Only Quentin Tarantino could take Anton Chekhov's famous maxim about a gun and apply it to a flame thrower. But anything goes in the Oscar-winning Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood, as we reveal in guiding users towards the films to watch if they enjoyed this rollickingly radical Tinseltown fantasy.
Told in two parts, set in February and August 1969, Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood centres on the friendship between veteran actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). However, fact and fiction merge when Polish director Roman Polanski (Rafal Zawierucha) and his new wife, Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), rent out the property next door to Dalton on Cielo Drive. The scene is set for one of Hollywood's most shocking tragedies. But Quentin Tarantino prefers to let events play out in a very different way...
Hooray For Hollywood
There has never been a place for false modesty in Hollywood. Consequently, the denizens of America's movie capital have been turning the camera on themselves since the silent era. Several slapstick shorts were made about the perils and pitfalls of shooting films on studio lots or on the streets of Los Angeles.
Produced at a time when off-screen scandals were besmirching Tinseltown's reputation, films like Rupert Hughes's Souls for Sale (1923) and James Cruze's Merton of the Movies (1924) were made to take the curse off the negative headlines. The latter was remade by Robert Alton in 1947 with Red Skelton in the lead and pictures like Gene Wilder's The World's Greatest Lover and Ken Russell's Valentino (both 1977) have since sought to recapture the nostalgic glow cast by an age that invented the concepts of stardom and celebrity gossip.
A glimpse of a world about to change forever was provided by King Vidor's Show People (1928), which was released after Alan Crosland's The Jazz Singer (1927) had demonstrated that cinema's future lay in talking pictures. The tricky transition to sound has been the subject of several features, including Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen's Singin' in the Rain (1952), Peter Bogdanovich's Nickelodeon (1976) and Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist (2011), which won the Academy Awards for Best Picture, Director and Actor (Jean Dujardin). The latter became only the second silent after William A. Wellman's Wings (1927) to take the top prize, although Mel Funn had the idea to turn back time by pitching a film without dialogue to the head of Big Picture Studios in Mel Brooks's affectionate parody, Silent Movie (1976).
Insights into the new film factories proved thinner on the ground during the 1930s, although George Cukor's What Price Hollywood? (1932) inspired William A. Wellman's A Star Is Born (1937), which Cukor would remake under the same title in 1954. Janet Gaynor and Fredric March were paired in the first of four films about a fading star falling in love with a rising prospect (see our If You Liked article on the quartet), while Judy Garland and James Mason took over in the colour version. The darker side of the glamorous lifestyle was further exposed in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), Joseph L. Mankiewicz's The Barefoot Contessa (1954) and the Robert Aldrich's The Big Knife (1955). And this sense of Hollywood as a place of broken hearts and shattered dreams was reinforced in Elia Kazan's The Last Tycoon (1976) and John Schlesinger's The Day of the Locust (1975), which were respectively adapted from acclaimed novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald and Nathaniel West.
The deceptively genial Preston Sturges put a lighter spin on the travails of a studio drone, as director Joel McCrea quits making fripperies to study life in the raw in Sullivan's Travels (1941). Woody Allen has since picked up on this notion that cinema is an illusion created by smoke and mirrors in The Purple Rose of Cairo (1985) and Café Society (2016), while Joel and Ethan Coen have wittily satirised both the studio system and the kind of generic pictures it churned out in Barton Fink (1991) and Hail, Caesar! (2016).
Long before Tarantino pitched historical figures into a fictional setting, Blake Edwards cast James Garner and Bruce Willis as Wyatt Earp and Tom Mix in Sunset (1988), which sees the legendary lawman and the cowboy star join forces to solve a murder. There's more gumshoeing in Robert Zemeckis's Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988), as private eye Eddie Valiant (Bob Hoskins) takes on a fiendish case in Toontown. Peter Bogdanovich also drew inspiration from a celebrated Hollywood murder, as he assembled a list of suspects that includes Charlie Chaplin (Eddie Izzard), Marion Davies (Kirsten Dunst) and William Randolph Hearst (Edward Herrmann) in The Cat's Meow (2004), while the troubled existence of Superman actor George Reeves (Ben Affleck) is recalled in Allen Coulter's Hollywoodland (2006).
