‘You don’t have to believe in giant monkeys to direct King Kong…’
As Quentin Tarantino can’t seem to decide what his tenth and supposedly final film will be, this has freed him up to focus on other stuff. That means both his first non-fiction novel, Cinema Speculation, and this novelisation of his most recent film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Now, I didn’t love that film. I found it to be incoherent at times and I didn’t care for the ending but this novelisation fixes most of these problems…
Rick Dalton is an ageing Hollywood star with his best years behind him. His stunt double and fixer, Cliff Booth, supports Rick to overcome his insecurities in order to cling to stardom. Dalton’s fall from grace takes place against the backdrop of Sharon Tate being, quite literally, the girl next door and the Manson Family lurking in the background.
I will begin by saying that this novel fixes or improves upon much of the stuff I didn’t like about the film. Dalton is a much more sympathetic and interesting character; the infamous Bruce Lee sequence, whilst still faintly odious, works better here and the ending, which was a deleted scene in the book, rounds things off in a much more satisfying way than the cartoonish conclusion of the source material. Tarantino is an unshowy writer, interested only in telling the story in a compelling way, and the book is all the better for it. He is a pulpy writer but not a trashy one, and he knows how to construct characters that we care about without losing narrative momentum – a nifty trick from a more experienced novelist but a pretty revelatory one for a relative beginner (although he is obviously already an accomplished screenwriter).
Tarantino’s novelisation allowed me to view the source material through a different lens to the extent where it immediately made me want to revisit the film again. Apparently, there is more stuff to come in this universe, both on screen and on the page, and based on the quality of this book, I’m all in.