Tarantino's favourite of his own films rewrites the summer of 1969
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood follows a fading TV cowboy and his stunt double through Los Angeles in 1969, with Sharon Tate living next door and the Manson Family lurking at the edges. Quentin Tarantino calls it the best thing he has made, and it earned Brad Pitt an Oscar.
Announced in July 2017, it was Tarantino's first film without Bob and Harvey Weinstein, whom he dropped after the sexual abuse allegations against Harvey. Several studios bid for it; Sony won by meeting his conditions, final cut among them. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Rick Dalton, star of an invented late-1950s Western series called Bounty Law, now reduced to guest spots as TV villains. Brad Pitt is Cliff Booth, his double, driver and friend, and Margot Robbie plays Tate. Shooting ran from June to November 2018 around Los Angeles, and it became Luke Perry's last film; he died on March 4, 2019, and it is dedicated to him.
Much of the pleasure lies in the real Hollywood hidden inside the fiction. Bounty Law nods to Steve McQueen's Wanted Dead or Alive. Cliff draws on the stuntman Gary Kent, who worked at Spahn Ranch while the Manson Family lived there, and on the judo champion Gene LeBell, whose clash with Bruce Lee on The Green Hornet is itself disputed. His denim outfit comes from Tom Laughlin's Billy Jack. The rumour that Cliff killed his wife echoes the death of Natalie Wood, and the precocious child actor Trudi is modelled on Jodie Foster. Tarantino wrote the agent Marvin Schwarz with Al Pacino in mind.
The story drifts through a few days of Rick's crisis of confidence on the set of Lancer, a stint making spaghetti Westerns in Italy, and Cliff's uneasy visit to the ranch, before building to a violent alternative version of the night of August 8, 1969, in which history is bent away from what happened to Tate.
It premiered at Cannes on May 21, 2019, projected from a 35 mm print, and took over $393 million worldwide. Critics praised it, while some objected to historical liberties and the portrayal of certain real performers. It won the Golden Globe for best musical or comedy and collected ten Oscar nominations, winning for Pitt and for production design. Tarantino later turned it into a novel, his first, published in 2021, and David Fincher is directing a sequel about Cliff, again starring Pitt.
Source: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
