Once Upon a Time

Tarantino, at their swaggering best, energetic and inventive, rich in fantasy and blithely
amoral: consummate Hollywood entertainment complete with: “I am not an American
filmmaker. I make movies for the planet Earth!” Only Martin Scorsese, perhaps,
rivals Tarantino in his historical knowledge of the medium. As for fanboy
enthusiasm, Tarantino has no peer.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a cornucopia of lovingly selected artifacts ranging

from radio spots and dance moves to comic books and billboards. The attention to
period detail is impressive given that, as the title tells us, the movie is a fairytale—
albeit one at least as violent as those collected by the brothers Grimm. It’s also, despite
its historical specificity, a revisionist thesis that is more about 2019 than 1969.

Like most of Tarantino’s films, Once Upon a Time is predicated on revenge—

although the motor here is not as immediately apparent as it was in Kill
Bill or Django Unchained. In genre terms, is a buddy film, a mode that reached its
apogee in 1969 with the enormously successful Western Butch Cassidy and the
Sundance Kid. Once Upon a Time is also a sort of Western. The pals are a fading
actor, Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), known mainly for playing a TV bounty hunter,
and his stunt double-cum-driver, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). The savages are the Manson
Family, holed up in a Hollywood ghost town, the abandoned TV Western location
known as the Spahn Movie Ranch.

Tarantino skillfully interweaves the drama (or comedy) of Rick and Cliff’s
dwindling careers with an account of the year’s most notorious crime. In their
shambolic way, the heroes cross paths with the Manson girls, as well as Rick’s
neighbor Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), the young wife of Roman Polanski—and the
most famous victim of a murder spree that began on the night of August 8, 1969.
Tarantino thus succeeds in superimposing two meta-narratives: the end of the
Western and the self-destruction of the counterculture. Both stories are
symptomatic of the war in Vietnam, though here Vietnam is little more than
background noise, cited briefly on the radio and in the babbling of the most talkative
Manson maenad.

Tarantino told Esquire that, as a six-year-old growing up in Los Angeles, 1969 was
the year that “formed” him. While it’s unclear what a first-grader’s perspective might
have been, the summer of ’69 produced three world-historical events: the moon
landing, Woodstock, and the Manson murders. Another feature film, Charlie Says,
directed by Mary Harron, focuses on the women who carried out the murders, while a
new book from Tom O’Neill, Chaos: Charles Manson, the CIA, and the Secret
History of the Sixties, marshals considerable circumstantial evidence connecting
Manson to the FBI Cointelpro and the CIA “Chaos” operations, as well as
tracking his earlier activities in Haight-Ashbury during the 1967 Summer of Love.
Tarantino, though, has no interest in these details. Rather, the Manson cult is a
foil, a twist on the old Western trope of when the bad guys come to town.

Once Upon a Time opens on February 8, 1969, nineteen days into the first Nixon
administration—it wasn’t for another few weeks that, inspired by the Living
Theater’s Paradise Now, a drunken Jim Morrison pulled down his leather pants on stage
and became the hippie whom straights loved to hate. The next month, musing on the
counterculture, the new president warned “this is the way civilizations begin to die,”
providing a cue for California’s then governor, a former actor named Ronald Reagan, to
declare his position toward Berkeley’s student demonstrators: “If it takes a bloodbath,
let’s get it over with.”
The film industry had then only begun to assimilate the meaning of Bonnie and
Clyde, a movie that had polarized audiences, largely by generation, two years
earlier. Arthur Penn’s Depression-era gangster romance considerably upped the
level of acceptable onscreen mayhem, and by 1969 two more extreme examplars,
Sam Peckinpah’s ultra-violent Western The Wild Bunch and Dennis Hopper’s
openly countercultural youth film Easy Rider, were in post-production and
screened later that year.

