Book Review: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, a novel by Quentin Tarantino (2021)

 

The paperback cover of Quentin Tarantino's novel Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, 2021. I love that it's supposed to look like a 1970's paperback.

Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a bonanza for those of us, like myself, who are mildly obsessed with mid-century American pop culture. There have been rumors that Tarantino filmed way more footage than could have fit into a theatrically released motion picture, even with Hollywood running 2 hours and 40 minutes. The first evidence of that comes with the release of Tarantino’s novel of the same title, which greatly expands the story that the movie shows us.

The novel Once Upon a Time in Hollywood tells us way more about the lives of actor Rick Dalton and his stuntman and gofer, Cliff Booth. (Played in the movie by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, respectively.) We also get additional chapters focusing on Sharon Tate, Charles Manson, and the backstory behind Lancer, the TV pilot that Rick Dalton films during the movie. Personally, I found Rick to be a more compelling character than Cliff, in both the novel and the movie. In the movie, I’m pretty sure the only direction Tarantino had to give Brad Pitt was “Look cool in this scene.” Cause that’s all Cliff does. Even when kicking ass, the guy never breaks a sweat. Cliff has none of the self-doubts that plague Rick Dalton—and that makes Cliff far less interesting to me. In the novel, we learn a lot of terrible things about Cliff—he’s a murderer who was involved in illegal dogfights.

The time structure of the novel is odd, and non-linear, as the climax of the film is revealed to us in dialogue about a quarter of the way through the book. There’s also a weird digressive chapter late in the novel about the actor Aldo Ray. But the novel is filled with little eccentricities like that. Also, be on the lookout for all the times women go barefoot in the novel—it seems to be an obsession of Tarantino’s.

There were a couple of little errors I noticed in the novel, such as the mention of “platinum albums” on page 163. Platinum albums were not introduced as a certification until 1976, 7 years after the main action of the film and novel. A tiny detail, sure, but the sort of thing that I’d think a pop culture nut like Tarantino would notice. A more noticeable error is the discrepancy in the number of seasons of Bounty Law, the TV show that catapulted Rick Dalton to stardom. On page 23, Rick says, “I totally pissed away a fourth season of Bounty Law,” meaning that the show ended before the fourth season. Yet on page 11, we learn that Bounty Law went on the air in the fall of the 1959-60 TV season and went off the air in the middle of the 1963-64 season—that would be the middle of the 5^th season. Again, it’s a tiny detail, but in a universe as fully thought out as the one that Rick Dalton inhabits, a noticeable detail.

Sharon Tate plays a slightly larger role in the novel than she does in the movie, but I would have vastly preferred more Sharon and less Cliff Booth. Tarantino is obsessed with the macho world that Cliff inhabits, so that dominates the novel. It could also be that Tarantino finds it easier to inhabit totally fictional characters like Cliff and Rick rather than a real historical person like Sharon Tate.

The novel is steeped in misogyny. It’s tough to say how much of this is Tarantino being “true to the time period” and how much it reflects his own thoughts and attitudes about women. Whatever the case, readers may find it off-putting. There are odd moments that are just jarring, like when Trudi Frazer, the 8-year-old actress who plays Mirabella Lancer on the Lancer TV pilot, tells Rick that she thinks his bad guy character would marry Mirabella, whom he has kidnapped. Rick is appalled by the idea and tells Trudi this. Sure, for Trudi some of this is an acting exercise to think outside of the boundaries of the script, but it’s just creepy.

Cliff Booth is a misogynist through and through. (The novel clears up the mysterious circumstances surrounding his wife’s death.) Cliff likes sleeping with women, but really has little use for them other than sexually. Sample text: “To Cliff, pussy was pussy, but he did have a real fondness for Italian pussy.” Cool, bro. Two paragraphs later, Cliff tells his friends about Rick’s new wife, an Italian actress: “Out of the fucking blue, he fucking married the bitch.” (p.341)

One of the funnier moments of the novel deals with Roman Polanski’s paranoia that Sharon Tate may have slept with Steve McQueen before she was married to Roman. “He’s never confirmed this with Sharon…but McQueen makes a point of it by the way he smirks at Roman. Every glance of those blue eyes and grin of that little mouth seems to say, I fucked your wife.” (p.129) I can see Steve McQueen making that face. Steve McQueen would be a really intimidating guy to be friends with. Because unless you’re Paul Newman, Steve McQueen is always going to be way cooler than you are. Steve McQueen races motorcycles and cars in his spare time. Steve McQueen has piercing blue eyes. Steve McQueen is strong and silent and stoic. Steve McQueen always gets to play the coolest parts in ensemble movies: The Magnificent Seven? He’s the coolest one. The Great Escape? He’s the coolest one. Oh, and when he’s not in an ensemble movie, he’s being cool as hell in movies like Le Mans and Bullitt, where he does his own stunt driving! Or The Thomas Crown Affair, where he even looks cool playing polo. Trust me, you don’t really want your wife spending a lot of time around Steve McQueen. Or Roman Polanski, for that matter.

