Quentin Tarantino has always considered himself a writer just as much as a filmmaker. Indeed, his lengthy screenplays, as profane and littered with questionable slurs as they might be, are literate and fantastical, and he has long professed the desire to write a book. Hence, we now have Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, Tarantino’s newly released novelization of his popular 2019 film, which starred Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt, and Margot Robbie.
With his debut novel, Tarantino proves the same engaging storyteller that he’s already demonstrated on the big screen, except this time without limitations such as running time and budget.
As in the movie, Hollywood tells the story of Rick Dalton, the once-famous star of a ’50s TV cowboy show called Bounty Law. Dalton prematurely left his highly-rated series in the early ’60s to pursue a silver-screen career, one which stalled after a handful of mostly B-pictures. Now relegated to villainous guest spots on whatever popular television shows will cast him, Rick senses that his career might be coming to an end.
But it’s not only Rick’s livelihood that’s ending. Set in 1969, the story deals with many different elements of the American culture advancing towards their inevitable conclusions: the Golden Age of Hollywood, the hippie idealism of the ’60s, and the notion of hyper-masculine identity, which Rick has often personified in his tough guy roles.
Rick Dalton could not be less of a cowboy if he tried. Neurotic, self-obsessed, and constantly on the verge of a nervous breakdown (fueled by alcohol dependency and withering egomania, not to mention untreated bipolar disorder), in life, Dalton is the exact opposite of the characters he typically portrays.
Enter Cliff Booth, Rick’s former stuntman who now acts as his combination assistant, chauffeur, handyman, and best friend. Cliff, a decorated WWII veteran, represents almost everything that Rick is not — humble, patient, and stoic. Rick can barely function as a human being, and Cliff keeps him afloat, providing moral support and doing so without hesitation.
Taking place largely over one single day, the book details two separate stories, divided between Rick and Cliff. Rick’s portion of the proceedings occurs while he’s filming the pilot episode for Lancer, a new Western. Sick from a night of heavy drinking, Rick has to find a way to get through the shoot and deliver a command performance as the lead baddie.
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Meanwhile, Cliff finds himself in hot water when he drops a teenage hitchhiker at Spahn Ranch, a location where he and Rick used to film Bounty Law but which has now been occupied by the nascent Manson Family. The Family is, as far as Cliff is concerned, a bunch of creepy hippies taking advantage of George Spahn, the elderly and blind owner of the property.
Mixed in with these narratives is a third story, this one about Sharon Tate, who, along with new husband, Roman Polanski, happens to be Rick’s neighbor. We get to know Sharon as she goes about her day, deciding to catch a screening of The Wrecking Crew starring Dean Martin, the new film in which she appears as a supporting character. The innocent and extremely genial Tate watches the movie and silently reminisces about its production.
And that’s it, by and large. Once Upon A Time in Hollywood has been referred to as a hangout movie with little in the way of plot, and that is basically true, a fact reflected in the novelization.
For those who’ve seen the film and might be wondering about its infamous final act, where the Manson Family decides to attack Rick and Cliff instead of Sharon Tate and her friends, that ending is nowhere to be found here. The incident is briefly mentioned, however, in one of the book’s occasional (and admittedly odd) flash-forwards, describing the scene almost as an afterthought. Rick becomes a conservative hero for having killed three supposed hippies who dared to mess with him, which affords Dalton some decent roles as well as ample time on talk shows. But the actual attack is never dramatized, unlike in the movie iteration, where it serves as the story’s climax.
According to Tarantino in recent promotional interviews, the original structure of the film styled the confrontation with the Mansonites—wherein they get their arguable just deserts—as more or less an epilogue. The culmination of act three (as initially scripted and filmed) was not blood and fire but a conversation when precocious child star Trudi Frazer, who befriends Rick on the set of the Lancer pilot, calls Rick in the middle of the night to make sure he’s learned his lines for the next day. Their friendly rivalry results in a hilarious but touching back-and-forth over the phone, a moment which here operates as the emotional high point and conclusion of the book.
The novel, therefore, offers a fascinating glimpse into how the movie might have played had it been longer, as many moments are based upon scenes deleted from the final version of the film. Other sequences have been wholly reimagined; the opening where Rick meets with new agent Marvin Schwarz no longer takes place at a restaurant but in Schwarz’s office, a more formal context for their meeting.
Another newly added element is the presence of a fictionalized Charles Manson. While the character cameos in the film, most of the “Charlie” material was cut from the finished product. The book reinstates Manson and further clarifies his desperation to be a rock star. He would happily leave his brainwashed cult behind in a heartbeat should Columbia offer him a record deal. This parallels Rick, who, despite a middling career in the movies and on TV, feels left out of the big Hollywood picture.
