One thing that struck me about ONCE UPON A TIME … IN HOLLYWOOD more than anything else, I think, was that late 1960s LA seems like it was an amazing time and place to be a moviegoer. All these solid, entertaining films that I’d never heard of before Quentin Tarantino started doing interviews and podcasts and Q&As for this film, and programming a lot of them to screen at the New Beverly Cinema (and that are extremely hard to find now). And not a “tentpole” franchise film in sight. Nothing inherently wrong with franchise films, but man, there is a serious buffet of movie titles on display over the course of this film.
KILL BILL is always going to have a special place in my heart among his movies, but OUATIH might be my favorite experience seeing a Tarantino film. I realize that he’s very much not some people’s cup of tea (both as a filmmaker and as a personality), and if that is the case for someone, this probably won’t turn them around. However, never having been in that camp, his movies have long been Major Events for me. I’ve never cared about him being self-indulgent (a frequent charge against him) because his films always seem to indulge ME, which is why I go to the movies in the first place, so I can't imagine complaining about that.
Having said that, this movie was quite a surprise and may not be what a lot of people expect from a QT film. There’s very little violence in the film until the last ten minutes or so. There’s not even *quite* as much profanity, it doesn’t seem like (though certainly still a good bit). And while the characters do talk a lot about movies and namedrop actors and obscure movies and television shows (a staple of QT’s dialogue), the movie is *set* in Hollywood, with characters who are in the movie business, so it’s a lot more organic and doesn’t just feel like people trying to sound cool (which I have nothing against, but hoo boy some people sure do).
There’s not a ton of plot to speak of. Around 90 percent of the movie takes place over just two and a half days, and a significant amount of real estate is spent on people just going about their day -- an actor killing time on set between scenes, that actor’s stuntman/driver/gofer/BFF driving around LA, and an actress running errands or dancing around the house. The film is very character-driven and -- like MIDSOMMAR -- dropped me into a setting that I was more than happy to get lost in.
So let me walk you through it. Here come
All The Spoilers, including the ending of the film.
(Apologies that what follows is not so much a review as a plot summary on crack, but this is the only way I could write about it. And doing it this way is like getting to experience the movie again, and I hope that reading it could be that way for you as well.)
Once upon a time … in Hollywood … there was an actor named Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio). He was a pretty big television star in the late 1950s and his particular claim to fame was a western show called “Bounty Law,” in which he played the hero, Jake Cahill. He left that show to try and break into movies and might have had a career similar to Steve McQueen’s, but while he did a few decent movies (including the sadly fictional “Tanner” and “The 14 Fists of McCluskey” -- the latter resembling a B-movie version of INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS), Rick never had a breakout hit like THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN, so movies didn’t really pan out for him. Unfortunately, he burned a lot of bridges leaving his popular show (to say nothing of the show’s fans), so when he tried to go back to television his name wasn’t what it had been. He’s now stuck playing the heavy in other actors’ star-vehicle shows. A sort of Dino DeLaurentiis-like producer, Marvin Schwarzs (Al Pacino), is trying to convince him to go to Italy and make some films there. A lot of second-tier stars end up doing this because Italian filmmakers may want the Big Name Stars, but they’ll settle for a reasonable facsimile -- if they can’t get Marlon Brando they’ll take Burt Reynolds; if they can’t get Steve McQueen they’ll take Rick Dalton. Rick is dubious, but he takes to heart Schwarzs’s point that repeatedly being bested by the heroes on television (a network trick, he calls it, to build a new star's reputation) diminishes what Rick's name is worth to audiences. He comes out of the meeting devastated and in tears (manly tears, which Cliff helps him hide by lending him his sunglasses). Incidentally, it does not surprise me AT ALL that there are suddenly a LOT of Rick/Cliff shippers.