In Tarantino’s film, the Old Hollywood about to be overtaken by the new wave is
embodied by Tate and Polanski. Though the director was then, after Rosemary’s
Baby, at the peak of his career, he, like Manson, barely surfaces here—appearing as a
haute-hippie Hollywood prince, dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy, who pilots his Rolls
Royce around the Hollywood hills with his trophy beside him. For her part, Tate
prances radiant and heedless through a glamorous party at the Playboy mansion.
This hedonist heaven is the polar opposite of the dusty faux Western town that the
Manson Family calls home—a derelict movie set that suggests, in its downbeat
grittiness, the New Hollywood.

Absorbed in all aspects of cinema, Once Upon a Time moves from set to scene, to
screening room to theater, and back again. Rick Dalton struggles with a featured role
in a new TV pilot: playing a Western villain whom the show-runner wants to have
a contemporary look, he bears more than a casual resemblance to Charlie Manson.
Tate goes the movies to watch herself in a Dean Martin action-comedy, while Cliff
Booth picks up a hitchhiker who takes him to the Spahn Movie Ranch. (Students of
Manson Family lore will register that among their victims was a former stuntman
named Shorty Shea.)

After a six-month hiatus, during which men land on the moon and hippies prepare to
gather at Woodstock, the action jumps to August 8, the night of the first murders. Mick
Jagger is singing “Out of Time.” What follows is a minute-by-minute account of the
night’s activities, much of it mediated by the media. Face to face with a trespassing
long-hair, Rick refers to him as “Dennis Hopper,” logging his contempt for the
most notorious of Hollywood hippies. Recognizing Rick as a former TV cowboy,
the Mansonettes engage in a bit of acid-ripped social theorizing: “If you grew up
on TV you grew up watching people killed.”

It’s a funny riff but ominous. Earlier, the movie showed Cliff, Rick, the Manson
followers, and presumably everyone in American tuning in to watch the popular TV
show The FBI.

At the Cannes Film Festival, where many in the audience were taken with its tone—
wistful verging on elegiac, Tarantino was compared to John Ford. Others, less
susceptible to cowboy romance, have found Tarantino’s nostalgia as reactionary as
Trump’s, some even suggesting that, as displaced white men, Rick and Cliff are
prototypical MAGA-hat heroes. (One need only step back from the story to see that
insouciant roughnecks like these were not being phased out in 1969; it’s more that, fifty
years later, they have become anachronisms replaced by the CGI cyborgs of
Hollywood’s comic-book movies.)

Where the critique may be closer to the mark is that to be nostalgic for the Western is,
in some ways, to be nostalgic for a particular regime—call it white supremacy,
manifest destiny, or Hollywood über alles. Cliff’s casual disparagement of Mexicans
is a deliberate inoculation, signaled by Tarantino to seem “old-fashioned”—
however topical that bigotry may in fact be today. A more overt, explicitly comic
example of nativist revenge is directed at the martial arts star Bruce Lee (played by
Mike Moh), in which he is mocked by Cliff, picks a fight with him, and gets his
comeuppance.

Lee’s daughter has complained about what she sees as a slanderous scene. In
actual fact, Lee, who was at the time a featured player on The Green Hornet TV
show as well as a martial arts instructor to the stars, did brawl with a stunt man. But
that was not until 1973, and it is unlikely Lee suffered the ridiculous mortification
shown here.

Tarantino chose to portray Lee, the only significant person of color in the movie, as an
obnoxious braggart—showbiz is full of such types. Cliff is fighting to protect his status.

Hollywood’s changing mores, though, surely were on Tarantino’s mind. Once Upon a
Time is the first movie he has made since the disgrace of his longtime patron,
Harvey Weinstein. Was Tarantino chastened by Weinstein’s fall or simply resentful at
the loss of a major sponsor? Once Upon a Time repeatedly points out that
Cliff has avoided punishment for a crime against a woman more egregious than
any of the charges laid against Weinstein: he has killed his wife. So what are we to
make of the fact that Cliff is also the movie’s most likable character?

