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: The Pat Hobby Stories, by F. Scott Fitzgerald, with an Introduction by Arnold Gingrich (1962)

 

The Pat Hobby Stories, on my Fitzgerald shelf. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, 1937. (Photo by Carl Van Vechten)

The Pat Hobby Stories is a collection of 17 humorous short stories written by F. Scott Fitzgerald during the last 18 months of his life. The titular character is a ne’er-do-well, an aging alcoholic screenwriter struggling to eke out a living in Hollywood. The 17 stories were all originally published in Esquire magazine, the last reliable market for Fitzgerald’s short stories. Esquire paid Fitzgerald $250 for each of the Pat Hobby stories, a far cry from the $4,000 per short story he had commanded from The Saturday Evening Post at the beginning of the 1930’s.

At the time Fitzgerald was writing the Pat Hobby stories, he was living in Hollywood and working as a screenwriter. Since Pat Hobby and Fitzgerald share the same occupation, one might be tempted to read the stories as autobiographical, especially since so much of Fitzgerald’s fiction drew upon his real-life experiences. But this would be misguided, as it’s quite clear that Pat Hobby has no actual talent for writing, in contrast to his creator, who obviously had a lot of talent for writing.

Fitzgerald makes the distinction between himself and his character early in the series, writing of Pat in “A Man in the Way,” the second story in the series: “He was a writer but he had never written much, nor even read all the ‘originals’ he worked from, because it made his head bang to read much.” (p.13)

In the story “Teamed with Genius,” Pat is asked if he’s heard of an author named Rene Wilcox. This throws Pat into a panic: “The name was unfamiliar. Pat had scarcely opened a book in a decade.” Pat then offers a generic “She’s pretty good,” before he learns that Rene is a male. (p.30)

Despite their differences in reading habits, Fitzgerald did use some of his real-life experiences in Hollywood to inform the Pat Hobby stories. A screen treatment that Hobby is supposed to work with Rene Wilcox to expand into a screenplay is titled “Ballet Shoes.” Thanks to I’d Die for You, the 2017 collection of previously unpublished Fitzgerald short stories, we know that Fitzgerald wrote a short screen treatment called “Ballet Shoes or Ballet Slippers.” (Fitzgerald used both titles on the cover sheet.) Fitzgerald’s treatment dates from 1936 and was never filmed. (I’d Die for You, p.313)

In “Pat Hobby’s Secret,” Hobby is working on a screenplay that includes the plot element of an artillery shell being found in the trunk of a car. (p.52) As unlikely an occurrence as this might seem to be, Fitzgerald wrote a screen treatment titled “Love is a Pain” that incorporated this same plot element. Dated 1939/40, “Love is a Pain” was finally published in 2017’s I’d Die for You. (I’d Die for You, p.279)

The Pat Hobby stories are full of funny lines, and one of my favorites is Fitzgerald’s description of Secrets of Film Writing, a 1928 book that Hobby co-authored: “It would have made money if pictures hadn’t started to talk.” (p.31) Another line that I found hilarious is when a producer offers to pay Pat—not quite a job, “more of a sinecure” in the producer’s words. “Pat became uneasy. He didn’t recognize the word, but ‘sin’ disturbed him and ‘cure’ brought a whole flood of unpleasant memories.” (p.104)

The Pat Hobby Stories draws the reader’s attention to Fitzgerald’s wit and humor, two qualities in his writing that are often overlooked. Fitzgerald’s humor may come as a surprise to readers, as the mood most associated with his writing is a yearning romanticism. Fitzgerald was by no means a humorist, but he was capable of a fine irony in his work. Think of Tom Buchanan railing against interracial marriage at the Plaza Hotel in The Great Gatsby, and Jordan Baker’s humorous reminder “We’re all white here.” (p.137)

The Pat Hobby Stories remain somewhat neglected in the Fitzgerald canon, and they have generally drawn little attention from Fitzgerald biographers and critics. One reason is the overt humor of the stories. Pat Hobby is clearly a humorous character, and the stories’ focus on humor and irony may have dissuaded literary critics of their importance, as generally speaking, humor writing is usually critically undervalued at the expense of “serious” writing. Whereas Gatsby is poetically yearning for the green light at the end of Daisy Buchanan’s dock, Pat Hobby is prosaically yearning for the time when he owned a house with a swimming pool.

In addition to being a comedic character, Pat Hobby is also clearly an untalented hack, and a talented writer writing stories about a hack writer may make people think that the talented writer is just doing hack work himself. The Pat Hobby stories were all written for money, but this fact alone shouldn’t bias the reader against them, as money was the driving force behind everything Fitzgerald wrote. From 1919 until his death in 1940, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s occupation was free-lance fiction writer. So, you could reasonably say that The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night were written for money as well. So were Fitzgerald’s finest short stories, like “Winter Dreams,” “The Diamond as Big as the Ritz,” “Babylon Revisited,” “Crazy Sunday,” and whichever Fitzgerald short stories are your own personal favorites.