Rick claimed earlier to Marvin that his car was in the shop and Cliff was just giving him a ride, but in reality, as relayed to us by narrator Kurt Russell, his license was revoked for excessive drunk driving tickets and Cliff has to drive him around everywhere. So after dinner at Musso & Frank, Cliff drives him to his house in Benedict Canyon. On Cielo Drive. As they pull into the drive, he and Cliff spot his new neighbors -- Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate -- also pulling in next door. Rick presumably bought his house at the height of his success, when he could afford it, and there’s a point here about the nature of Hollywood and how failure and success can live right next to each other. Rick muses that he could be one pool party away from being in a Polanski movie (this is February 1969, less than a year after Polanski’s ROSEMARY’S BABY made him the hottest director in Hollywood), and he feels much better than he did earlier in the evening. After Cliff leaves, Rick spends some time going over his lines for a TV pilot he is shooting the next day against a rehearsal tape and I seriously coveted that little reel-to-reel cassette player he uses, even though I don’t own any reel-to-reel cassettes. It must be one of the greatest jobs ever to do set dressing for movies and get to rummage around stores that specialize in providing film and TV productions with all that knick-knackery.
The next morning, Cliff drops Rick off on the studio lot and we see what Rick’s day on set is like. He meets with wardrobe and makeup and is a little dismayed that they want to do away with his carefully maintained pompadour and give him a long-hair wig and handlebar mustache, essentially making him look like a hippie (he ends up looking a bit like Dennis Hopper in EASY RIDER, but that movie wouldn’t come out for another five months). He asks how the audience will know it’s Rick Dalton under all that fuzz, but the director tells him (in the most respectful, coddling way imaginable) that he wants the audience to see the character, not the celebrity -- or more specifically, not Jake Cahill from “Bounty Law.” Rick has a conversation with the star of the show, James Stacy (played by Timothy Olyphant), and tells him about a part he got because first-choice star Fabian injured himself -- illustrating to us just how much success in Hollywood relies on luck -- and how he was on a shortlist of alternates for McQueen’s role in THE GREAT ESCAPE (*cue fantasy sequence where Rick imagines himself in that role and Leo is digitally inserted into the actual movie*). He has another conversation (one of my favorite sequences) with a young actress who is exceedingly precocious for her eight years of age. They talk about craft and why she only responds to her character’s name when she’s on set, and she asks him to tell her about the novel he’s reading -- a potboiler western about a cowboy called “Easy Breezy.” Easy Breezy’s story, about a man who is getting older and isn't what he once was, hits a little too close to home for Rick and he gets emotional, and the young actress is deeply moved. I could have watched these two interact for an entire movie.
When it comes time for Rick to shoot his first scene, he has some trouble remembering his lines and later has a major meltdown in his trailer (a meltdown I found all too relatable). He comes back to shoot another scene, this one with Wayne Maunder (played by the late Luke Perry), along with the young girl from the earlier scene. This second scene goes much better, with Rick really showing off what made him a star in the first place. After they finish shooting, the young girl tells him (in a moment you’ve probably seen in the trailers) that that was the best acting she’s ever seen, leading Rick to well up with pride. All in all, a good day for Rick.
*****
Once upon a time … in Hollywood … there was a stuntman named Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). He’s been around the block, as they say, and has spent the past several years being Rick Dalton’s stunt double pretty much exclusively. As Rick’s luck has waned, so has Cliff’s, and he makes a little extra money being Rick’s driver and gofer. He’s also Rick’s closest friend and looks out for him and bucks him up when he needs it. After he drops Rick and Rick’s car off on Cielo Drive on Saturday night (after the Musso & Frank meeting), he gets in his own beat-up car and drives home to his trailer, which sits in an empty lot behind a drive-in theater in Van Nuys. We spend a few minutes with him as he feeds his pit bull Brandy (who is SUCH a good doggie, yes she is!) and makes himself some boxed macaroni and cheese, which he eats straight from the pot (without even any milk and butter, poor guy), and watches some television.
