Once Upon A Time In Hollywood

wilberfan · August 01, 2019, 10:11:44 AM

Quote from: Drenk on August 01, 2019, 07:49:12 AM
They barely talk about Boogie Nights. It's very disapointing, Episode 2 was way better.

Perhaps slightly off-topic, but does anyone else have trouble making sense of Quentin's comment that as a 16 year old working at a Pussycat theatre, he had no interest in porn? I suppose I'm projecting my own adolescent interests and experiences, but that comment really surprises me. (We know PTA was fascinated by the stuff at 16!)

Drenk · August 01, 2019, 10:43:52 AM

Maybe he's lying, or he suffered from over-exposure, but I can imagine a stoic Tarantino—even the brief oral sex scene in Pulp Fiction seems more in love with Godard than, well, sex.

Jeremy Blackman · August 01, 2019, 11:15:40 AM

I guess these cultural criticism pieces have their place, but they sadden me. Feel like we had the exact same problem with Phantom Thread—writers attempting to tackle a legitimately complex film with a very simplistic surface-level reading.

And in fact, even as narrow-scoped cultural criticism, that article falls flat on its face. For spoilery reasons:

Spoiler: Show

Alethia · August 01, 2019, 12:01:17 PM

Quote from: Drenk on August 01, 2019, 10:43:52 AM
Maybe he's lying, or he suffered from over-exposure, but I can imagine a stoic Tarantino—even the brief oral sex scene in Pulp Fiction seems more in love with Godard than, well, sex.

Maybe feet are all that do it for him. I ain't here to kink-shame.

Something Spanish · August 01, 2019, 12:38:19 PM

Spoiler: Show

man, I am can't wait to see it again tomorrow.

Alethia · August 01, 2019, 12:39:05 PM

This is a nice read.

On Sharon Tate, the Actress
As the most high-profile victim of the Charles Manson murders, Tate has long been reduced to being a footnote in a gruesome tale. But rewatching the work she did in film reveals a fuller, more human story.

By Manuela Lazic

When it was announced that Quentin Tarantino was working on a film centered on the Charles Manson murders that shook the Los Angeles elite in the summer of 1969, some filmgoers (myself included) worried that the director's taste for extreme violence would be applied to these atrocious real-life events. The casting of Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, billed in advance as a key character, also brewed anxiety over whether Tarantino, not always the best writer of female roles, would lean into the particularly gruesome death of Roman Polanski's then-wife.

As it turns out, Tarantino's cinephilic instincts took precedence over his bloodthirst: Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood focuses on Tate's acting aspirations and her burgeoning recognition as a promising new talent at the time of her death, rather than the death itself—a tragedy that doesn't even happen on screen. Easily Tarantino's most melancholy and humane film since Jackie Brown, it presents Tate as someone to be remembered not for the way she disappeared, but for her life as a young woman trying to find both happiness and artistic fulfillment in an environment where her unusual beauty (even by Hollywood's extreme standards) made her both a hot commodity and uniquely vulnerable.

Tate's start in movies was, unsurprisingly, spawned by her striking looks. While living in Italy, where her father worked as a military officer, she and some friends got parts as extras in the film Hemingway's Adventures of a Young Man, during which actor Richard Beymer (later to star as Ben Horne in David Lynch's Twin Peaks) noticed her. They dated and were engaged for a year (she was 18, he was 22) and he encouraged her to pursue acting. But all that followed was extra work and screen tests that led nowhere.

In 2015, writer and podcaster Karina Longworth dedicated an entire series of her tremendously researched podcast about Hollywood's forgotten histories, You Must Remember This, to "Charles Manson's Hollywood." Providing some context and corrections to an infamous narrative already familiar from books and movies (and which Tarantino's film does little to flesh out), Longworth dedicated two of the 12 episodes to Tate's life and explained how, from a very early age, the young woman felt insecure. Her strict upbringing, combined with her looks, made her shy and scared—an anxiety that was further imposed upon her when, while still living in Italy and before getting into acting, she survived a sexual assault on a date with a young soldier. But Tate wanted to become an actress, and although her lack of confidence repeatedly got in the way of her career, experience helped her free her instincts.

For a time, Tate's agent, Harold Gefsky, and producer Martin Ransohoff confined her to the small screen, but her turn in 15 episodes of the TV series The Beverly Hillbillies helped unleash her comedic aptitude and certainly encouraged her self-confidence. As dark-wigged secretary Janet Trego, she played a little dumb, but with good comic timing and the lightness of an actress really enjoying herself.

After more missed opportunities to appear on the big screen, in 1967 Ransohoff finally gave Tate a real part in one of his film productions, the bizarre horror fable Eye of the Devil. Tate's astounding beauty is her main tool in the film, as she plays an eerie witch living in an ominous castle with her family (her brother is played by David Hemmings in a smart bit of casting, his clear eyes and blond hair making him look pretty much like a male Sharon Tate) and terrorizing another family with strange rituals. Tate, her luscious hair glowing in the black-and-white photography, has her gigantic eyes painted in the style of the time, with dark kohl and heavy eyelashes emphasizing their bewitching effect. In a part that could easily have been laughably cliché, she proves genuinely mesmerizing, delivering her few lines with elegance and adopting a statuesque pose that fashion shoots helped her master. Eye of the Devil is not a good film, but Tate took it seriously. By the time she was 24, she had shown that she could play both ends of the spectrum—the clueless receptionist and the scary temptress.

But before the release of Eye of the Devil, another of Tate's films came out to poor reviews, with which she herself agreed. Don't Make Waves is a slight and silly comedy surf movie in which Tate plays Malibu, a lifeguard who saves Tony Curtis from drowning and distracts him from Claudia Cardinale (a predicament to be wished upon no one). The dumb blond image was not going to be easy to shed, but Tate was determined.