The Pat Hobby Stories don’t really fit in with the rest of Fitzgerald’s work, as they lack the romantic lyricism that we typically associated with his best work. I’m not going to make the claim that The Pat Hobby Stories are Fitzgerald’s finest works, but they’re still enjoyable to read and are well-written. I wouldn’t recommend The Pat Hobby Stories for your first dip into Fitzgerald’s writing. The Pat Hobby Stories aren’t required reading for Fitzgerald 101, but if you want to go deeper into Fitzgerald’s work, they’re well worth the time.  

The Pat Hobby stories are also notable because they’re the last stories, or writing of any kind, that F. Scott Fitzgerald finished for publication during his lifetime, which gives them a unique historical significance. Fitzgerald wrote the stories quickly: a month after sending Esquire the first Pat Hobby story in September 1939, he had already written four more. Because Fitzgerald died in December of 1940, in the middle of Esquire’s publishing the Pat Hobby stories, we don’t really know what Fitzgerald himself would have done with the stories. Would he have written 7 or 8 more Pat Hobby stories and then revised them for publication as a standalone book? Or would he have left them uncollected and moved on to other subjects and stories? Fitzgerald was a tough critic of his own work, and it’s quite possible that he simply would have left poor old Pat Hobby out in the cold of his uncollected stories, rather than under the shelter and warmth of a sturdy book binding. At the time of Fitzgerald’s death, only 46 of his approximately 170 published short stories had been collected in book form. Despite the interest in Fitzgerald’s life and writing after his death, it took until 1979 for all of those stories to appear in books. Even then, there were still a few sub-par stories left to fend for themselves.

Few Fitzgerald scholars have dedicated much time or space to the Pat Hobby stories, and even Aaron Latham’s 1971 book Crazy Sundays: F. Scott Fitzgerald in Hollywood, barely mentions the stories. Fitzgerald scholar and biographer Matthew J. Bruccoli, who could usually be counted on to find something positive to say about Fitzgerald’s writings, criticizes the Pat Hobby stories. Bruccoli glosses over the stories in Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, his biography of Fitzgerald, but in the Introduction to the Cambridge University Press edition of The Love of the Last Tycoon, the novel Fitzgerald was working on at the time of his death, he’s quite critical of the stories.

Bruccoli writes: “Most of the seventeen Hobby stories about a hack movie writer are disappointing.” Bruccoli continues: “The Hobby stories are mainly travesties.” (The Love of the Last Tycoon, p.xxxvi) Okay, that seems a little harsh. I’m not going to claim that the Pat Hobby stories are Fitzgerald’s forgotten masterpieces, but they’re still enjoyable, even if they are rather slight.

What did Fitzgerald himself think of Pat Hobby? Fortunately, we have a letter in which he reveals his feelings. Frances Kroll was Fitzgerald’s secretary during the last 20 months of his life. She wrote the fascinating memoir Against the Current: As I Remember F. Scott Fitzgerald. (I reviewed that book here.) Frances’ brother Nathan was an aspiring writer, and he was considering adapting the Pat Hobby stories for the stage. Fitzgerald wrote Nathan an encouraging letter on May 6, 1940 about the possibilities of adapting the stories. As usual, Fitzgerald was an insightful critic of his own work, writing to Nathan: “the series is characterized by a really bitter humor and only the explosive situations and the fact that Pat is a figure almost incapable of real tragedy or damage saves it from downright unpleasantness.” (Correspondence of F. Scott Fitzgerald, p.595)

There’s very little description in The Pat Hobby Stories. They are short short stories—all the extra fat has been trimmed away. At times it doesn’t even quite feel like Fitzgerald. The beautiful descriptions that were such a hallmark of Fitzgerald’s style are rarely to be found in The Pat Hobby Stories. It makes me a little sad since I love Fitzgerald’s style so much. Fitzgerald’s writing in The Pat Hobby Stories isn’t quite Hemingway-esque, or hard-boiled prose, but I would say that his writing seems to have changed after the personal travails he experienced during the mid-1930’s. Perhaps because Fitzgerald’s own romanticism and hope in life had been bruised and battered, so too his writing had been changed by his experiences, and his prose now emerged in a leaner style. Had Fitzgerald lived longer, it would be interesting to see how his style might have changed throughout the years. If Fitzgerald had finished The Last Tycoon to his satisfaction, it would be fascinating to know if the finished novel would have reflected this change as well.

In Fitzgerald’s Notebooks, there’s an enigmatic note of just two sentences, probably dating from the late 1930’s, where Fitzgerald compares himself with Hemingway: “I talk with the authority of failure—Ernest with the authority of success. We could never sit across the same table again.” (The Crack-Up, p.181) The Pat Hobby Stories are certainly about failure, as Pat Hobby’s schemes go awry time and time again. But like a cork in the ocean, Pat Hobby keeps bobbing to the surface. It’s hard to imagine Hemingway writing about a character as hapless as Pat Hobby.