Moreover, there are also variations on the Cielo massacre including Brandon Slagle's Hollywood and the Sharon Tate Murders (2014) which features Suzi Lorraine as the Dallas-born actress, who can be seen in Roman Polanski's The Fearless Vampire Killers and Mark Robson's Valley of the Dolls (both 1967).
Despite the replacement of the Production Code with a ratings system in 1968, Hollywood found itself fighting a losing battle with television as David N. Gottlieb reveals in the cult curio, Game Show Models (1977). More films than ever were being spun off from small-screen originals, such as James Frawley's The Muppet Movie (1979), which boasted guest appearances by such screen stalwarts as Bob Hope, Orson Welles and James Coburn.
The workings of the movie business also changed, as the studios were acquired by multinational conglomerates who sought to reduce the risks involved in producing pictures by basing them on presold sources like novels, plays and comic-books. This resulted in the birth of the blockbuster in the mid-1970s, whose growing reliance on special effects reduced the need for live-action set-pieces such as those enacted by fugitive Vietnam veteran Steve Railsback on megalomaniac director Peter O'Toole's set in Richard Rush's The Stunt Man (1980).
The studios hardly emerged smelling of roses from Robert Altman's The Player (1992) as executive Griffin Mill (Tim Robbins) resorts to desperate measures to keep his picture on track. Kevin Spacey proves equally ruthless as sharp-tongued studio vice president Buddy Ackerman in George Huang's Swimming With Sharks (1994) and there's plenty more relishable dialogue in Barry Sonnenfeld's Get Shorty (1995), an adaptation of an Elmore Leonard bestseller that sees loan shark Chili Palmer (John Travolta) pitch a movie idea to indebted producer Harry Zimm (Gene Hackman). The satirical edge is just as sharp in Christopher Guest's For Your Consideration (2006).
Life on the movie margins was celebrated by Frank Oz in Bowfinger (1999), as hack director Steve Martin uses all his ingenuity to shoot a film with superstar Eddie Murphy without him knowing he's on camera. Creative pains are also the subject of Spike Jonze's Adaptation (2002), which anticipated Tarantino's gambit of mixing fact and fiction in casting Nicolas Cage as Charles Kaufman, who actually wrote the screenplay for this intricate meta-comedy that weaves in strands from The Orchid Thief, Susan Orlean's account of the crimes of John Laroche, who is essayed by Chris Cooper and won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his work.
Getting the casting right is often the key to a film's success and Hollywood honcho Larry Miller thinks he's stumbled upon a born Method actor when he encounters Robert Downey, Jr. in Shane Black's Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005). But he's a fugitive criminal who is taking a huge risk in agreeing to be groomed for the part of a detective in a forthcoming picture by gay shamus, Val Kilmer. Producer Robert De Niro has his own problems in Barry Levinson's What Just Happened (2008), as director Michael Wincott keeps casting the likes of Sean Penn in arty confections that stand no chance of making back his money. But, even with Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt attached to his next projects, De Niro looks likely to land in hot water when he takes an unseen version of Wincott's latest opus, Fiercely, to Cannes.
Hopeful Naomi Watts would love to have such problems, as she schlepps between auditions with a growing sense of desperation in Scott Coffey's Ellie Parker (2005) and her plight is shared by vocal coach Lake Bell in the self-directed comedy, In a World... (2013), and by aspiring actress Emma Stone (who would win an Oscar for her delightful performance) in Damien Chazelle's unmissable musical, La La Land (2016).
But even an A-lister like Vincent Chase (Adrian Grenier) can have his problems, in spite of the backing of buddies like Eric (Kevin Connolly), Turtle (Jerry Ferrara) and Drama (Kevin Dillon), as writer-director Doug Ellin reveals in Entourage (2015). Neurotic diva Julianne Moore also finds coping increasingly difficult, although her problems look set to increase when she hires recently released psychiatric patient Mia Wasikowska as her new PA in David Cronenberg's biting satire, Maps to the Stars (2014). But spare a thought for the Jump City superhero team who can't interest anyone in Hollywood in making a film about them. Following humiliation at the hands of the Justice League at the start of Aaron Horvath and Peter Rida Michail's Teen Titans Go! To the Movies (2018), things seem set to change when they plan a pitch to director Jade Wilson (Kristen Bell). However, they didn't take into account the machinations of their arch enemy, Slade (Will Arnett).
