Title: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood
Rating: 3 Stars
Once I heard that Quentin Tarantino had written a novel called Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, I knew that I’d have to read it. I prepared for it by first re-watching the film (which I watched almost exactly two years ago and wrote about here).
What did I think about it? Well, my blog post kind of sums it up. It’s not original to me alas, it’s from a review of the novel written in the Evening Standard. It did read like fan fiction.
That’s not necessarily a bad thing. It did provide tight continuity between the film and the novel. Some situations and dialog were taken verbatim from the film. That in itself is interesting because some of the dialog quoted here was adlibbed by the actors. For instance, when Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt in the film) says to Rick Dalton (Leo DiCaprio), “Don’t forget that you’re Rick fucking Dalton”, that’s a Pitt adlib inspired by the time that a friend of his once told him that when he was in his doldrums that he was Brad Fucking Pitt.
The plot is pretty much the same between the two. In both cases, Rick Dalton is a once famed TV cowboy actor whose star has now faded. He’s reduced to taking heavy roles so that he can get his ass kicked by the current generation of TV stars. He’s not happy with his fall and is using alcohol to cushion it. His best (maybe only?) friend is his stuntman Cliff Booth.
There’s also the story of Sharon Tate, a young, beautiful and effervescent actor. She’s just emerging as a star and is just enjoying her moment.
Finally, there’s the thread of Charlie Manson’s family living on a ranch that was once used as a setting for Western films.
These stories intersect when Cliff picks up the hitchhiking Pussycat, a young member of Manson’s family. He drives her to the ranch, a place that he knows well from his days working on Westerns. Another intersection point is that Dalton lives next door to Sharon Tate on the fated night that the Manson family decide to kill everyone at Tate’s house.
Since a novel can, by its length, provide more detail than a film, Tarantino does fill in some gaps.
For instance, we learn a lot more about Cliff Booth. It’s hinted in the film that he’s a war hero. This is explained in depth. He was basically a murdering machine, killing huge numbers of both Italians and Japanese. Taken prisoner by the Japanese, there were many times that he expected to die but he emerged from the war as a decorated war hero. In the film, it’s hinted that he might have killed his wife. In the book, he most definitely did kill his wife. Not only that, but there were a couple of low level Italian mobsters that were threatening him. He casually kills them and then gets away with it by playing the war hero card. In the film, he has a pit bull named Brandy. It’s extremely well trained. Here we get the backstory on Brandy as well. A fellow stuntman owed Cliff a lot of money. To help pay it off, he offered to set Cliff up with an unbeatable pit bull (Brandy) for dog fighting. Cliff agrees and he makes a small fortune having Brandy fight other dogs to the death. Only when it’s apparent that Brandy will probably die in her next fight does he finally stop fighting her (and kills his fellow stuntman in the process). So, although Cliff still has plenty of charm in the novel, it’s obvious that he’s not really a good man. It’s unclear whether the war changed him or if this was just his nature.
Even more interesting is the fact that in the film, Cliff’s and Rick’s brutal killing of the Manson family members that originally intended to murder all at the Tate’s residence was the big closer. It was the last twenty minutes or so of the film and the extreme violence was reminiscent of the final Nazi death scene from Inglorious Basterds. It had the same feeling of fixing some historical wrong via extreme vengeance.
In the novel, this takes place, but it takes place in the middle of the novel and it is barely even described in an underwritten chapter.
Instead, the big finish is a scene between Rick and Trudi, the very adult eight year old actor that he’s working with on his TV show Lancer guest appearance. She takes acting very seriously, and in so doing, forces Rick to also take a closer look at his craft that he just takes for granted. The final scene in the book is them rehearsing a scene over the phone. In it, Rick, comes to an understanding and appreciation for the love that he has for acting.
So, instead of ending the film on some ultra violent act of vengeance, the novel ends with a sweet reckoning of acting professionals taking their job seriously and doing it well. The film felt like the depressing end of the peace and love sixties while the novel felt like a warm love of film.
I did enjoy reading the novel. It gets a one star demerit for being so self indulgent as to include an extended section involving Tarantino’s stepfather as well as an oblique reference to Tarantino himself. It didn’t add anything to include them. The second star demerit is because, when reading the novel, it is obvious that Tarantino is a screenwriter, not a novelist.
dorkenstein 