Cliff drives Rick to the set of the pilot the next day and we learn that Cliff doesn’t have a great reputation on movie sets, at least with certain people. For one thing, there are persistent rumors that he killed his wife and got away with it, which gives others a healthy fear of him but the ambiguity of whether this is true (not to mention the implication that he killed her because she was a shrill, nagging bitch) is the biggest wrinkle in the movie for me. He understands when Rick tells him he can’t ask the production to hire him and a bit later we’ll get a flashback to explain why (in addition to the wife-murder rumor, he once threw Bruce Lee into a stunt coordinator’s wife’s car during a “playful” fight on the set of "The Green Hornet" -- causing more damage to the car than to Bruce Lee -- and got kicked off the set). Cliff's "hm, fair enough" reaction to the flashback that he's clearly just experienced with the audience is priceless.
Cliff spends the morning fixing the antenna on Rick’s roof, which gives us a significant stretch of shirtless Brad Pitt (who is still hotter in his mid-50s than any man ought to be), wearing a tool belt that has a compartment for a beer can (more likely it’s for something else and Cliff just *uses* it for a beer can). He hears Paul Revere and the Raiders blasting from the stereo at the Polanski house and watches as someone pulls up to the driveway in a Hostess Twinkie truck. The guy gets out and walks toward the house, and has a brief exchange with the person who answers the door. I'll get into more detail on this in the Sharon Tate section, but this visitor is Charles Manson, who really did visit that house several months before the murders took place.
Cliff spends the afternoon driving around Los Angeles. A substantial part of this movie is Cliff driving around LA and listening to the car radio. I know some people think this is a dull part of the movie, but it’s one of my favorite parts. Almost all of the music in this movie is diegetic (i.e., in the scene, not over the scene) and we don’t just get the songs -- we are listening to LA radio in 1969, complete with DJ intros and commercials (the soundtrack has SO MUCH of this!), taken from actual broadcast recordings from KHJ Boss Radio in 1969. We hear Neil Diamond’s new single, “Brother Love’s Traveling Salvation Show,” which is heavily featured in all the movie’s trailers and would have been released a month before most of the movie takes place. Incidentally, I also love how the music in this movie is not just the Greatest Hits of 1969 that everyone’s heard a million times, but it’s a ton of songs that weren’t megahits but would definitely have been on the radio at the time (or, in many cases, that were hits in LA but maybe not anywhere else). I mean, you do get “Mrs. Robinson,” but you get a lot *more* stuff like “Bring a Little Lovin’” by Los Bravos. It really adds to the immersive quality of the movie and feels like you’re hanging out with these characters.
That afternoon, Cliff, who seems open to just about anything while still keeping up his guard, picks up a hitchhiker who calls herself “Pussycat” (played by FOSSE/VERDON’s Margaret Qualley and loosely based on Kathryn Lutesinger). Cliff has seen Pussycat hitching a couple of times before, while he was with Rick. We’ve seen a bit more of her and most will have guessed that she's one of Manson’s girls. In particular, we’ve seen her and several other girls dumpster-diving for food -- a frequent activity of the real Manson girls, when they weren’t trading sex for money and food. We also hear them singing "I'll Never Say Never to Always," a song written by Manson and eventually recorded by him and his Family. When Pussycat tells Cliff she’s going to Chatsworth (about an hour’s drive from LA proper), he’s surprised that she regularly hitchhikes between there and LA, but he agrees to drive her because he doesn’t have anything else to do. He is even more surprised when she tells him she lives at Spahn Movie Ranch, a place he is familiar with because a lot of westerns used to be shot there, including (in this universe) “Bounty Law.” They talk a bit and she offers to fellate him as he drives but he shuts that down as she’s clearly not yet 18 and is not worth going to prison for. #gentleman
They arrive at Spahn Ranch and the movie sets are pretty run down and overrun with hippies (all Manson Family, though that’s not a distinction that means anything to anyone but them yet). Charlie and most of the others have gone to Santa Barbara, but they’ll be back and Pussycat is anxious to introduce Cliff to Charlie (“Charlie’s really gonna dig you”). After meeting Charlie’s semi-lieutenant Tex Watson and a few others, Cliff is a bit suspicious of the whole situation and asks to see George Spahn, who owns the ranch and who Cliff knows from doing stunt work on those sets several years before. The girls tell him in a creepy, Wicker-Man-esque we’re-totally-hiding-something way that George is napping, but Cliff insists. He goes up to the house where George lives and comes face to face with “Squeaky” (played by a near unrecognizable Dakota Fanning). She tries to dissuade Cliff but is unable to keep him from coming into the house and going right into George’s room (in a sequence that is very reminiscent of THE TEXAS CHAIN SAW MASSACRE). Cliff chats a bit with George (played by Bruce Dern), who is blind and doesn’t really remember who Cliff is, but is touched that someone came to visit him. Cliff assures him that he just wants to be sure these new residents aren’t taking advantage of him. (This is all historically accurate -- again, sans Cliff, obviously. The Manson Family did live at Spahn Ranch in the months before the Tate murders. Lynette Fromme was George’s lover and it was basically her job to screw him and keep him happy so he didn’t ask questions. George nicknamed her “Squeaky” for the sound she made when he touched her. She was not involved in the Tate-LaBianca murders but several years later she would attempt to assassinate President Gerald Ford in Sacramento.)
