(pb; 2021: movie tie-in)
From the first inside page
“RICK DALTON—Once he had his own TV series, but now Rick’s a washed-up villain-of-the-week drowning his sorrows in whiskey sours. Will a phone call from Rome save his fate or seal it?
“CLIFF BOOTH—Rick’s stunt double, and the most infamous man on any movie set because he’s the only one there who might have gotten away with murder.
“SHARON TATE—She left Texas to chase a movie-star dream and found it. Sharon’s salad days are now spent on Cielo Drive, high in the Hollywood Hills.
“CHARLES MANSON—The ex-con’s got a bunch of zonked-out hippies thinking he’s their spiritual leader, but he’d trade it all to be a rock ‘n’ roll star.
“HOLLYWOOD 1969—YOU SHOULDA
BEEN THERE.”
Review
More an expansive, structural rework companion piece to Tarantino’s 2019 character-centric, plot-rambling and world-building film, Once is best read as a screenplay without a script structure. (When I write “rework” I mean it—e.g., the film’s climactic finish is lacking in the book, mentioned in almost-conversational passing early on. And when I write expansive, that’s equally true of Once, especially when Tarantino details Cliff Booth’s immediate post-WWII years (considering becoming a “man of leisure” in Paris; the details of his stateside homicides, once in Cleveland, the other his wife’s on-boat demise). As with the film, there’s a lot of sly mixing of real-life history and often-wistful, sometimes meta-humored, wish-it-happened Hollywood fantasy.
Mostly, Once works as
an alternate-version, well-written book, though Tarantino, true to form, sometimes
lets his love of cinema, his characters, and world-building run long (e.g.,
chapters where he details the plots and characters of his fictional television
shows as well as the passages detailing the foreign films that Cliff likes and
dislikes).
Once is an impressive, sometimes exasperating (excessive detailing of films and shows) read, one worth checking out, perhaps owning, if you’re looking for something more than the usual, rigid-to-the-film movie tie-in book, and/or a Tarantino fan.
1 comment:
IIRC, part of the meta-humor of Once is about how the movie changes details of the book that it's based on, so any differences between the book and the movie are intentional because, in the world of the movie, the book came first. To make it twisty, here's how I *think* it's supposed to go:
1. Real events as happened in the Tarantino-verse. (Including Sharon Tate surviving.)
2. This book.
3. The movie. DiCaprio's character plays himmself. Sharon Tate deckines and is played by a contempirary of Sharon Tate (in turn played by Margot Robbie.) Pitt's character does *not* play himself and the studio orders the moviemskers to fudge whether or not they think he killed his wife in the boating accident in order to stave off a lawsuit from the real version of Pitt's character.
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