But while the story is, in the end, a character study of Rick Dalton—with Sharon Tate floating through almost like some sort of heavenly apparition and Charles Manson an anxious demon on the sidelines—the novel’s most conspicuous additions involve Cliff Booth.
As presented in the movie, Cliff is a bit of an enigma. Unlike Rick, he’s remarkably balanced and measured. Until he isn’t. During one controversial flashback scene, an arrogant Bruce Lee challenges Cliff to a fight, and upon further inspection, it’s obvious that Cliff is encouraging this altercation because he’s irritated and bored, even though it could end his (already faltering) career as a stuntman. We also learn, alarmingly, that Cliff may have murdered his own wife some years before.
Then, during the face-off with the Manson Family members, Cliff takes extra effort to brutalize the two attackers, who are women, smashing Susan “Sadie” Atkins in the face with a can of food and then siccing his pit bull on her and repeatedly slamming Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel’s head into any hard surface he can find until she’s unrecognizable. (The male attacker, Charles “Tex” Watson, is put down with an unpleasant but very quick curb stomp). There’s a disconcerting twinge of misogynistic violence to the scene, especially when considering that Cliff might be a wife-killer. Is Cliff simply acting in self-defense, or is he murdering the would-be murderers and getting off on it, in particular regarding the women?
The film left these questions about Cliff open-ended, and the darker implications about his character remained mostly beneath the surface. But in the novel, Tarantino casts aside any ambiguity: yes, Cliff Booth absolutely murdered his wife. Not only that, he’s murdered a handful of other people as well and so far has eluded jail time for his crimes.
These revelations may be jarring for those who cheered for Cliff in the movie theater, but it’s worth considering that his being played by Brad Pitt probably aided in the character’s likability. Without Pitt’s Academy Award-winning performance as a buffer, Cliff is stripped down to his cruder essence, and that essence is of a generally modest person who happens to possess a fucked-up, psychopathic streak that emerges when provoked.
For audience members who found the violence against women in the film problematic, the book will do little to assuage those concerns; it’s pretty clear that Cliff is a misogynist, at least to a degree. Tarantino also doesn’t do himself any favors by dismissively referring to his wife Billie Booth, as a “c*nt.” While the narration is meant to reflect Cliff’s state of mind, the prose is still ugly.
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And it’s made that much more ugly in the larger context of the book: Tarantino dedicates the novel to a handful of old-school Hollywood veterans, including Robert Blake, the actor famous for being tried and acquitted of the murder of his wife Bonnie Lee Bakley, a crime many still believe he committed. This context renders some of Tarantino’s creative choices in questionable taste.
However, Quentin Tarantino is nothing if not an expert at characterization. While often credited as a maestro when it comes to dialogue, homage, or the use of violence for dramatic effect—and he is quite skilled at all of those—his primary talent lies at the nuanced intersection of character and subtext and the way the latter can complicate the former. He knows exactly what he’s doing by revealing the handsome, affable, laconic cowboy stuntman to be a murderer and a misogynist, disrupting what could have been an otherwise straightforward character.
Once Upon A Time in Hollywood preoccupies itself with questioning certain conceptions of heroism, as Tarantino paints the portrait of a man who should be a hero but isn’t. In many ways, Cliff Booth represents Rick Dalton’s shadow self, a projection of those masculine ideals which Rick, in reality, fails to embody, but moreover, a subversion of that very ideal, underscored with a toxicity that can become violent.
The director, whose films tend to exalt masculine action tropes while subtly critiquing the ins and outs of male identity in moviedom, has been pursuing this line of questioning from Reservoir Dogs all the way through The Hateful Eight. Even his first screenplays, True Romance and Natural Born Killers, dealt in what seemed like superficial celebrations of macho posturing but were, in actuality, scathing, tragic takedowns of those clichés. Yet within Tarantino’s filmography, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood‘s closest cousin is probably Death Proof, his satire of slasher films that center around, take note, a murderous stuntman.
In a humorous move that both lightens and deepens the character, Cliff is revealed to be an avid cinephile, having been turned off by Hollywood’s relatively safe product after the war. Instead, Cliff prefers world cinema, and we get to hear his thoughts on everything from Akira Kurosawa to Ingmar Bergman to the most recent erotic arthouse fare. Though many of these observations read a lot like Tarantino’s own personal opinions as a critic, they are all filtered through Cliff’s reasoning and perspective.
