Tulsa King: Taylor Sheridan wrote pilot for the Sylvester Stallone mob series in just one day

Given how many projects Taylor Sheridan seems to be juggling on a regular basis, it should come as no surprise that the dude is one prolific writer. But according to Taylor Sheridan’s producing partner David Glasser, he may have set a screenwriting record by penning the draft for the pilot of Sylvester Stallone’s upcoming Tulsa King series in just one day.

While speaking with THR, David Glasser said that he had mentioned to Taylor Sheridan that Sylvester Stallone had always wanted to play a gangster, and by the following afternoon… there was a script in Glasser’s inbox. “Taylor starts to spitball the idea of a fish out of water story for an hour,” Glasser said. “Then, Saturday afternoon at 4 p.m., he goes, ‘Check your inbox.’ There is a script he’s already written called Kansas City King and it’s incredible.” Sheridan and Glasser pitched the idea to Stallone on Monday, and the rest is history.

While Taylor Sheridan may have fired off the script for Tulsa King in record time, he handed creative control of the project over to Terence Winter (Boardwalk Empire). Winter made a few changes to the story, which included changing the location from Kansas City to Tulsa. “It didn’t feel remote enough,” Winter said. “The New Yorker in me started thinking, ‘All right, what sounds like the middle of nowhere? I looked at the map and I’m like, ‘Oklahoma.’”

Terence Winter also had to get used to Sylvester Stallone wanting to put his own spin on the script, which was very different from his experience on The Sopranos, where the cast stuck to the written words exactly “It was verbatim,” Winter said. “Every pause, every ‘um,’ every ‘you know’ — it’s all [in the scripts].” Stallone added, “Usually they’re very strict about adhering to what’s written on the page. But I tend to go off the page every now and then and throw in ad-libs. They were a little disturbed at first.” Winter quickly came to see Stallone’s contributions as a major benefit. “With Stallone, you’re getting a writer, a director, a producer, an editor,” Winter said. “He’s got great ideas, and he’s got strong opinions about things, and he’s been doing this for a really long time at the highest possible level. He’s also been in his own skin for so long that he knows what works and knows what he does well.“

Sylvester Stallone stars in Tulsa King as Dwight “The General” Manfredi, a New York mafia capo. After he’s released from prison, Dwight is unceremoniously exiled by his boss to set up shop in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Realizing that his mob family may not have his best interests in mind, Dwight slowly builds a crew from a group of unlikely characters to help him establish a new criminal empire in a place that might as well be another planet. Tulsa King will debut on Paramont+ on November 13th.