As Cliff leaves the house, it is clear he has worn out his welcome and the antipathy is mutual, so he heads to Rick’s car to get the hell out of Movie Dodge, only to find one of the tires with a knife stuck into it. A gift from another Manson cult member, Clem. Cliff beats he shit out of Clem (prompting the girls to fetch Tex, who had gone off to lead a horseback riding tour) and forces him to replace the slashed tire with the spare. He drives off before Tex can return and that’s the end of that for now.
After picking Rick up from the set and taking him home to Cielo Drive, he goes into the house and the two of them watch the new episode of THE F.B.I., which Rick did a guest role in (someone recently found a copy of the real episode, in which Rick's role was actually played by Burt Reynolds). They drink beer, order pizza and comment on the episode, and Cliff leaves an LSD-dipped cigarette he bought from another (non-Manson?) hippie in Rick’s silver cigarette box, reminding him not to smoke it by mistake. An unusual day, but Cliff would probably say any day not spent in jail is a good day.
*****
Once upon a time … in Hollywood … there was an actress named Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie). She isn’t that well known yet, but she has been in some television and a few films, most notably VALLEY OF THE DOLLS. She has just moved into the house at 10050 Cielo Drive with her husband, famous (and not yet infamous) director Roman Polanski. At the beginning of the film, she and Roman arrive at the airport from a trip and are surrounded by photographers. They are what the kids today would call a “Hollywood power couple.”
Later that evening, they go out for a night on the town. Their destination: a party at the Playboy Mansion with, among others, Steve McQueen, Michelle Phillips, Cass Elliott, and Sharon’s close friend Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch), hairdresser to the stars and partial inspiration for Warren Beatty's character in SHAMPOO.
This movie's Steve McQueen (Damian Lewis) is basically only here to look uncannily like the real McQueen and to give us exposition on Sharon, Roman and Jay. He tells the woman sitting next to him that Sharon and Jay were engaged previously until she fell in love with Roman while working on one of his films (presumably THE FEARLESS VAMPIRE KILLERS). She is still close to Jay, who McQueen says is biding his time until Roman eventually screws up the marriage, and the three of them are inseparable. (I suspect the inseparable part is artistic license, but it was probably a simpler description than their actual dynamic.) And in another of my favorite moments, the woman McQueen is telling this to remarks that Sharon certainly has a “type” -- short, cute, talented men that look like 12-year-old boys. McQueen responds, “I never stood a chance.” I love this movie.
The next day Sharon sleeps late, leaving her husband to have coffee in the back yard and walk her dog, Dr. Sapirstein (aka “Sappy,” named after Dr. Sapirstein in ROSEMARY’S BABY -- again, taken from real life). Jay comes over later and Sharon packs for a trip and dances around the house to some records, teasing Jay that she’s going to tell Jim Morrison that he loves Paul Revere and the Raiders. While Sharon is packing, we see through the window behind her Charles Manson approaching the house, in maybe the most chilling shot of the movie (even though, as I learned for the first time a few months ago, Manson himself didn’t commit any of the murders). Jay answers the door and Charlie asks him where Terry is, saying he’s a friend of Terry’s and of Dennis Wilson (of The Beach Boys). This is another real-life event, though it happened a month later than it does in the film, and Jay wasn’t there -- Charlie spoke with a photographer who had come to the house to do a photoshoot with Sharon.