Tarantino, ever a lover of twisty narratives, throws a couple of curveballs to the reader during the course of his tale. In addition to the flashbacks and flash-forwards and the discursive essays on film criticism and history, he devotes whole chapters to the plot of Lancer, describing the action as if it has suddenly become the main storyline. This parallels the movie, which pulled a similar meta-narrative trick.
And speaking of meta, Quentin Tarantino manages to reference himself not once but twice in one of the novel’s later chapters, when Rick encounters Tarantino’s stepfather Curt in a bar. While such a move could be merely chalked up to the author’s ego, it’s worth noting that this is his most personal and sentimental story by a mile, and the injection of direct autobiographical elements comes across as more heartfelt than anything. (The film, too, features a nod to the director’s parents: the couple seen horseback riding at Spahn Ranch is intended to be his mother and stepfather).
The big question hanging over this book is whether or not the novel stands enough apart from the film to justify the whole endeavor. While technically having written a novelization, Tarantino clearly wants his literary debut differentiated from the source material so that it can be judged on its own merits. And they are, for certain, very different.
The movie feels like a fairy tale, notably in its final section, where the climactic blast of ghoulish violence—pitched somewhere between Last House on the Left and Looney Tunes—writes a new and happy ending for Sharon Tate and for Rick Dalton. When Sharon and Roman Polanski’s gates open to Rick during the film’s final moments, we’re seeing the metaphorical gates of success opening to him, a golden, gleaming second chance.
In contrast, the book leans towards realism, undermining the fairy tale nature that made the movie so appealing. Rick’s big moment now comes during his conversation with new friend Trudi in the final chapter, a tender beat where Rick puts aside his ego and realizes he’s already living his dream, major success or not, professing his gratefulness for the opportunity to be an actor.
By dropping the over-the-top finale with the Manson Family and its fantasy aftermath, the narrative now reads like a fictional but accurate depiction of a very particular time in Hollywood history. Even the most surreal and pulpy details, namely Cliff’s blood-soaked backstory, still fit believably within that framework.
To be sure, this is a rethinking as opposed to a retelling. Whether the additions and changes are small (the novel is set on a Saturday, the film on a Sunday) or more elaborate (reworked from the ground up, Cliff’s visit to Spahn Ranch is shorter and less Texas Chainsaw-esque in its literary version, and told almost exclusively through the perspective of Manson Family member “Squeaky” Fromme), Tarantino’s novelization succeeds as a companion piece, related to but not necessarily dependent upon the story’s big screen incarnation.
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In fact, the novel’s best moment—a flash-forward where Cliff meets washed-up ’50s actor Aldo Ray during a film shoot in Spain—has no precedent in the movie at all and dovetails perfectly with the recurring theme of gruff male performers who become alcoholic wrecks as their careers (and life forces) fade, a very specific trail of human wreckage which conjures the outdated and poisonous expectations of masculinity that Tarantino interrogates.
Of course, when taken on its own, the drama is undercut by the flash-forwards scattered throughout, which reveal Cliff and Rick to be doing just fine in the future. In the film, the audience has no idea whether Rick, Cliff, Sharon, or her friends will survive as the Mansonites approach Cielo Drive, which lends genuine tension. The novel lacks such urgency.
On the other hand, the book primarily concerns itself with painting the intricacies of 1969 Hollywood as opposed to telling a linear plot, sinking deep into the minutiae in a fetishistic manner not always possible on the filmic level where the story has to keep moving. Tarantino has, with obvious enthusiasm, embraced novelistic storytelling and its allowances for digressions, tangents, and multiple points of view, all served up with crisp, sometimes aggressively swaggering prose redolent of classic hard-boiled pulp fiction.
The author isn’t yet done with Hollywood, either. He’s apparently written a stage play version, this time focused on the fateful dinner between Rick and spaghetti Western director Sergio Corbucci (an event suggested but unseen either in the book or the film), as well as several scripts for Rick’s fictional series Bounty Law. And this fall, the novel will be republished as a hardcover, replete with color photos and one of the Bounty Law teleplays.
In book form, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. For those readers put off by Tarantino’s tendencies towards male characters drenched in misogyny and machismo or for his use of offensive language (homophobic insults get an unfortunate workout during the novel, mainly via the cocky ignorance of Rick Dalton), they won’t find much reprieve. Ditto for viewers of the movie who may have taken an uncomplicated view of Rick and Cliff as heroes and who will have that perspective challenged here.
But for those willing to go along with the ride, the novel provides a worthwhile, maybe even indispensable, complement to its cinematic counterpart.