The women in Once Upon a Time, in fact, are notably depersonalized, undeveloped
in Tate’s case and, with Manson’s harem, merely menacing. Tarantino evidently had
no interest in representing the maenads as victims of the patriarchy, whereas
previous films of his, notably Jackie Brown and Kill Bill, have featured strong
female leads. Certainly, these young women are no one’s idea of feminist heroines;
perhaps they deserve their abject state. With its contrasting focus on Manson as a
crafty misogynist who uses public mortification and gaslighting to manipulate his
female followers, Charlie Says is far more relevant to Trump’s America: the cult leader
as a demagogue writ small.

If Manson gets short shrift from Tarantino, it may be because movies are an inherently
authoritarian medium and there is room for only one autocrat in Once Upon a Time.
More than any other working director, Tarantino understands the dark desires for
domination and vengeance that movies can enable… because they are his. More self-
aware than Spielberg and less cynical than Hitchcock, Tarantino is absolutely sincere
in his grateful, reverent attachment to Hollywood and his obsession with the movies
of his adolescence. And in successfully implicating the audience and satisfying its
bloodlust at the conclusion of Once Upon a Time, he pulls off an impressively
Hitchcockian switcheroo.

Recreating “1969” Hollywood in his own image, Tarantino has made his most personal
film.
J. Hoberman+
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hollywood/?fbclid=IwAR3XcHXZzsBTfX_sc866Eb-SCFy8U7jY-UCEp-
pGuWmYYNNBj5cKXiN4em8

Tarantino: “This film is the closest thing I’ve done to Pulp Fiction. Probably my most
personal. I think of it like my memory piece. Alfonso [Cuarón] had Roma and Mexico
City, 1970. I had L. A. and 1969. This is me. This is the year that formed me. I was
six years old then. This is my world. And this is my love letter to L. A.”

It’s 1969, a year of tremendous upheaval, not just in America’s streets but also on the
backlots of Hollywood. The Golden Age is ending. The original studio system,
which has been a source of stability and structure for fifty years, is collapsing as
the under-thirty counterculture rejects traditional plotlines and traditional leading
men. It’s the year Easy Rider and Midnight Cowboy and The Wild Bunch break
big— films that celebrate the antihero and upend the definition of what a matinee
idol looks like.
August 8—the night when, as Joan Didion famously wrote, “the sixties ended
abruptly . . . the tension broke . . . the paranoia was fulfilled.”

Tarantino spent five years writing it as a novel before “I let it become what it wanted to
become.”

LD: This time period was fascinating. It was this homage to Hollywood. I don’t think
there’s been a Hollywood film like this—set in Hollywood and about Hollywood—
which gets its nails dirty, getting into the everyday life of an actor and his stunt double.
1969 is a seminal time in cinema history as well as in the world. Rick and Cliff,
they’re part of the old guard in Hollywood, but they’re also trying to navigate this
new world of the hippie revolution and free love. I loved the idea of taking on this
struggling actor who is trying to find his footing in this new world. And his pal who
he’s been with through all these wars in Hollywood. Quentin so brilliantly captures
what’s going on in the changing of America but also through these characters’ eyes
how Hollywood was changing. The characters had the imprint of Quentin’s immense
knowledge of cinema history. You are in awe of the detail, and you know it’s
fucking authentic.

MH: This title. On one hand, it evokes a fairy tale. On the other hand, it echoes a Sergio
Leone western or a gangster movie.

QT: Well, there is a fairy-tale aspect. But this is a memory piece also. So it’s not
historical fact per se. It is a Hollywood of reality—but a Hollywood of the mind at the
same time.

BP: QT is the last purveyor of cool. Quentin gives you these speeches, the kind that you
wished you had said on the drive home, that you think of a day later. We all grew up
with the lore of the lead actor and his stuntman. There are epic stories of these duos:
Burt Reynolds had Hal Needham. Steve McQueen had Bud Ekins. Kurt Russell had his
guy. Harrison Ford had his. These guys were partners for decades. And it’s something
that is not the same in our generation, as the pieces became more movable.

LD: Our characters are the voyeurs of the majesty and glamour of Hollywood. We’re
the outsiders. We’re the guys who are there day to day, trying to get the work. Brad and
I are watching Hollywood change, but we’re in the grind. And we have this connected
relationship where we have each other’s backs. Through thick and thin.