(Some Context Not Included In Movie: Terry is Terry Melcher, record producer and son of Doris Day; he hung out with the Manson Family a bit and Manson hoped to parlay their friendship into a recording contract. Terry, who was 10050 Cielo Drive’s previous tenant before Roman and Sharon, eventually drove out to Spahn Ranch and gave Charlie an audition, but a few weeks later called him to say it wasn’t going to work out. This phone call is believed to be the main impetus for Charlie instructing a few of his followers to go to Terry’s old house and kill everyone inside, even though he knew Terry no longer lived there. When Jay says “Terry and Candy don’t live here anymore,” he’s referring to Melcher and 23-year-old actress Candice Bergen, who Terry was dating at the time and who had lived with him in the Cielo Drive house. Dennis Wilson was also a one-time friend of Manson, having been introduced to him by two of his hitchhiking Family members he'd picked up a couple of times (one of whom was Patricia Krenwinkle -- see below). Wilson eventually became scared of Charlie’s violent side and basically ghosted him. The Beach Boys’ song “Never Learn Not to Love” was an altered version of a song written by Manson called “Cease to Exist.”)
That afternoon Sharon runs some errands in her Porsche, including picking up a first edition of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles for Roman from a book shop (Polanski would direct a film adaptation of this novel just over a decade later, which he dedicated to Sharon). Like Cliff and many others in this era, she picks up a hippie hitchhiker (probably not one of Manson’s), dropping her off soon after with a farewell hug like they’re good friends (#notallhippies). She spots a movie theater that is playing a movie she’s in, called THE WRECKING CREW, and goes to the box office. Just before she reaches into her purse for ticket money, she decides to tell the ticket girl who she is (not that money is an issue, but she wants the recognition). After some back and forth and a photo request, she is let inside. She dons some oversized glasses for discretion and plops down to watch the movie.
We see a couple of trailers first, and Sharon puts her bare feet on the seat in front of her. I can usually tolerate QT’s foot thing, but if someone did that in real life I would be LIVID no matter who they were. The movie starts and it is the real movie, not a recreation, with the real Sharon Tate. In easily one of the best moments in the film, Sharon gets to enjoy hearing an audience react to her on-screen -- laughing at her pratfalls, and even cheering her on as she fights Nancy Kwan. And during this fight, we get some glimpses of *our* Sharon training for it with *our* Bruce Lee, a fond memory for her and a reminder of the work she put into the role. (Lee really did train the real Sharon, as well as Polanski, as I understand, and he was the fight choreographer for THE WRECKING CREW.) Even though nothing spectacular happens, it’s a pretty great day for Sharon.
There have been many comments about the portrayal of Sharon Tate in this film, beginning with the journalist at Cannes who asked why she didn’t have more lines. Frankly, I think this was one person’s reaction that became a bigger deal than it needed to be because people love drawing conclusions about things they haven’t yet seen. But lines of dialogue aren’t always the best measure of someone’s importance. Sharon gets a LOT of screen time, but she is less a character here and more a symbol, a grim reminder of what is to come. She is still hugely significant and the movie would not exist without her; she is the reason for its being, as we’ll see in the film’s contentious ending. We see her living her Best Life, juxtaposed with Rick’s melancholy and uncertainty, and just seeing her living her life has meaning in itself because it’s something the real Sharon Tate was cruelly denied.