“Pat Hobby sat in the bar. Pat Hobby was drunk. The bar was across the street from the movie studio. Pat Hobby loved the movie studio. The movie studio treated Pat Hobby badly, but still he loved it. Pat Hobby loved the movie studio the way some men loved some women. The women had treated these men badly. But still the men found the women attractive despite the hurt and the pain. Or maybe the men still found the women attractive because of the hurt and the pain. Pat Hobby was not sure. All Pat Hobby wanted to do was to go back inside the movie studio. But the policeman would not let Pat Hobby in the gates. Pat Hobby cursed the policeman as he walked away.

Pat Hobby decided he would go to Tijuana and find some whores. There were always good whores there, and if you paid them enough, afterwards they would listen to all of your problems as you laid your head on their chest. Pat Hobby knew where the good whorehouses were. The whores there were not beautiful. But they were good-looking enough so you did not have to close your eyes and think of a movie star. Pat Hobby made love to his whore three times that afternoon. Pat Hobby knew there was good whiskey there too. Enough whiskey to get a man good and drunk so he could go to the bullfight and cheer for the brave young matador in his tight pants. Pat Hobby had always wanted to be a matador. But Pat Hobby was not one of the brave ones. The whiskey coursed through Pat Hobby’s veins and it made him feel very brave today. Pat Hobby suddenly jumped over the fence into the bull ring. The bull stared at Pat Hobby. Pat Hobby took off his jacket and waved it around. The bull was wounded, and he hobbled over to Pat Hobby. Pat Hobby danced around and waved his jacket more. The bull charged Pat Hobby. Pat Hobby jerked to his left and avoided the horns. Pat Hobby smacked the bull on the rump as he charged past. The crowd cheered for Pat Hobby. On the next pass, the bull gored Pat Hobby in the upper thigh. The bull’s horn tore through an artery. Pat Hobby fell to the dirt. Pat Hobby watched the blood pool around him quickly. Pat Hobby knew it was a fatal wound. Pat Hobby smiled at his last moment of glory. Pat Hobby waved to the crowd and smiled just before he passed out. Then the young matador in the tight pants killed the bull. The crowd cheered.”  

If you’re interested in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s last years in Hollywood, The Pat Hobby Stories are an entertaining and humorous diversion.

Movie Review: Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind, a Documentary Directed by Laurent Bouzereau (2020)

Poster for Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind, 2020.

Natalie Wood, late 1960's.

Actress Natasha Gregson Wagner, Natalie Wood's daughter and one of the producers of What Remains Behind. (Photo from the Natalie Wood Instagram account.)

I’m a big fan of Natalie Wood, and I was very excited when the news came out that her daughter Natasha Gregson Wagner was producing a documentary about her mother. Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind, directed by Laurent Bouzereau, premiered on Tuesday night on HBO. For fans of Natalie Wood, it’s a must-see.

The fact that Natasha Gregson Wagner produced Natalie Wood: What Remains Behind means that we get to see an amazing array of behind the scenes photos and film footage. Both of Wood’s children—Natasha Gregson Wagner and Courtney Wagner—were interviewed, as well as both of Natalie’s husbands, Richard Gregson and Robert Wagner, her personal assistant Mart Crowley, the author of the groundbreaking 1968 play The Boys in the Band, two time co-star Robert Redford, and others. What Remains Behind is a real behind the scenes look at this iconic actress. 

What Natasha Gregson Wagner says in the trailer becomes the theme of the movie: “There’s been so much focus on how she died, that it’s overshadowed who she was as a person.” Of course, we all know how Natalie Wood died: she drowned off Catalina Island in 1981 at the age of 43. There has been an endless amount of speculation about the events of that night, and What Remains Behind addresses the mysterious circumstances around Natalie’s death during an emotional interview with Natasha and Robert Wagner. Personally, I think Natalie Wood’s death was a tragic accident, and that’s the point of view that What Remains Behind takes.

What Remains Behind is very well structured, although it isn’t strictly chronological. The film flows together very nicely. I was a little disappointed that Warren Beatty wasn’t interviewed for it, but it takes Beatty such a long time to decide to do anything that I’m not totally surprised.

It’s apparent that Natasha Gregson Wagner wants to change the narrative about her mother. Gregson Wagner wants her mother to be seen as a whole person, rather than just a tragic figure who died too young. Over the last 5 years or so, as Natasha has taken a more visible role in publicizing and shaping her mother’s legacy, I think she has changed the narrative about Natalie Wood’s life. Natasha has launched a fragrance, published a beautiful coffee table book, 2016’s Natalie Wood: Reflections on a Legendary Life, and now we have What Remains Behind, and Natasha’s memoir More Than Love, which was also released on Tuesday. What Natasha has done is given us a more vibrant picture of the woman who was Natalie Wood. Natasha has ensured that her mother will be remembered not only for being an amazing and beautiful actress, but also a vibrant woman who was a dedicated mother and a great friend to all who knew her.