BP: I have an immediate comfort on Quentin’s sets. It’s the atmosphere. It’s the
conversations we have, which are just fun. You know, we all kind of came of age in this
industry about the same time.

LD: We’re all nineties babies.

BP: We all speak the same language. There is an immediate comfort, stepping into
Quentin’s dialogue. It’s why actors want to work with him.

LD: His sets are so magnetic. You don’t walk onto sets like this anymore,
where everyone has respect for the process. There’s this celebration of a way of making
movies that has slowly become an antiquity in this industry. Quentin puts a tremendous
amount of thought into making these characters come to life, making the authenticity of
the period come to life. There’s also this freedom—an energy—we feel on his set. It’s
become a rarity to have a process the way he has it. And that is: taking the time to
fucking Get. It. Right. At all costs.  

QT: We follow three different people in Hollywood, and they represent the three
social strata of the town. We follow Sharon, who is truly living the Hollywood life.
Then Rick, who is doing better than he thinks he’s doing. He has a house, some money,
and he’s still working. Then Cliff represents a guy who has dedicated his entire life to
this industry and has nothing to show for it. He is part of Hollywood, but he lives in
Panorama City in a trailer. Hollywood is his life, but he is not a citizen.

Brad, developing Cliff’s character: He and I are very similar in age, so this is an equal
memory piece for Brad. In 1969, we were both five, six years old. We both remember
the shows that were on TV and what was on the radio.
But with Leonardo, who didn’t grow up in the same era as Brad and me, I needed to
find references for him. And that gave it a freshness, watching Leo watch old western
TV shows I’d given him. Then I’d invent a movie that Rick could have starred in,
like The 14 Fists of McCluskey, which is like a poor man’s Dirty Dozen. I said to Leo,
“If Rick’s rival, Steve McQueen, does The Magnificent Seven, Rick is the kind of guy
who would have been in the third sequel, as the second lead.”

LD: Rick, his whole life is wanting to belong to that club. He’s constantly feeling
rejected. Almost had that one shot where, if things would have played correctly . . . But
what I really loved about this movie is there’s a lot of love in the story of Cliff and
Rick’s relationship. Because through all of this, they are like a family. They’ve
created a family unit and a connection that’s going to let them survive the
stomping of their dreams.

MH: This is a story about guys who act in westerns, at a time when the western—
which has always been a metaphor for American manhood and the idea of the
rugged individual—is totally changing. Look at the different versions of westerns that
came out in 1969, and what they say about manhood and how we see America: True
Grit. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Easy Rider. Midnight Cowboy. The Wild
Bunch. And here you are, Rick and Cliff, in a period piece that riffs on an essential
dynamic of the western: the duo. The buddies.

Leo, there’s a scene where the child actor on your western, a girl, phones you when you
are in a bad place.

LD: Rick’s is a journey not only of acceptance but of appreciation. When you are in his
position, constantly looking for that foothold to stardom and doors keep shutting in your
face, after a while you start to realize: Can I be happy where I am? Is there satisfaction
in not achieving that goal? It’s a journey for Rick of his dreams constantly being
trampled on, the effects of questioning himself on an everyday basis. Self-hatred. But
can he get to a place of acceptance and appreciation for being in this industry? Is
there any celebration of that, or is it just a constant source of disappointment?
That’s the arc we were going with for Rick. But like I said, it’s Quentin’s celebration of
this industry and all those who kept at it, even if all those dreams they had as a young
spitfire didn’t come to fruition.

MH: Was it better to have tried or not to have tried, right?

LD: In a lot of ways, I think that is the story.

MH: On the surface, this is a film about actors in 1969, dealing with change in
Hollywood. But what is powerful and universal is that, at the root, this is a story about
two men battling forces that many men are confronting right now. That is: What
happens to me when I am in the middle of my career, in the middle of my life, and the
industry I am working in doesn’t want me, or the job I have had for decades, it’s
changing, or going away? Can I reinvent myself? So many guys are facing that anxiety
right now.

LD: I think you said it basically right on.

BP: Exactly. Who am I now? Where’s my meaning?