Getting the Facts Straight (ish)
Quentin Tarantino has a thing about rewriting history, whether it concerns the demise of the Nazi hierarchy in Inglourious Basterds (2009), the fortunes of a pre-Civil War slave in Django Unchained (2012) or the fate of a black Union soldier in postbellum Wyoming in The Hateful Eight (2015). Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, Tarantino seeks to stop the clock and prevent the 1960s counterculture from sweeping aside the values that had served the United States well since its frontier days.
It's a bold premise that posits an alternative future for the fictional and historical characters alike, as well as the country they inhabit. Naturally, such an approach has sparked controversy, as social media has ensured that it's no longer possible simply to concur with Alfred Hitchcock's remark to a stressed Ingrid Bergman on the set of Under Capricoron (1949), 'Ingrid, it's only a movie.' Movies matter and every superficial and subtextural detail is subjected to the minutest scrutiny.
As a walking encyclopedia of popular culture, Tarantino would have been determined to get the facts behind his story straight in order to give its fictional elements greater authenticity. Thus, he conducted extensive research into everything from the films showing in downtown Los Angeles in 1969 to the songs playing on the radio to ensure that they were as spot-on as the costumes, hairstyles, facades and décor. Yet, when he embarked upon what was initially known as Magnum Opus, he wrote a novel rather than a screenplay. This phase took around five years, with Tarantino varying his writing approaches to get a better handle on the material. The restaurant scene between Rick Dalton and agent Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino), for example, was originally drafted as a one-act play.
The core plot, however, revolves around the friendship between Dalton and his stunt double-turned-factotum, Cliff Booth, who was partially based on stunt stalwarts Gary Kent and Gene LeBell. More significantly, though, Tarantino drew on the long-standing bond between actor Burt Reynolds and onetime stuntman, Hal Needham. From the moment they met on the TV series, Riverboat (1959-61), the duo became best buds. Indeed, after Needham's first marriage ended, he moved into the carriage house at Reynolds's Holmby Hills mansion and remained there for 12 years. When not partying hard, the pair also worked on several pictures together, with Needham landing a car on a moving river barge in Joseph Sargent's White Lightning (1973) and hanging off the side of a speeding truck in the 1976 sequel, Gator, which Reynolds directed himself.
In all, Needham would perform stunts in 4500 TV episodes and 310 features, breaking 56 bones in the process. But not even busting his back could slow him down and one wonders whether Reynolds encouraged his transition to directing in order to protect him. Cinema Paradiso users can enjoy their collaborations on Smokey and the Bandit (1977) and Smokey and the Bandit Ride Again (1980), as well as The Cannonball Run (1981) and The Cannonball Run 2 (1984). In order to beef up Booth's backstory, however, Tarantino made him a war hero and implies that he had gotten away with murdering his own wife in a sly cutaway that evokes the watery demise of Natalie Wood, whose big hit of 1969 was Paul Mazursky's Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice, which is further referenced by the similarity between the jackets worn by DiCaprio and Robert Culp.
In shaping his scenario, however, Tarantino worked back from the denouement, which radically reinvented the events of 8-9 August at 10050 Cielo Drive - the property that just happens to be next door to the residence that Dalton bought at the height of his powers on the advice of veteran actor Edmond O'Brien. In case you still haven't seen Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood, we wouldn't dream of telling you what form this revision of history takes. But most people will know that Charles Manson (Damon Herriman) sent four members of the cult 'Family' that lived at the Spahn Ranch to murder the occupants of the address that had once been home to Doris Day's son, Terry Melcher, and his actress girlfriend, Candice Bergen.
