[NEW FEATURE: Of the two, Toast is the book reader, but as he notes "I read slower than GRR Martin can write books". Kent, on the other hand, just "gets bored reading" so he mostly reads comics. It's the reason this blog mostly covers Movies and TV shows. We cover a lot of "Comic-to-movies/TV" or "Book-to-movie/TV" but "I Want My MTB" is for the rare "Media-to-Book" (MTB) ...for when we actually get around to reading something.]
2021 - Harper Perennial Paperback
As a late-teen I had a copy of Quentin Tarantino's screenplay for Pulp Fiction, which was maybe my all-time favourite film for a number of years (still my favourite Tarantino). As much as I don't read, I read and re-read that screenplay many, many times. The dialogue flowed so easily, reading it was effortless. It helped that I had seen the film a half-dozen times in the theatre and listened to the soundtrack regularly (fun fact, my dad asked me to make a tape of the soundtrack for him to play in his truck, the ONLY time that's ever happened). Tarantino once cited Elmore Leonard as one of his main inspirations for writing dialogue, and I've read a few Leonard novels in the many years since discovering Tarantino and can totally see the influence.
I've never read another Tarantino screenplay, mainly because I haven't connected with any of the other films in the same obsessive way. I probably should though, if only to get myself into the mindset of script writing again. But I digress...
I was listening to a recent installment of the podcast WTF with Marc Maron in which Maron was interviewing Tarantino. The episode debuted a week before Tarantino's novelization of Once Upon A Time...In Hollywood would hit the stands. Maron had read the novel...more to the point he kind of absorbed it, in a very short span of time, and was praising it as not so much an adaptation of the movie, but an extension of it, totally different than the movie, and totally entertaining. They get into the book a bit in the podcast but I was already sold from Maron's preamble. I liked but didn't love the movie...but if the book was a completely different experience than the movie, I was in. Even if it's something I'm not into, any kind of extended/alternate versions of movies/media is always intriguing to me.
Book pre-ordered. Book arrived. Book consumed rapidly (well,over a few weeks, but for me, that's really, really fast).
First, the book we're talking about is an old-school paperback, set up like a 60's or 70's-styled film adaptation novel, 400 pages, and about the size of a grown man's hand... rather than describe it, here's a picture:
Most of the books I've read over the past two decades have been in hardcover, or else an oversized paperback. I've forgotten how maneuverable a traditional paperback back book is, how easy it is to hold in one hand. It was already tweaking nostalgia buttons in so many different way before I ever read the first line.
The book is such a Tarantino production. It jumps around in time in a non-linear fashion from chapter to chapter, and has single-chapter connected asides which focus on tertiary characters, much as his films often do.
The opening chapter is 24 pages of actor Rick Dalton in his agent's office, most of which is the two men talking about movies (real and Rick's in-world films) and tough-guy action and western TV and movie stars of the era and how they compare to Rick. The second chapter follows Rick's stunt double/personal assistant Cliff Booth for 24 pages, but is mostly about his interest in films, how they differ from Rick's. There's a lot of talk about Kurasawa films and Tohsiro Mifune. It may sound laborious but it's a test of whether you're in or out.
The film doesn't labor on so profusely about movies following these two chapters, but it's living in Hollywood circa 1969, following a professional actor whose star is on the wane, and is ultimately concerned with such things as people's opinions on movies, television, music and pop culture as a guideline for who their characters are. One has to think that QT himself engages with people on this basis if this is how he engages with -- and defines -- his characters.
Once Upon A Time... In Hollywood as a film was often described as an ode to the tough guys of old that just don't exist anymore, as well as a love letter to a Hollywood long gone (both as town, and as a movie production center), its innocence shattered after what the Manson family did in 1969. It's also, in its production, an homage to so much TV and film of the 60's, as all of QT's films are, full of pastiche and reverence for so many films and filmmaking styles (and stars).
QT worked on the story for Once Upon A Time... for the better part of a decade, apparently as a novel first, not a screenplay. He built out both the world that actually was as well as inserting his own voice into it via Rick and Cliff, and their work. There were spaghetti westerns, TV shows and advertisements all featuring Rick that, it's been reported, Tarantino fully scripted out, all for what winds up as seconds in the film. There's also, apparently, hours of footage left on the floor, for as long as the film is, QT didn't want to be too over-indulgent as to lose focus on the main characters: Cliff, Rick and Sharon Tate.
