There's often no tidy line between a character's perspective and the narrator's, and given the decidedly non-PC attitudes on display, this can be a little hair-raising. Tarantino is a narrator who likes to show and tell, making him a boisterous if somewhat undisciplined presence. Although the brio with which he imitates period idiom produces the occasional absurdity ("He lights his cancer stick with his silver Zippo in the flashy (noisy) way of a fifties-era cool daddy-o"), on the whole it helps to create an authentically pulpy atmosphere. Tarantino's explosive dialogue, with its blend of streetwise and formal cadences, is almost as effective written down as read aloud. As "an Eisenhower actor in a Dennis Hopper Hollywood," Rick faces "a race to the bottom." Cliff, meanwhile, whose on-set unruliness is making him unhirable, is increasingly reliant on his old buddy for a living.
reshot?Īt its heart, the book is about the threat posed to Rick and Cliff by the advent of the New Hollywood. "t the Actors Studio," she says, "they ask the question: What if the script didn't say that? Then what would your character do? Then what choice would your character make?" This, it seems, is what Tarantino has been asking himself for a while: when a historical ending isn't quite right, what if history could be simply.
It falls to her to provide the most pointed meta-commentary on the novel's action.
#Once upon a time in hollywood novel tv
We also get more of the precocious 8-year-old who plays Rick's half-sister in the TV western "Lancer" (a real show, incidentally). Some lines are lifted verbatim from the screenplay, but there's plenty of new material too, much of it concerning Cliff's violent past, only hinted at in the movie. Like the movie, the book follows Rick and Cliff from set to bar to Beverly Hills. The emotional core of the novel lies instead with his own creations, TV cowboy Rick Dalton and his best friend and stunt double, Cliff Booth. De-centering the Manson plotline, he turns it into just another part of the far-out tapestry of late-'60s LA.
But Tarantino, ever-wily, spots in the retelling a chance to shape the novel quite differently.