Sharon Tate, who was eight months pregnant, was spending the evening with hairdresser friend Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch), coffee heiress Abigail Folger (Samantha Robinson) and her Polish boyfriend, Wojciech Frykowski (Costa Ronin), who was a friend of Roman Polanski, who was away working in Europe. According to some sources, Steve McQueen (Damien Lewis) and Bruce Lee (Mike Moh) had arranged to spend the evening with Tate, but had changed their plans at the last moment. Linda Kasabian (who is reimagined here as 'Flower Child' [Maya Hawke]) remained in the car, leaving Patricia 'Katie' Krenwinkel (Madison Beaty), Charles 'Tex' Watson (Austin Butler) and Susan 'Sadie' Atkins (Mikey Madison) to commit one of the most notorious crimes of the decade. But, this being a once upon a time Hollywood...
Tarantino has claimed that this is a very personal film and Tate's trip to the pictures to watch her performance opposite Dean Martin in The Wrecking Crew is based on his own experience of not being recognised by the staff of the same Bruin Theater when he had attended a screening of Tony Scott's True Romance (1993), which Tarantino had scripted - and which, of course, starred a young Brad Pitt. As his first job in the film business was at the Pussycat porn cinema in Torrance, Tarantino also slips in a reference to a porno premiere at the Eros Theater, which he now owns under its current name, The New Beverly Cinema.
Such is his perfectionism that Tarantino even wrote five half-hour episodes of Dalton's 1950s TV show, Bounty Law, which he is now developing to direct for the small screen. However, it was the widescreen majesty of Sergio Leone that gave him the idea to change the film's title in honour of his Spaghetti masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West (1968), and the gangland saga, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), which also gave him the latitude to turn Hollywood fact into Tinseltown fairytale.
You're Kinda Pretty For a Stunt Guy
When Tarantino announced his new project on 11 July 2017, he hinted that Brad Pitt and Jennifer Lawrence would play prominent parts, along with Samuel L. Jackson, who had been so crucial to the success of Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004), Django Unchained and The Hateful Eight (for fuller details, see Tara Wood's documentary QT8: The First Eight, 2019). Shortly after it was revealed that Margot Robbie and Leonard DiCaprio would be signing up (the latter taking a 50% pay cut to land his $10 million role), rumours began circulating that Tom Cruise was keen to play one of the leads.
In addition to demanding a $95 million budget and final cut, Tarantino also secured an agreement to produce a single copy of the screenplay, which he would keep under lock and key to prevent leakages. Indeed, when Pitt and DiCaprio first read the script, they did so under strict supervision and only a limited number of persons involved in the project were allowed to see the ending. During shooting, performers were either given their own scenes or the full document minus the last 30 pages.
Among those keen to participate was Burt Reynolds, who was cast as George Spahn, who owned the ranch that had once been used to shoot Westerns and was the scene of Steve Grogan's murder of stuntman, Donald 'Shorty' Shea. He coined the line, 'You're kinda pretty for a stunt guy,' which was delivered by Mike Moh in the Booth-Lee fight sequence that has caused considerable controversy for its depiction of the martial arts icon as arrogantly dismissive. However, Reynolds died before he could shoot his scenes and the part of Spahn passed to Bruce Dern.
James Marsden, Tim Roth and Danny Strong also failed to make the finished film. But Tarantino managed to find room for lots of stellar cameos, as he dotted the action with cult heroes from his viewing past. Luke Perry (who also died before the premiere) was cast as Wayne Maunder, who had starred in the Western series, Lancer (1968-70), on which Dalton makes a guest appearance. No stranger to TV Westerns after his turns in Deadwood (2004-06) and Justified (2010-15), Timothy Olyphant was ideal for the role of James Stacy, although there was a cruel irony in the shot of him riding away from the studio on a motorcycle, as he lost his left arm and leg in the bike crash that claimed the life of his girlfriend, Claire Cox.
Stacy's ex-wife, Connie Stevens, is played by Dreama Walker, while Rachel Redleaf and Rebecca Rittenhouse crop up as Cass Elliot and Michelle Phillips. The music of their band, The Mamas and the Papas, plays a crucial role in the film, right down to the sheet music for 'Straight Shooter', which Tate and her friends sing around the piano in the run-up to the gruesome finale. Playing a key role in proceedings is a pit bull from Delaware named Sayuri, who won the prestigious Palm Dog at Cannes for her performance (although PETA was less impressed). In fact, the role of Cliff Booth's beloved Wolf's Tooth-gorging pet, Brandy, was shared between three hounds, with Cerberus, and Siren being the other two. Prior to shooting his scenes, Pitt spent some time playing with the pooches to ensure that they had a rapport on screen.
