Once Upon A Time In Hollywood – a novel by Quentin Tarantino

 

“Hollywood is the only place where you can die of encouragement,” said Pauline Kael, and Quentin Tarantino says it again – and again – in his debut novel, a somewhat faithful adaptation of his 2018 movie that slyly goes its own way in the final quarter. If you want to cut to the chase and see how he writes up his film’s famously over-the-top final showdown, which involved the Manson family and some heavy firepower, turn to page 110 where it is summarily dispensed with. Once that’s out of the way, feel free to enjoy the spirit of Tarantino’s film as it was initially conceived; without the motivating drive of impending violence. In that sense, this freewheeling novel – perhaps we could call it a re-realisation – is a great deal tamer than you might imagine (bar one largely unfilmable sex scene). It’s also slightly less of an ensemble work and more of a digressive period piece centred around a week in the life of fading movie star Rick Dalton – once a serious contender to Steve McQueen’s number one status and now the heavy-of-the-week in serial television, struggling to stay upright on the shifting sands of New Hollywood.

Like his onscreen narrations (ie, the Voice Of God commentaries of Inglourious Basterds and, more pertinently, The Hateful Eight), Tarantino tends to write in the present tense – unless he’s deep in one the story’s myriad flashbacks or getting into the story of Lancer, the new western show that Dalton has signed up for. Such flashbacks tend to reveal a lot more about Dalton’s stunt double, Cliff Booth, whose dangerous reputation as a wife-killer and warlord keeps him tied to Rick, since no one else will touch him. Booth is from the now-unfashionable fighting generation, and the eight years between his black-and-white TV-western “old-timey” prime and the new, Technicolor age of hippie could not more expressly drawn than they are in his scenes here with jailbait hitchhiker Pussycat, a member of Charles Manson’s commune who lives on the all-but-abandoned Spahn movie ranch in nearby Chatsworth.

Most of what Manson is famous for has yet to happen in the story being told, but what he stood for makes for an interesting parallel to “straight” Hollywood. Manson purists will likely balk at the story’s broad adherence to the narrative of Helter Skelter, the lurid “true crime” book by DA Vincent Bugliosi that gets fishier with every passing year. But in the narrow bandwidth of this specific story, Manson is an entertainer too – like Rick Dalton, looking for the break he wants so badly. It’s a moot point whether Manson wanted to be a star, as such – or shock his followers and “trade places with Mickey Dolenz and join The Monkees” – but he did want a record deal, and Tarantino quite rightly fleshes out Manson as a would-be insider in his carousel of struggling players rather than a psychotic interloper.

Sharon Tate is the slight misfit here in that her struggles are slightly less neurotic than the men. Tate is already there, on top of the world and one of the world’s biggest, most beautiful rising stars (genuine question: was any other actress so photographed and documented in the space of three years?). However, her presence is a little less diaphanous than it was in Tarantino’s film. Here, we get a little more of Tate's interior monologue, trying not to be bound up by her “sexy little me” persona and pushing back against Roman Polanski, her petulant rock-star filmmaker husband.

But there are more than just five major characters here (Dalton, Booth, Manson, Tate, and the fictional Johnny Lancer). The sixth is Hollywood itself, both as a location and a notion – and, just as he did in the movie, Tarantino indulges both. As it was in the film, music is very important here, and Tarantino uses music cues here in much the same way (an italicised verse from Johnny Preston’s Running Bear here, a quick nod to The Box Tops’ Sweet Cream Ladies, Forward March there). It even allows for more examination of KHJ Boss Radio, sketching in more of DJ Real Don Steele and the curious case of his mysterious catchphrase (“Tina Delgado is alive!”), Likewise, the psycho-geography is important, especially when Cliff is driving, and his left and right turns are catalogued with a definite precision.

However, it’s as a business town that Hollywood pops and crackles, and in that way Tarantino’s novel is a headspinner – give it a while and it’s as well to go with the flow rather than try to separate the faux facts from the real ones in the backstories of Dalton, Booth and Tate (and Lancer star Jim Stacey, who, true or not, begrudges the fuck out of guest star Dalton’s groovy Easy Rider jacket and Zapata moustache). Tarantino deliberately blurs fact and fiction so that this isn’t simply a roman à clef, although the film’s most controversial scene – involving Bruce Lee – gets much-needed context, portraying Lee as an arrogant diva who looked down on the work of stuntmen but craved affirmation for his “serious” movie The Silent Flute. (Tarantino draws a thoughtful parallel with Manson as another thwarted artist, which is provocative since, in the aftermath of Tate’s murder Polanski reputedly considered Lee a suspect.)

It's this love of Hollywood lore that replaces the guts and god-knows of the original ending, and, rather than build to a crescendo, Tarantino lets us out with two bravura extended sequences, one involving Rick Dalton’s drinking buddies, the other his precocious Lancer co-star Trudi Frazer, eight years old and playing 12 (or is it the other way round?). Both scenes showcase some of Tarantino’s best writing yet and amply demonstrate that he doesn’t need violence to create suspense and tension. With a little girl and a telephone, has he really honed his best ending since Pulp Fiction? Reading is believing.