MH: Because for men, identity comes from work. And you play two men trying to
understand who they are, what’s left, what’s their purpose, if they lose that identity. Can
they reinvent themselves and determine their future?

QT: Rick comes to town in ’55. He’s a young, good-looking guy. He thinks, Hey,
I’m in Missouri. Let me get the fuck out of here and go where good-looking guys
make money: Hollywood. I’ll get some tight jeans and hang around Schwab’s
drugstore.

BP: That was me in ’86.

QT: Rick was sold a bill of goods everyone else was sold. To be a young leading
man is to be macho and masculine and sexy and handsome and chiseled.

MH: Well, for his generation, that’s the epitome of manhood, of male identity.

QT: Exactly. And that’s how you got on a western show back then.

BP: And everyone came from that. Burt Reynolds. Clint Eastwood.

QT: All those guys. Now, in 1969, the new leading men are the exact opposite. They
are skinny, shaggy-haired guys. There’s a pansexuality about them. And it’s the
hippie sons of famous people. So it’s Peter Fonda. It’s Michael Douglas, Arlo
Guthrie, or Michael Sarrazin.

MH: There is the rise of the pretty leading man, but there is also the rise of the anti–
leading man. Again, look at 1969. Dustin Hoffman plays Ratso Rizzo in a corrupted
western, Midnight Cowboy. And then, who is the complete embodiment of the new
anti–leading man? Charles Manson! He’s hairy and charismatic and young. Plus, he
gets the chicks. And he literally steals the old dream factories from these guys; he’s
living on an old movie set. Manson usurps it all! Even the headlines. He becomes more
famous than all of them.

QT: In the film, there’s a sequence that takes place on Spahn Ranch. Through the whole
movie, we’ve been hanging out on real Hollywood-western soundstages
where phony versions of this kind of masculine drama are being played out for cameras.
Then we end up on Spahn Ranch, on this dilapidated western backlot, and those
masculine rituals are played out—but this time with real-world consequences, and
no one’s acting.

MH: Brad, if Rick can never see outside himself, you are a guy who’s more aware of
the wider world. You’re at the red light and that Manson hippie girl walks in front of
your car. We see a guy recognizing, literally, that he’s seeing the new players coming
onstage.

QT: You’re reading it right.

BP: He’s at peace with his mac and cheese. Even if he doesn’t have milk. He’s
content with his place in life. Pretty thrilled just to be alive that day. I just felt like
he would be all right wherever he landed. He would figure it out. He isn’t asking for
that much. So when he sees that girl, he knows something new and exciting is coming
along. This is not the lady at Denny’s.
LD: You need your support system. You need that guy you can sit there and watch TV
with and not say a fucking word with for five hours. You need to know somebody
is there. It was very early on where Brad improvised a line and it changed everything.
I’m discovering what my future is going to be in this industry. And I’m really down.
And in the scene, Brad ad-libs. He just comes out with this line: He looks at me and
says, “Hey, you’re Rick fucking Dalton. Don’t you forget that.”

QT: That was a thing Brad just said—and it ended up becoming a thing.

MH: How did you find that line, Brad?

BP: True story, this was probably early nineties. I was on set and I was whining about
something and lamenting something. I was pretty low. And this guy was basically
saying to me, “Get your head up, hold your head up. Quit your whining. You’re Brad
fucking Pitt. I would like to be Brad fucking Pitt.” It did me a favor. I needed to hear it.
That day, I flashed on that. The way Quentin’s scene was constructed, it reminded me of
it.

MH: You all have twenty-five years of winning the lottery. So I’m curious: Are there
other things that remind you of where you are right now in your own careers?

LD: This as a huge shift in the way movies are going to get done, what gets financing.
We’re now in an era when there’s a flush of cash into streaming. But with an overflow
of content, there’s a lot of garbage out there. Now I do see a lot of chances being taken
for story lines, certainly documentaries, certainly giving some artists opportunities to
make out-of-the-box story lines that I don’t think ten years ago would have been
possible. But these types of films that Quentin is doing are also becoming endangered
species.