No such special arrangements were required for Al Pacino's scenes as Marvin Schwarz. He makes a point of emphasising the absence of a 't' in his surname, as there was a producer active in Hollywood in this period called Marvin Schwartz.
Looks Familiar
Shooting commenced on 18 June 2018 and was completed on 1 November. For much of the time, Tarantino was working in his own backyard and he had cinematographer Robert Richardson use lots of low angles to reproduce the perspective of the seven year-old boy who had viewed Hollywood with such awe back in 1969. Richardson was no stranger to recreating this period, as he and production designer Barbara Ling had worked together on Oliver Stone's The Doors (1991), which was mostly set at the tail end of the Swinging Sixties.
As he dislikes using computer-generated imagery, Tarantino had to spend months negotiating with city planners and business owners to bring certain parts of Los Angeles to a standstill. A four-block area of Hollywood Boulevard underwent a complete renovation to take it back half a century. Luckily, a number of local landmarks remained intact, including the Musso & Frank's and El Coyote restaurants. Larry Edmund's Bookshop was fitted with a new old sign, while the Stan's Donuts shop was completely spruced up. The Bruin and Fox Village cinemas were also restored. But the Pussycat Theater had long disappeared and Ling had to design a fake front that needed to be winched into place before shooting. There was one locational snafu, however, as Hugh Hefner didn't acquire the LA pile that became the Playboy Mansion until 1971.
Like Ling (who won) and Richardson (who didn't), costume designer Arianne Phillips received an Oscar nomination for her work, as did the sound mixing and sound editing teams. Tarantino was also recognised for his scripting and direction, while Brad Pitt went one better than Leonardo DiCaprio by taking the Best Supporting Actor prize. However, there were no accolades for make-up artist Heba Thorisdottir and her team or the multitude of hairstylists and wig makers who transformed the cast into 60s hippies and hipsters. Poster artist Steven Chorney also missed out on the gongs, despite the brilliance of the posters for such faux films as Red Blood Red Skin, Nebraska Jim, Hell-Fire Texas, Operation Dyn-O-Mite and Comanche Uprising. Caricaturist Tom Richmond's Dalton covers for MAD Magazine and TV Guide are also a treat.
For the most part, Richardson worked on 35mm. But, in order to get the right feel for the Bounty Law footage, he shot in Academy Ratio monochrome using Super 8 and 16mm Ektachrome stock. He took his visual cues from shows like Alias Smith and Jones (1971-73), while Dalton's war movie, The 14 Fists of McCluskey, owed much to Robert Aldrich's The Dirty Dozen (1967). Another key influence on the look of the picture was John Flynn's Rolling Thunder (1975) and movie buffs will have a ball spotting the poster and marquee mentions that litter the action.
They may not know, however, that Sam Wanamaker (Nicholas Hammond) actually did direct 'The High Riders', the pilot of Lancer (albeit he did so in September 1968) or that Leonardo DiCaprio's face has been grafted on to Burt Reynolds's body for the 'All the Streets Are Silent' episode of The FBI (1965). But they will certainly spot Dalton imagining himself as Virgil Hilts in a scene from John Sturges's The Great Escape (1963) in place of Steve McQueen. Kurt Russell fans will also notice that he also provides the narration, as well as playing stunt co-ordinator Randy Miller, a role that harks back to his turn as Stuntman Mike in Tarantino's Death Proof (2007).
Only the eagle-eyed, however, will notice the iconic prop that DiCaprio loaned to Tarantino for Sharon Tate's visit to the bookshop. That really is the statue that Humphrey Bogart called 'the stuff that dreams are made of' in John Huston's adaptation of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1941). This scene also provides another screen connection, as the copy of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles that Tate purchases would later inspire Roman Polanski's Tess (1979), which he dedicated to his late wife, who really did name her Yorkshire Terrier Dr Sapirstein after the character played by Ralph Bellamy in her husband's horror classic, Rosemary's Baby (1968).
