Far from being the throwaway artefact it sometimes pretends to be, Tarantino's first novel may even, as he's hinted, herald the start of a new direction for this relentlessly inventive director. Chapters have the propulsive thrust of anecdotes his exuberant excess is the dominant charm. It can also disrupt the period effect – in a chapter told from Charles Manson's POV, we get an anachronistic Pauline Kael quote elsewhere, Candice Bergen is referred to as a "sixties-era zeitgeist beauty," a description that surely belongs to hindsight.Ībsent the voluptuous thrills of the cinematic experience – the operatic splatter, the rambunctious camerawork, the golden needle-drops – Once Upon a Time is perhaps less like a trip to the movies than a night in with Tarantino. There's often no tidy line between a character's perspective and the narrator's, and given the decidedly non-PC attitudes on display, this can be a little hair-raising. Tarantino is a narrator who likes to show and tell, making him a boisterous if somewhat undisciplined presence. Although the brio with which he imitates period idiom produces the occasional absurdity ("He lights his cancer stick with his silver Zippo in the flashy (noisy) way of a fifties-era cool daddy-o"), on the whole it helps to create an authentically pulpy atmosphere. Tarantino's explosive dialogue, with its blend of streetwise and formal cadences, is almost as effective written down as read aloud.
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As "an Eisenhower actor in a Dennis Hopper Hollywood," Rick faces "a race to the bottom." Cliff, meanwhile, whose on-set unruliness is making him unhirable, is increasingly reliant on his old buddy for a living. reshot?Īt its heart, the book is about the threat posed to Rick and Cliff by the advent of the New Hollywood. "t the Actors Studio," she says, "they ask the question: What if the script didn't say that? Then what would your character do? Then what choice would your character make?" This, it seems, is what Tarantino has been asking himself for a while: when a historical ending isn't quite right, what if history could be simply. It falls to her to provide the most pointed meta-commentary on the novel's action.
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We also get more of the precocious 8-year-old who plays Rick's half-sister in the TV western "Lancer" (a real show, incidentally). Some lines are lifted verbatim from the screenplay, but there's plenty of new material too, much of it concerning Cliff's violent past, only hinted at in the movie. Like the movie, the book follows Rick and Cliff from set to bar to Beverly Hills. The emotional core of the novel lies instead with his own creations, TV cowboy Rick Dalton and his best friend and stunt double, Cliff Booth. De-centering the Manson plotline, he turns it into just another part of the far-out tapestry of late-'60s LA. Once Upon a Time.But Tarantino, ever-wily, spots in the retelling a chance to shape the novel quite differently.
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Interview With the Vampire being adapted into a TV series in Hollywood, the novel, is out at HarperCollins in the US and W&N in the UK.Īndra Day responds to Brad Pitt dating reports in Hollywood was nominated for 10 Academy Awards at the 2020 ceremony, including Best Picture and Best Director. Pitt won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Booth in the film. “That, I will never tell,” he told the newspaper in 2019. “The second time was when Cliff killed his wife two years earlier,” he writes, confirming that Booth did, in fact, commit the murder.īefore the novel’s release, Pitt had told the LA Times that he knew whether his character had killed his wife, but declined to reveal the answer. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at. Not only is the book itself an artifact of a past age, art-designed.
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In the book, Tarantino clearly states that Booth got away with murder several times. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson (8.99). But no gesture has ever matched the dedication inherent in Tarantino’s first book: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood A Novel. The novel, however, takes a much more definitive approach. In the movie, Pitt’s character Cliff Booth is implied to have potentially killed his wife, although the film leaves this particular plot point open-ended.