In recent months, Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, his 10th movie, has streamed on Netflix UK. It’s now been taken off, having made the top 10 for some weeks. In its pre-production days, movie gossip sites were shilling rumours about Tarantino’s biopic about the Manson Murders, conjuring gore-splashed images of murder victims used as entertainment for the masses. Tarantino = controversy, after all.
When the film eventually released, viewers quickly realised it was a masturbatory, 3-hour fuckaround about 60s Hollywood, and the Manson connection fleeting and totally fictionalised. In the meantime, Margot Robbie dressed up as ill-fated Sharon Tate, and… watched herself in the cinema, and Leonardo DiCaprio brought to life Rick Dalton, a fictional burned-out western actor.
Other fictional and real-life movie people drifted in and out of the narrative, but none of this seemed to mean anything: there was no overarching story or direction to the events: just ‘60s people doing ‘60s things. It took me several attempts to get through. So much opportunity, so little actual story.
By this time, I’d already got the book- the allure of my favourite screenwriter – creator of the blandly shocking Reservoir Dogs and the culture-soup delight Pulp Fiction - turning his hand to novelisations was too intriguing. Recently, I dipped into it.
Also fiction, the book weaves factual people and events with alternate-reality Hollywood: films that were never made (and some that were), people that never existed (and some that did), and a history in which 1800s Americans used the word ‘motherfucker.’ (Hint: they didn’t. Not commonly, anyway.)
This discrepancy occurs in a chunk of the book set inside the movie-in-the-movie, if you like- Dalton’s movie plot is expounded though several chapters, describing familiar western scenarios: bounty hunters, revenge murders, kidnaps and brothers finding each other in a pre-Facebook desert-world. There’s more driving story inside this short western section- a few chapters- than there is in the whole of the rest of the book.
There are further jarring inclusions when the book references Enter the Dragon (a film not released for another 4 years after the story is set), there are physical descriptions of female characters, but not so much the male ones, and the ending- the only interesting part of the film- is replaced with a phone riff between two actors. Weird. References to the real and fictional worlds, things that the characters wouldn't be conscious of, take us out of the moment and jar like an unspooled film reel. Tarantino doubles down on this when he meta-references himself as winning an Oscar - a century after that section of the story takes place - for a film that doesn't actually exist, let alone received a nomination.
There are strengths: Cliff’s backstory is fleshed out with sinister details, and Tarantino’s writing style stays intriguing and eloquent. The book, if anything, quells any notion that he’s some 60’s hippie who got lucky for writing recycled stories with slick-talking, sweary protagonists. He can write. He just needs something to write about.
