks us through her extraordinary career as a film producer and creative executive.

Working at Disney in the mid-1980s, I met Martin Scorsese and Quincy Jones, who have both been lifelong mentors. I was working on “The Color of Money” (Scorcese’s underrated Paul Newman-Tom Cruise gem) and pinching myself. At NYU, I had studied Marty's ‘Sight and Sound’ films and there’s Paul Newman and this kid Tom Cruise, who had made “Top Gun”, although they hadn't released it yet. Disney sent me to the Chicago set and Marty let me do what a studio executive should do — sit next to him when he was directing, go see dailies with him. Just to hear the conversations, it was every NYU film student’s dream.?

I met with Robert De Niro because Martin Scorsese asked me to meet Robert De Niro. This was 34 years ago. He wanted to start a production company to make some movies that he could direct… At the time, Bob was working on “Midnight Run”. He didn't have a building or a company name. He was talking to a lot of different people, so we talked again over the years and he finally said he was ready to do it. My friends were like, ‘you're gonna go work with some cocky, macho actor in New York?

I was about to turn 30, so I wrote a list of pros and cons and intangibles. But the pros were outweighed and the cons and the intangibles were gonna be intangibles my whole life (in the industry). I’d been through Disney and was exhausted and had this enormous repertoire of films. It was like, why not take a shot? So I rented out my house, put my car in storage and moved to New York.?

At the start, I was working out of my apartment which was down the street from this building here in Tribeca. Then we would work from his kitchen table, at his loft, which was over on Hudson. We walked around looking for buildings and found this building, which used to be the Martinson Coffee building and had to be financed like a commercial condominium. It was all chop shops up and down the street at the time, pretty desolate. When I told people 35 years ago I was moving to Tribeca, they said, ‘I thought you were moving to New York? Like, is that near Long Island?’?

When we started getting scripts and developing projects we thought about a name for the company. Bob suggested things like Pavement productions or Canal productions, and I said, no, we should just call it Tribeca. So we did and now it's the name of the restaurant, the Tribeca Grill, the hotel and the production company, Tribeca Productions. Now there's too much Tribeca, but that's another story. We were doing so many things — I was also developing scripts. This was before cell phones and faxes had just come into fashion. You were always waiting for Fedex or a fax to come through.?

“A Bronx Tale” came to us very early on. We also developed the movie “Thunderheart”, which I ended up spending three months filming on the Pine Ridge Indian reservation. It was Val Kilmer, Graham Greene and Sam Shepard. Michael Apted directed it. It was important to me to be able to say it wasn't just ‘developing’ — we were doing.?

“Analyze This” was the first comedy we did. You go look at any of Bob's movies, including “Taxi Driver” or “Raging Bull”, and he's got moments of sheer comedy. He's got a wicked sense of humor and great timing. We wanted to make the most of that. Billy Crystal would sometimes call me and say ‘Is Bob always like this? Do you think he likes me?’ And I was like, ‘what are you talking about, of course, he does.’ But there was real tension between the director Harold Ramis and Bob and Billy. They kept that edge, which played for the movie. That was the first time we had a movie that hit $100 million. Then right after that, Bob did “Flawless” with Joel Schumacher and Philip Seymour Hoffman.?

On 9/11, I was coming into the office. I dropped off my daughter at school and was coming down the East Side and came through the Battery Park underpass. My driver stopped at a yellow light and then the plane was all I heard was so I went further into Wall Street because we'd already been here through the first attack (in 1993) and you know, you're not thinking of buildings falling down. Bob I think was home, getting ready to go to the airport or something. It took me about four hours to get home that morning. The next day, on the 12th, I was supposed to go to LA and I obviously ended up staying home. It was so desolate down here, and I remember one night going to dinner in Little Italy and there was nobody there.?

I became obsessed with figuring out how we bring people back downtown. So we started these dinners downtown, in October, 2001 at a time when you still had to show your ID just coming down here (from other parts of Manhattan). The concept was basically have a meal, save a job because all of the restaurant workers were losing their jobs. The first night, we had about 400 people including President Clinton.?

We had been approached previously about doing a film festival. But it’s like, you don’t quit your day job to do a film festival… I remember one day I got home and I called Bob and said, you know, I think now is the time to do a film festival and do something for the city. We called (PR guru) Howard Rubenstein, they got the governor involved and the head of economic development. They helped us put together a press conference with Meryl Streep, Ed Burns, Scorsese, me and Bob and the governor. My phone started to ring... I did not know about sponsorship or anything like that. My attitude was if I can prepare a movie in three months, I can prepare for a film festival.

At the time, many of the networks were letting people go from their news divisions. So people from CNN and CBS came in to help the first year and brought the discipline of ‘no is not an option’. We ended up getting American Express as a major sponsor and it wasn't like a traditional sponsorship relationship because they were moving back downtown after they had lost a couple of people on 9/11 and they believed it would be uplifting for their community. And so they said yes.?

The first year we got Nelson Mandela and there were hundreds of thousands of people who came down. We had a concert and David Bowie played, too. So we did it. I'm thinking, OK, I gotta go back to producing movies. But I truly did not understand the contracts we signed with (sponsors). I had thought if I signed a long term contract, they'd say, OK, the first one is fine, we don't need to do this again. But here we are, still.?

We've long been a woman-led and a majority-woman run business. It's taken my career in a different place. I haven't made as many movies as I would have made if I was just totally focused on that. But I've also gotten to meet and explore things with new filmmakers and we have nurtured and mentored so many filmmakers. That's been really gratifying, too.

I had this idea in 2004 of uploading short films for people to see online… We didn't have iPhones yet. We thought we should upload them online and have people from all over the country vote and then we'll bring the winner to the festival. So we ended up calling this guy, Jeff Bezos. Could Amazon help us build a back end? They did. I mean, it still took forever to do this. I think about why we didn't just stick with that? Could it have been YouTube??

I had produced (Martin Scorsese’s epic film) “The Irishman,” just before COVID. We were trying to get the big theater chains to take the movie for 30 days before it came out on Netflix, but they wouldn't make a deal with us. Netflix to its credit made some deals with independent theaters. But when we were in COVID, (the big chains) wanted to make any deal possible. So you went from COVID and a mild recovery, then last year’s strikes shut the industry down. Not to mention the consolidation of big studios, like what's gonna happen with Paramount right now, and then we’ve lost that great competition of what happens on opening weekend anymore. We've also had globalization too, which is great, but they're making less movies, taking less chances.?

We went through a period where studios wanted us to do more ‘serious’ projects. We did “When They See Us” on the Central Park Five for Netflix. Now, all of a sudden they don't wanna do this anymore, they want romantic comedies. We're currently shooting one in Atlanta for Amazon with Michelle Pfeiffer, Denis Leary and Michael Showalter directing.?

The exhibition business has totally changed. In Manhattan, we used to have The Plaza, The Paris, The Ziegfeld and bigger theaters below 23rd Street, too. There weren't all these little cineplexes that are worried about serving food. I don't think that’s been good for the business. It's harder to find rooms… We ended up building a 500-seat theater at Spring Studio, because those don't really exist. We use The Beacon Theater and they've put in a screen and a good sound system for us.?

In times of difficulty, whether it was 9/11, whether it was Afghanistan, or even during COVID, we needed stories that can bring us together. So the festival is still about entertaining, but it's also a way for us to hopefully bring something to our community. We've always been an activist festival and feel that those stories give you an opportunity to walk in for two hours to just have conversations. It's interesting to see where independent films will go and I think festivals play an important part in the distribution of those films. I've talked to some friends at Sundance and Venice about how we should really come together and figure out how we can help support independent films even more.