LD: Let’s celebrate filmmakers who are still holding on to the craft of making movies,
and let’s hope that in that transition into whatever this is going to be, this type of
filmmaking will still exist. There are some dark ages coming up.

BP: I see something happening with the younger generations. I was dismayed at how
many twenty-year-olds have never seen Godfather, Cuckoo’s Nest, All the
President’s Men—these films that are in the Bible to me. I’ve always believed every
good film finds its eyes, inevitably. But there’s a shift in attention span. I’ve been
hearing from newer generations that they’re used to something shorter, quicker, big
jump, and get out. And the streaming services work that way; you can move on to the
next one if you’re enticed. What I always loved about going to a cinema was letting
something slowly unfold, and to luxuriate in that story and watch and see where it
goes. I’m curious to see if that whole form of movie watching is just out the window
with the younger generations. I don’t think so completely.

QT: It requires the right kind of movie—one that hits the right kind of nerve where it
becomes a conversation.

MH: When you look back at the beginning of your careers, how do you think you are
different from when you broke into Hollywood?
LD: Growing up in L. A., in Silver Lake, was the only reason I became an actor. Had I
lived anywhere else, my parents would not have [laughs] picked up shop and moved—it
was the sheer proximity to auditions.

MH: If you were to give Rick and Cliff advice, what would it be?

LD: Stop fucking drinking! There’s always a shot. Maybe not quite the
opportunities that you had hoped for, but there’s always a shot to do something
magnificent—and to get out of that story that you have in your head that keeps
playing like a computer virus, that story that says you’ve been screwed over by the
industry, by society, by the changing of times.

QT: It can all change in a moment. You get one audition and now your life is different.
This moment is going to change your life, but you don’t know it. It’s just one of four
auditions you’re doing that week.

MH: The structure of the film. It takes place over three days. That’s it.

LD: It was hard for me to wrap my head around that concept, because I don’t think I’ve
done a film where the narrative takes place over just a couple days. I always look at
“Where’s the beginning, where’s the middle, where’s the climax and the crescendo?”

Usually, I’m like, “Let’s explain everything about the character. . . .” Quentin’s like,
“No, this is just two days. We’re going to get glimpses of Rick’s condition and what
Rick’s mentally and emotionally going through.” As an actor, you get this sort of weird
relaxation from it. It’s the audience filling in the gaps that makes this movie,

QT: Well . . . Titanic is only a couple days. Right?

LD: [Goes silent. Then:] Truuuuue.

MH: You have this three-act movie, but Manson looms over it, like Chekov’s gun.

QT: This is a Hollywood movie in the same vein as, like, The Stunt Man or Singin’ in
the Rain or any other movie about Hollywood. And there’s a good-hearted spirit
to it. Then you ask, “How does the Manson Family fit in?” Well, that’s the trick. And
that is, actually, how it is supposed to work: “How does this rancidness figure into
everything?” And I want the audience asking that question. It’s like we’ve got a
perfectly good body, and then we take a syringe and inject it with a deadly virus.

MH: Manson was not an outsider in Hollywood. He crossed paths with many famous
people in town. Like Brian Wilson. Or like Doris Day’s son, Terry Melcher, the record
producer.

MH: Burt Reynolds was originally cast to play George Spahn.

QT: The last performance Burt Reynolds gave was when he came down and did a
rehearsal day for that sequence, and then the script reading.

BP: For me, growing up in the Ozarks and watching Smokey and the Bandit, you know,
he was the guy. Virile. Always had something sharp to say—funny as shit. A great
dresser.
BP: “That’s Luke fucking Perry!” I remember going to the studios and [Beverly
Hills, 90210] was going on and he was that icon of coolness for us as teenagers.

MH: Isn’t that part of what the film is about, making the most of the time and being
grateful? Because you never know what’s going to change in your life?

LD: Absolutely.

Michael Hainey is the Executive Director of Editorial at Esquire magazine.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/movies/a27458589/once-upon-a-time-in-
hollywood-leonardo-dicaprio-brad-pitt-quentin-tarantino-interview/