There’s a very funny scene where Rick Dalton breaks down in detail why he wouldn’t have gotten Steve McQueen’s role in The Great Escape. The rumor around Hollywood is that had McQueen turned down the part, Rick’s name was on a list with “the three Georges.” That would be George Peppard, George Maharis, and George Chakiris. (If you know who those guys are without Googling them, this is the book for you.) Rick tells actor Jim Stacy exactly why each of the three Georges would have been cast ahead of him. For the sake of argument, Rick raises the possibility that horrific accidents might have befallen the three Georges, leaving him as the last name on the list. “Do I get it now?” Rick asks Jim Stacy.

“Of course you get it, you’re the last guy on the fuckin’ list!”

“That’s just my point, Jim. When the fuck do they hire the last guy on the fucking list? When you get to the last guy on the fuckin’ list, you throw out the fuckin’ list and start a new fuckin’ list!” (p.376-7)

In that same scene, look for a cameo appearance by Tarantino’s stepdad, Curt Zastoupil. Supposedly, Tarantino has written a second novel detailing the film career of Rick Dalton. I’m looking forward to reading it. If you’re fascinated by Old Hollywood, and you enjoyed the movie, you’ll love the novel of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Book Review: Molly Bit, a novel by Dan Bevacqua (2020)

The cover of Molly Bit, by Dan Bevacqua, 2020.

Writer Dan Bevacqua.

Dan Bevacqua’s debut novel, titled Molly Bit, is a look at an actress who becomes a famous movie star. I thought that was an interesting enough concept for a book, so I took a chance on buying it after reading a review. There are fine moments sprinkled throughout Molly Bit, but ultimately, I didn’t enjoy it that much. 

Bevacqua is a good writer, but he also has an MFA from Columbia—he should be a good writer. An example of his prose that I particularly liked was this: “She’d always thought older guys would be less touchy, but they were actually worse. A man in his thirties understood when his life was falling apart. A young one didn’t care—he thought he had more chances.” (p.39) 

What I found most difficult about Molly Bit was, well, Molly Bit. She’s not defined enough as a character to be truly interesting—she comes off as too much of a cipher. You can argue that’s the point, that she’s an actress who pleases other people while having little interior life of her own, but I’d argue back that’s not the best choice for a lead character in a novel. There’s not much I can really tell you about Molly Bit, besides the fact that she seems to crave a cigarette every three pages or so. 

Molly Bit is split up into chapters that take place years apart, which might not be the most effective technique. Because so few characters overlap chapters, I got less of an emotional impact from the novel. That also puts more weight on Molly as the lead character, since she’s the bridge between the chapters, and she can’t really take that, because she’s so thinly drawn. Oh, and if Molly Bit was really as poor as she’s meant to be in the first chapter, there’s no way she would have had a computer at college in 1993. 

There are clever bits for film fans to get, like the Vanity Fair article about Molly when she’s an up and coming young starlet: “Girl From the Future: Why in Six Months Everybody Will Know Who Molly Bit Is.” (p.69) That’s the kind of specificity that Molly Bit the novel, and Molly Bit the character, could use more of. 

Can we talk about names for a minute? Molly Bit is ridiculous enough—I guess it’s meant to be a pun on an actor being a “bit” player. But some of the other characters are named Kate Uppley and Roger Michael Vincent. One can only assume the author was staring at pictures of Kate Upton while watching reruns of Airwolf. If you’re writing an over the top comedic novel, sure, you can give your characters names like this. But Molly Bit isn’t an over the top comedic novel. Although there are some comedic moments: “Molly remembered the exact moment when she knew it was over with Jared. She’d been hanging upside down by a guidewire off the side of a building.” (p.110)

As a fan of Tom Wolfe, I did appreciate that one of the characters is reading The Bonfire of the Vanities. Bevacqua describes the way he’s sitting thus: “The phrase was perhaps legs and arms akimbo.” (p.109) Since “legs akimbo” was one of Wolfe’s pet phrases that crops up again and again in his writing, I assume that this was a little tip of the hat to the man in white. (Wolfe even wrote a fictitious hip-hop song with the lyrics “shanks akimbo” for his novel A Man in Full.) 

What also hampers Molly Bit so much is what happens to Molly Bit, which is given away in the very first line of the synopsis inside the dust jacket. It seems like such a cliché—like it’s a Lifetime movie from the 1990’s. 

We might ask for too much from novels about artists: first, we expect the novel itself to be a great work of art, and then on top of that the novelist has to convince us that the artist in question has created great art in this different medium—film, painting, sculpture, etc. That’s a heavy task. 

Molly Bit is by turns interesting and frustrating. Bevacqua clearly has talent, and it will be interesting to see where it takes him next.