But the film left a lot of questions on the table about the nature of its characters and their portrayal. Was Cliff Booth (as played by Brad Pitt) a murderer? I mean there were rumours in the film that he murdered his wife (along with the briefest of "cut-to" scenes that perhaps showed him doing the deed). But it wasn't clear cut. Certainly the controversial Grand Guignal of a finale very uncomfortably shows Cliff's aggression towards women.
There was controversy surrounding the use of Bruce Lee in the film, in a flashback scene where Rick beats up Lee in a head-to-head fight, something that family and fans (and beyond) found disrespectful to the late martial arts master and performer. Did QT intend to besmirch the Dragon just to elevate his character?
There was certainly some discourse about Tarantino's use of Sharon Tate (as played by Margot Robbie) but only receiving around a dozen lines of dialogue. Did he think so little of her?
The book, by nature of the format of storytelling, is allowed to get in the heads of these characters, to tell their stories from a far more intimate perspective. Cliff, if you remove the sexy gloss of Brad Pitt, is a disgusting, violent, racist, misogynistic, homophobic, murderous human being (and yes, he most definitely killed his wife). That he is so adoring and loyal of his friend Rick, who acts in movies like Cliff behaves in real life, but is otherwise fairly soft, full of self-doubt, and prone to fits of vulnerability and crying is a stark counterpoint. It leads to the question, does Tarantino adore these type of men, or just the cinematic representation of them? Is this story a tribute to them or a damnation? Or does it fail to take a standpoint, because QT can't separate his love for the product from the complex, often repulsive nature of these men.
Case in point, QT spends an entire chapter on real-life actor James Stacy (in the story, Rick is guest starring as the heavy in the pilot for Stacy's real-world TV show, Lancer). There is a sense of admiration that QT has for Stacy, as he notes that he would have been a better choice for certain roles, and glowingly descriptive of Stacy's handsomeness, yet, it also dives into a pettiness and there's a number of points where the author notes the presence of the child actor sitting on Stacy's lap. A quick google entry finds that - skipping past Stacy's dismembement in a motorcycle collision with a drunk driver - Stacy was prosecuted for doing bad things with kids in the early 90s. Stacy's a real piece of shit. That QT both admires him as a performer yet doesn't paint him as a great guy (though never addresses his criminal behavior head on despite jumping forward in time through others careers) is part of the confounding depth of the story of Once Upon A Time in Hollywood (both book and film). He clearly loves the era, but is also not completely ignorant of the real nature of the men involved, and yet isn't directly addressing these behaviors either.
It's the complexity of being a QT fan. He's able to write these awful lines of dialogue (it's hard to forget his troublesome penchant for using the n-word), there's often a thread of misogyny, homophobia and/or racism to many of his central characters. In prose, that he's able to put his head inside someone like Cliff makes it hard to separate the thinking and thought patterns of the character from those of the author. It makes it challenging to
Sharon Tate spills out as a kind, generous, loving, upbeat, intelligent woman in the book. You actually can gather that from the film, but it's very spelled out in the novel. Tarantino clearly adores her. He shows Tate's presence in the lives of the people she knew meant their lives were better. She was aware of Hollywood's desire to portray her as sexy, and she would use that to advance herself. The scene where she goes to watch her own performance in a Matt Helm movie, in the film, has its own layers as it's Margot Robbie watching the Real Sharon Tate, a sure signifier of the artificial edifice of the film, but in the book it's in Tate's mind as she wants to get a true gauge of how her comedic performance - an extension of her acting ability she has the least confidence in - goes over in an average crowd. One of QTs mandates for the story (in both forms) was to cover over the label of victim that has defined Tate for decades, instead showing people an actress on-the-rise who was Hollywood beautiful but versaitile, and also that she was genuinely a good person, the kind the world needs to be a better place. Her kindness and good nature is in stark opposition to men like Rick and Cliff.
The infamous murder of Tate, Jay Sebring and the other visitors to her home is retconned in Tarantino's representation of 1969 Hollywood, as the "Manson family" members get the wrong house and wind up facing Cliff Booth instead, with a much different result. In the film, this is an aggressively violent sequence of Brad Pitt beating the living tar out of the intruders in a scene which ogles the violence with the same fascination of an 1970's grindhouse or Giallo. In the book this sequence -- which is the climax of the film -- is reduced to a half-paragraph jump-forward mention partway through an early chapter of the novel, another key sign early on the book experience was to be drastically different from the cinematic one.
