Once Upon a Time in Hollywood by Quentin Tarantino
While there’s no shortage of directors who’ve tried their hand at writing novels, most filmmakers don’t write novelisations of their own hit movies. Most filmmakers, though, aren’t Quentin Tarantino. As an avowed fan of this much-sneered-at – and now fairly rare – sub-genre, Tarantino sees art where others see only trash. Pulp Fiction might have given us a titular clue to his literary sensibilities, but for his prose debut he’s defied convention by rewriting Once Upon a Time in Hollywood as if it was the unwieldy source novel of his audacious re-imagining of the Manson murders.
The result is a wild literary ride that functions as both a deep-dive into the characters Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt played in the film – fading cowboy star Rick Dalton and his ageing stunt double Cliff Booth – and a rich exploration of the vicissitudes of fate within the movie industry amid the tumult of the late 1960s.
Like the majority of the film, the novelisation is set over two days in 1969 as Rick and Cliff ’s paths intersect in direct and tangential ways with Sharon Tate, Charles Manson and members of the Manson family. Unlike the film, Tarantino’s take on the Manson slayings is dispensed with early and Rick’s myriad insecurities become instead the driving force of a narrative detailing the complex ways that thwarted ambition and luck can change not only the course of a career, but history at large.
There are plenty of wry meditations on the history of cinema too. Cliff, we discover, is a quite the connoisseur of Akira Kurosawa, though Tarantino could be referring to his own approach to filmmaking when he writes: “He wasn’t a fine artist, but he had sensational talent for staging drama and pulp artistically.” Indeed, the book is full of little meta-flourishes that illuminate Tarantino’s creative process while also burnishing his own meticulously constructed mythology.
Yet his characters never feel like ciphers. His signature dialogue riffs bring the prose screaming to life, but all the narrative longueurs have provocative dramatic payoffs that tease out the novel’s thematic
pre-occupations. A chapter detailing Cliff ’s sordid adventures in post-war Paris, for instance, becomes a key to unlocking Charles Manson’s ability to control his underlings, while an anecdote about Rick almost being cast in The Great Escape is transformed into a tragic motif for the tantalising what-ifs of a profession built on make-believe. The result is an outrageously entertaining novel about a much-pored-over era, with Tarantino finding inventive ways to link the paranoia of the Hollywood dream factory with the chaos of a country no longer able to hide its divisions.