Admittedly, I put off reading the third book Harper Perennial sent me to review, because of some personal distractions needing my attention, but when I picked up the tome from first-time novelist out of Knoxville, Tennessee, I read all 333 pages in less than two days.
Not all up-and-coming writers have blurbs of praise on their paperbacks from Chris Willman of Variety, and this writer, unlike many freshman in the publishing world who boast M.F.A.s and snooty lit magazines in their credits, earnestly lists his outsider, a-typical background in his author bio: “Born in 1963…he is the writer-director of nine feature films and the winner of two Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay. He lives in Los Angeles and Tel Aviv.” I’ve always rooted for the dark horse, and am happy to support this budding talent with a review.
THE BOOK: Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, by Quintin Tarantino
WHAT HAPPENS: We open in the office of Marvin Schwarz in Hollywood, 1969. Rick Dalton a fading TV actor who (among several characters in this book) drinks heavily and-not-in-the-fun-way to mask his undiagnosed bipolar, has taken a meeting to see about shifting his career from playing the Bad Guy on Westerns at home to playing the star of probably bad Westerns in Italy.
We soon learn that Rick’s best-friend-on-the-payroll is Cliff Booth, a roguishly-handsome blonde 46-year-old stunt double whose scenes interested me more than Rick’s. Perhaps because Rick mostly runs lines at home while drinking himself into a stupor or grapples with his insecurities on set while Cliff gets away with murder at least three times, briefly considers being a maq aka Parisian pimp after WW2, and adores his pitbull Brandy except for when he enters her in deadly dogfights – but only when he really needs thee money.
Or perhaps, because Rick’s scenes felt oddly familiar while many of Cliff’s did not.
Rick lives next door to Roman Polanski and his “sexy little me” bride, Sharon Tate. We cut back and forth between these characters and the misadventures of dumpster diving hippies who happily pass Venereal Diseases to every man who gives them a ride or day-old potato in hopes of pleasing their pimp daddy, Charlie Manson.
WHAT I THOUGHT: The irony of the auteur who made his name for writing movies like novels writing a novel like a movie does not escape me. Neither did certain scenes and backstories that I would go out on a limb to guess the studio asked Mr. Tarantino to please omit because audiences tend to have a hard time rooting for a dog-fighting, homicidal pimp, even if he is Brad Pitt.
I enjoyed the three-page non-sequitur in which we learn why Polanski asked the DP on Rosemary’s Baby to replace a well-framed single shot of Mrs. Castevet with a dirty one. * DISCLAIMER: I did attend and graduate from NYU and spent freshman year saying things at parties like “how can you say Tarantino is entirely derivative when he’s freshly effective enough for us to be talking about him right now?” *
READ IF YOU LIKE: Tarantino movies, or inside-Hollywood shows like Reboot, Episodes, and Entourage but think they lack politically incorrect rhetoric and anti-heroes who chop their wives in half with spear-guns for being “f*cking c*nts”.
GOOD FOR: Reminding yourself how much you’ve grown since freshman year of NYU, and having an answer when haters say, “You bum, all you do is stream movies. What was the last book you even read?”
RATING: 🥓🥓🥓🥓 Thank you for the book, Harper Perennial. I see great things to come from this new voice!