That Bruce Lee incident gets completely recontextualized, and in its telling, having the luxury of observing from both Cliff and Lee's perspectives, notes that the reason Lee appears to have lost the fight was because he didn't want to hurt Cliff (or rather that he couldn't hurt Cliff or he may have been fired from The Green Hornet), but that Cliff had absolutely zero compunction about hurting Lee. As well QT gets into how Cliff suckered Lee, and Lee knew it, only too late. It acquits Lee in the loss, but also serves to re-up Cliff's awful nature. It's nuance the film isn't able to cover (and perhaps shouldn't have even been in the film at all?).
Charles Manson is more of a spectre that haunts the film, but has much more of a presence in the novel. QT is of the generation to have a perverse fascination with the cult leader, and did the research to get in his head. The boogeyman that only scared people after being put away is very much demystified here, as a small man with big ambitions as a musician only to fail and fumble his way into leading lost and wayward teens. He would trick them out in his quest to advance his career,and keeping them pliable via a steady diet of drugs and philosophical platitudes. Under the guise of free love and anti-establishment counter-culture, he was a true predator who preyed on the people whom he then taught how to prey upon others. There are sequences here that further integrate Manson into the story QT is telling, sequences that flesh out the events of the film even more. The intonation of the story seems to be that for all the disgusting things Cliff is, at least he's not Charlie Manson.
As well, QT gets into the actual story of the pilot of that Lancer television series, obviously a fictional pilot versus the one that got made, but it equates for two full chapters, told as a narrative rather than relayed as a meta narrative (in the final chapter of the novel, QT writes Rick as Rick as well as his Lancer character, exemplifying how actors dissappear into their roles). It's actually one of the most engaging aspects of the books, these sudden divergences into a very pulpy 60's western. I won't be surprised if there's a completed 90-minute Lancer screenplay that QT has written, ready to take this forgotten series and rebirth it. The only thing he's missing is the stars of the 60's. These Lancer chapters may be the least Tarantino-esque things Tarantino has ever written since he has to adhere to 60's network TV storytelling norms.
The oddest aspect of the book is QT's decision to insert himself into it, twice within the last 50 pages. In the same chapter, he makes reference to a character's future acting career, and inserts that character into three fictional movies from real directors, including "Quentin Tarantino's 1999 remake of the John Sayles script for the gangster epic The Lady In Red" (another Google search reveals Sayles wrote the screenplay for the 1979 Lewis Teague movie The Lady In Red). Later that same chapter, Cliff, Rick and Lancer star Jim Stacy go out for drinks and meet Quentin's real-life stepfather who then gets Rick to sign an autograph for his son "Quint...Quentin". Unpacking this crossover of reality into fiction (which ostensibly is the whole Once Upon A Time In Hollywood story) seems cute, but is this just a sign of Quentin's desire to be a part of the late-60's Hollywood story? Is the intonation that Hollywood would have been different had the Manson Family murders been prevented destroyed by noting that The Lady In Red is still a screenplay, and that various other films like Melvin and Howard, Prizzi's Honor and Boys Don't Cry all still exist? This kind of cheeky Stephen King-ish metatext only confuses things. Then again, QT often would insert himself into his own films as a character, maybe to the detriment of those films, so is this less egregious?
I found Once Upon A Time In Hollywood to be an effortless read, challenged only by the ugly thoughts of 1960's-era men and the perpetual need to see whether what QT is writing about is real or made up (so many Google searches performed in the reading of this book). QT's dialogue is as deft as ever, but his prose is equally fluid. There's always a sense that the writer is fully engaged at all times with what is being written. Nothing feels labored over here, surprisingly, given the novel's gestation period. I don't know that it satisfies as a stand-alone novel (having seen the film already, it's too hard to judge) but as a companion to the film, it fleshes it out even further, deepens and adds context to sequences that played differently without it. It's perhaps best described as a novel of deleted and extended scenes.
The more I think about it, however, the more I wonder what QT is actually trying to say about Hollywood 1969, beyond the fact that he wishes he were a part of it. I don't think he's lamenting its loss, or trying to damn it... I even hesitate to say he's trying to come to some sort of understanding about his fascination with - or relationship to - the era. The fact that he has Roman Polansky and Jim Stacy as two lauded characters in his book, but with their future criminal lives as predators of children left out, (not to mention a strip tease from an underage girl in the car with Cliff) makes for complicated consideration of just what is QT trying to say.
I get the sense that there's more Once Upon A Time In Hollywood material for QT to flesh out, more that he could do with it, that there's still other avenues for facets of the story or the setting to appear. Time will tell.
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