*****
Once upon a time … in Hollywood … it was a hot August day in 1969. August 8, 1969, to be precise. Rick and Cliff come back from Italy, where Rick has recently shot four films (with Cliff doing stunts), and Kurt Russell's delivery of the title "Kill Me Quickly Ringo, Said the Gringo" is his greatest moment in the movie. Rick is now married to an Italian actress, and he can no longer afford to employ Cliff on a regular basis. He is planning to sell the Cielo Drive house and move somewhere less expensive. As this is the end of an era for the two of them, they decide to hang out that night and tie one on to say a proper goodbye. I feel like I haven’t said enough about Rick and Cliff’s relationship, but it is truly the backbone of the film (I was going to say the heart, but that is Sharon’s place). They’re basically family, and even though Cliff understands why their working relationship can’t continue, it’s still incredibly sad to know that these two are going their separate ways, professionally if not personally. Side note: if you had told 1990s me that there would be a movie that starred both my major celeb crushes of that time, Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio, I would have demanded you put me into a time machine and take me to see it that instant.
Next door, Sharon is eight months pregnant and her husband is in London working on a new project. She is visited during the day by her friend, British actress Joanna Pettet (played by Rumer Willis), and that evening she and Jay, and houseguests Wojciech Frykowski and Abigail Folger (the latter played by The Love Witch herself, Samantha Robinson), go to El Coyote for dinner (as they did in real life). In a probably apocryphal moment, Sharon glances down the street at a porn theater and comments, “I didn’t know porn movies *had* premieres.” That theater is the same one that would eventually become the New Beverly Cinema, the repertory theater Tarantino now owns and whose calendar he programs every month (he even did the calendar while shooting OUATIH). Rick and Cliff go to a different Mexican restaurant and, eventually, everyone returns to the two houses on Cielo Drive to settle in for the night. There's a sweet scene where Sharon, Jay and Wojciech stand around a piano as Abigail plays the Mamas and the Papas' song "Straight Shooter." In real life, sheet music of that song was sitting on the piano at the murder scene.
Cliff finds the LSD-dipped cigarette exactly where he left it six months before and decides that tonight is the night. He lights it up and goes to walk his dog, Brandy. Rick, in another part of the house, hears the loudest, clunkiest trash-heap of an automobile pull up outside. Muttering about how this is a private road and how much he pays in property taxes to keep riff-raff like this away from his home, he goes outside in his robe to give the intruders “what fer.” He manages to persuade them to leave, but they just park on another street and walk back. I should say that by “they” I mean Tex Watson, Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkle and Linda Kasabian (the latter played by Uma and Ethan’s bb, Maya Hawke) of the Manson Family. Before they walk back up Cielo Drive, Tex reminds them of Charlie’s instructions -- kill everyone inside, and make it look witchy. But Patricia and Tex realize that the guy who yelled at them was Rick Dalton from "Bounty Law," and they're torn between being outraged and being fans. Susan then has an idea, which is so harebrained I can’t really remember it well enough to reproduce it here (we grew up watching TV, TV taught us to murder, let's kill the people who taught us murder, something like that?), but in any case, the plan has now changed.
Long story short (WAY too late, yes?), because Rick drew their attention, they go to his house instead of the house next door. Cliff, high as a kite from the LSD cigarette, fights them off (with help from Good Doggie Brandy) and brutally kills Tex and Patricia in (mostly) self-defense. Perhaps it seemed more violent because the rest of the movie was so light on violence, but this was almost too much for me. Patricia Krenwinkle, in particular, comes in for a hell of a beating that felt over-the-top and bordered on misogyny (my other major wrinkle with the film). I mean, Cliff is high and may not quite be aware of what is happening (he hilariously asks Tex “are you real?”), but damn. Susan Atkins, who for my money was in real life the scariest of Manson’s followers (and who in this version of events Cliff smashes in the face by throwing a can of dog food at her), crashes through the sliding glass door into the backyard, screaming like a banshee, and comes across Rick, who goes to his shed and returns to dispatch her with the most amazing use of Chekhov’s Gun (in this film, Chekhov's Flame Thrower) that I've ever seen.
