Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

On the data. A film and a novel, and the novel is the surprise. The film is set in Los Angeles in 1969 and spends most of its length on an aging television actor and his stunt double doing very little. Sharon Tate, played by Margot Robbie, is a real person who was murdered by members of the Manson group in August 1969, and the film puts her on screen going about an ordinary day. What it then does with the night of the murders is the thing the film is for, and it is the same move Inglourious Basterds makes with Hitler: history is rewritten, deliberately and explicitly, and the title tells you that in advance. That choice was argued about hard. Some critics found it generous, a film that gives a murdered woman a life and then refuses to let her be killed. Others found it a film that uses a real murder for a set piece. Tate's sister Debra Tate saw it before release and defended it publicly, which carries more weight than most of the argument. Bruce Lee's portrayal is the other live dispute. Lee's daughter Shannon Lee objected publicly to how he is written, and Tarantino has defended the scene and declined to change anything. The novel came out in 2021 and is not a novelisation in the usual sense. It reorders the story, spends long stretches on Cliff Booth's history and on what he may or may not have done to his wife, treats the film's climax in a few pages, and reads like a 1970s paperback on purpose. If you liked the film, it is worth reading; if you want the film in prose, it is not that. This is also where Tarantino's count gets confusing. He has always said he will make ten films and stop, and he counts Kill Bill as one, which makes this the ninth. He announced a tenth called The Movie Critic and abandoned it in 2024. So this is, for now, the last film he has directed.

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