Quentin Tarantino’s first novel is, to borrow a
phrase from his oeuvre, a tasty beverage.
It’s his novelization of his own 2019 film “
Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood” (the book’s title omits the ellipsis). It’s been issued in the
format of a 1970s-era mass-market paperback, the sort of book you used to find
spinning in a drugstore rack.
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It’s got a retro-tacky tagline: “Hollywood 1969 … You
shoulda been there!” If it weren’t so plump, at 400 pages, you could slip it
into the back pocket of your flared corduroys.
Tarantino isn’t trying to play here what another
novelist/screenwriter, Terry Southern, liked to call the Quality Lit Game. He’s
not out to impress us with the intricacy of his sentences or the nuance of his
psychological insights.
He’s here to tell a story, in take-it-or-leave-it Elmore
Leonard fashion, and to make room along the way to talk about some of the
things he cares about — old movies, male camaraderie, revenge and redemption,
music and style. He gets it: Pop culture is what America has instead of
mythology. He got bitten early by this notion, and he’s stayed bitten.
The novel is loose-jointed. If it were written better, it’d
be written worse. It’s a mass-market paperback that reeks of mass-market
paperbacks. In my memory, it’s the smell of warm coconut oil and dust mites and
puddling Mercurochrome.
“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” runs along the same tracks
as the film. Some dialogue is similar, just about word for word. But the novel
departs from the movie in ways small and large.
The movie’s Grand Guignol ending, for example, which
culminates with the aging actor Rick Dalton (
Leonardo DiCaprio) torching a
member of the Manson family with a flamethrower, is dispensed with, early in
the novel, in a few sentences.
The killings make Rick, whom we discover is bipolar, famous.
He hated hippies anyway. Now he becomes “a folkloric hero of Nixon’s ‘silent
majority’” and a regular on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” Yet,
from his acting career, he remembers every misstep, every mortification, every
slight.
New Manson family scenes are tucked in. Tarantino goes so
deep into Manson’s once-promising music career, you may feel you’re reading a
back issue of Rolling Stone or Mojo magazine. He considers Charlie’s
“ooga-booga” dances.
He adds a long, sinister, and cinematic scene in which
Pussycat (Margaret Qualley in the film) enters a strange house, removes her
clothes, inserts a red light bulb into her mouth so that her lips are “wrapping
around the silver metal coil” and climbs toward the bedroom of a sleeping
elderly couple.
Once up there, Pussycat screws the red bulb into a lamp,
turns it on and leaps screaming into the couple’s bed, scaring them witless.
The Mansons referred to these sorts of “benign” outings as “creepy crawling.”
“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is, at heart, Cliff Booth’s
novel. Booth (Brad Pitt in the film) is Dalton’s gofer and stunt double. His
back story gets filled in. In World War II, we learn, he killed more Japanese
than any other American soldier, and earned the Medal of Valor twice.
He’s filled with macho advice, which he casually dispenses.
If you want to know what killing a man feels like, without actually killing a
man, Booth tells Dalton, grab a pig from behind and stick a knife into its
throat. Then hold on tight until it dies. It’s as close as you can legally get.
Yet Booth has a sensitive side. He’s a movie obsessive. A
lot of his opinions resemble Tarantino’s own. There’s good writing here about
acting, about foreign films, about B movies, about and about television action
directors.
Booth is a fan of the actor Alan Ladd, for example, because:
“When Ladd got mad in a movie, he didn’t act mad. He just got sore, like a real
fella. As far as Cliff was concerned, Alan Ladd was the only guy in movies who
knew how to comb his hair, wear a hat, or smoke a cigarette.”
Some of these opinions sound perhaps too much like
Tarantino’s own: “Once Fellini decided life was a circus, Cliff said
arrivederci.” There’s a list of Cliff’s favorite Akira Kurosawa films. About
the cinematography in the 1967 Swedish film “I Am Curious (Yellow)”: “Cliff
wanted to lick the screen.”
We discover how Dalton and Booth became friends. Booth saved
him from an on-set fire, telling him: “Rick, you’re standing in a puddle of
water. Just fall down.” We learn how Booth got his pit bull, a star of the
movie. He was given the dog, a champion fighter, to pay off a debt. Booth tags
along on some of the fights.
In the movie, Booth refuses to let the dog eat until he
takes the first bite of his own dinner: macaroni and cheese from a box. About
that dish, Tarantino writes: “The directions say to add milk and butter, but
Cliff thinks if you can afford to add milk and butter you can afford to eat
something else.”
Oh, and Booth did kill his wife. In the film, that plot
point is left hanging and has been much debated. Tarantino, happily, doesn’t
care if you find Cliff to be lovable.
In “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,” Tarantino makes telling
a page-turning story seem easy, which is the hardest trick of all.
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