The police come, carry off the bodies, put an injured Cliff in an ambulance and take some statements. As they leave, Jay Sebring comes to the gate of 10050 -- in this universe, an address that will never be known as the “Manson murder house” -- to ask if everyone is alright. And I start crying. Rick tells him what happened and Jay is flabbergasted. They chat for a bit and Jay says he’s been teasing Sharon about living next door to Jake Cahill from “Bounty Law” and Rick is clearly pleased that they know who he is. Sharon’s voice comes over the intercom at the gate (I cry even harder) and she asks if everyone is okay before inviting Rick in for a drink. So Rick goes up to the house and Sharon comes out to meet him and gives him a hug before introducing him to the other guests. We watch this play out from above and the credits roll over a world where Sharon Tate not only got to live past the age of 26 but was spared every bit of the violence that defined her life in our world. And maybe Rick got to be in Polanski’s next movie (which in this universe probably wasn’t MACBETH).
*****
I loved this movie so much. It’s a longer-than-average movie, but I never felt it and could have kept watching it for another couple of hours at least. It’s a wonderful love letter to the LA of Tarantino’s childhood, and it imagines a version of it where Manson didn’t become a cultural icon and those murders never took place. (Speculating here, I like to think the police raided Spahn Ranch pretty soon after the events at the end of the film, since Cliff recognized them from his trip out there.) I’m sure some people feel it’s tacky to rewrite events like that, but I love the idea that there is a universe, even if it’s a made-up one, where someone's existence in the world literally changes the course of another person's life, however unwittingly. And it feels like so much more than just a cheap fanfiction “what if” because Tarantino has spent so much time establishing this world and what it looks and sounds and feels like.
I broke it down here by characters, but it’s all woven together into one story (another somewhat departure for Tarantino, who has broken many of his films up into “chapters”). And part of the point in the way he constructs it is to juxtapose Sharon’s experience with Rick's (and Cliff’s, to a certain extent) and reinforce just how much someone’s fate in Hollywood can turn on good or bad luck.
The use of music in this is great (hardly uncharacteristic for a QT film), and as I said above, mostly plays *in* the scenes, not over them. Even the couple of pieces of music that are meant to create a sense of dread are playing in the scenes -- the score to the television show Squeaky is watching providing an ominous backdrop to Cliff searching George Spahn’s house, and Cliff’s playing a record of Vanilla Fudge’s cover of “Keep Me Hanging On” providing the perfect entrance music for “I’m the devil … and I’m here to do the devil’s business.”
I also have to give MASSIVE love to the production designer, Barbara Ling, who pulled off nothing less than a miracle with this movie. (Also Arianne Phillips -- Madonna’s stylist -- who did the 1960s costumes). The detail in the set design is like nothing I’ve ever seen before and the costumes are really extraordinary (Sharon’s costumes are near replicas of real outfits she was photographed in). The movie was shot in LA, but LA now doesn’t look a whole lot like it did in 1969 (barring a few notable landmarks), and this is Mad-Men-level detail. And even more impressive because so much of it happens outdoors, on location. Maybe my favorite moment (of many) is a little montage showing all the neon signs being turned on all over town as it gets dark on that fateful August night. If Barbara Ling is not at least NOMINATED for an Oscar, then why do we even give out awards?!
One thing that concerns me is that a lot of people who will see this will not be aware of the history of the Manson murders. I knew very little about them myself until listening to Karina Longworth's podcast series on the subject (which I highly recommend seeking out because it is excellent). The movie takes for granted that you know what happened and who these people are, but I’m not sure younger people do. My hope is that the movie inspires people to dig into the subject on their own. I know that my knowing more about it made the movie richer for me, and I was pleased that -- aside from the dramatically different ending -- the movie strays very little from the facts and includes or references several details that sort of morbidly delighted me to catch.
I don’t know where this falls in my personal ranking of QT films (not that I really have one). It’s too new and I need to see it many, many more times. And I can’t wait to do just that. Also, if you made it this far and haven’t seen it yet, stick around for the credits, which feature easily the most substantial Red Apple Cigarettes cameo in any of Tarantino’s movies (you’ll see a pack briefly in the scene with Cliff repairing the antenna, but the credits clip is the big reference).