It was during her time in Swinging London after the shooting of Eye of the Devil that Tate met Polanski, then an up-and-coming star thanks to his European productions Repulsion (1965) and Cul-de-sac (1966). Although at first unconvinced, Polanski gave Tate the role of Sarah, a beautiful damsel in distress, in his following project, the comedy horror film The Fearless Vampire Killers. Wearing a red wig, Tate functions primarily as the object of affection for Polanski's character, Alfred, the young horny assistant of a professor chasing vampires and falling prey to them. She first appears in the film when the duo walks in on her having a bubble bath, and although she remains scantily clad for most of the movie's runtime, her scenes with Polanski betray a genuine connection between them. The shoot apparently didn't start well, however: Polanski had little patience for Tate's insecurity and lack of experience; yet progressively, she demonstrated that she could take directions and that the dynamic script, requiring a few moments of action comedy and a general vivacity, was not beyond her grasp. After the shooting ended, the two moved in together. The film's release was botched, with the studio presenting a heavily re-edited version to the public, but since then, a cut closer to the director's original intentions has been released. The Fearless Vampire Killers has gained in popularity as a memento of its director's youthful playfulness (Tim Burton must have been an early fan), as well as a unique historical document tinged by darkness. Even when trying to view Tate as primarily an actress not defined by her death or her relationship to the since very controversial Polanski, it is nearly impossible not to feel great sadness for the couple when seeing Sarah and Alfred exchange a tender kiss, perhaps Tate's most sincere in her entire, short career.

Tate's following feature was meant to be her proper beginning as a serious dramatic actress. Jacqueline Susann's novel Valley of the Dolls was a sensational best seller and, as Longworth explains, Tate talked excitedly to the press about feeling close to her character, Jennifer North. A gorgeous small-town girl dreaming of Hollywood fame but devoid of talent and never taken seriously, Jennifer eventually turns to pornography in France to pay for her sick husband's stay in a sanitarium. The parallels with Tate's own experience arguably drew the actress to the part and helped her bring it to life. All these years of playing the dumb blond were finally paying off, and if Tate sometimes leans a little too much into this cluelessness, she also brings to it a touching vulnerability. Jennifer repeatedly receives phone calls from her mother scolding her for not having made it yet and asking for money (which Jennifer doesn't have), and although these melodramatic conversations are undeniably camp, Tate, speaking to her mother like a little girl, makes Jennifer's brutal loss of innocence and gradual disillusionment with her chances in Hollywood truly heartbreaking. One unexpectedly moving moment is when after one of these phone calls, Jennifer, alone at home, starts doing chest-toning exercises, but soon drops her arms and says, "Oh, to hell with 'em! ... Let 'em droop!" to herself; taken out of context, this is a silly moment, but it also feels like watching the real Tate in her everyday life. On her podcast, Longworth talks about the strict regime of dance, singing, and gym classes that Tate was subjected to when she arrived in Hollywood, "because you could always improve upon a perfect physique." Tate's impeccable figure was not simply the result of good genes; a lot of hard work and ambition went into it, and her dedication to an industry that treated her (and most other actresses) like an object was visible in her body, as well as in her willingness to play a tragic character so similar to herself.

Although Tate was nominated for a Golden Globe as New Star of the Year - Actress for her turn as Jennifer, Valley of the Dolls was panned by critics for its extravagance and its central performances. Roger Ebert called it "a dirty soap opera" for being so crude and pessimistic about sex, and he particularly hated Tate's bust exercise scene, calling it "the most offensive and appalling vulgarity ever thrown up by any civilization." (Somehow, Ebert went on to write the screenplay for the sequel.) The deep pathos of Jennifer's fall from grace, as well as that of her friends—the musical star Neely O'Hara (Patty Duke, in a story line inspired by Judy Garland's life) and the assistant entertainment lawyer Anne Welles (Barbara Parkins)—was deemed absurd and gross, too laughably exaggerated to be taken seriously. But watching it now, the misogyny of such views is blatant. The essential plot of Valley of the Dolls, which sees three women losing themselves to the stress of ambition and addiction, isn't so different from that of A Star Is Born, in which it is a man who suffers from these ills, mostly out of jealousy toward his successful wife on whom he relies to be saved. But it is A Star is Born that has been remade four times, even as the tragic and impossibly sad stories of Jennifer, Neely, and Anne keep repeating themselves in real life. And if these narratives still appear too improbable and gruesome, Tate's own biography unfortunately demonstrates that reality can be stranger, and more absurdly cruel, than fiction.

Tate's last film was the sloppy and forgettable farce Twelve Plus One (which she signed up for to appear in a film with Orson Welles) but the last Tate-starring film to be released in her lifetime was the James Bond spoof comedy The Wrecking Crew, which premiered to positive reviews in February 1969. Tate appeared alongside Dean Martin's 007ish agent Matt Helm as undercover spy Freya Carlson, a beautiful but nerdy (read: glasses-wearing) and clumsy young woman who more often than not slows down the agent in his investigation and prevents him from sleeping with the enemy. Tate practiced martial arts with Bruce Lee for a cute catfight scene between Freya and criminal Yu-Rang (Nancy Kwan), but more impressive yet is her progress as a comedy actress since her Beverly Hillbillies days. Serenely unconscious of her surroundings, Freya falls over countless times and often misunderstands Helm's witticisms; her dazed charm indicates that Tate, although still growing into her skills, clearly felt more capable than ever. Only 25 years old at the time of production, she is the best part of this rather confused and only mildly funny spoof, and critics at the time recognized her as such.

The ultimate film critic, Tarantino honors Tate's turn in The Wrecking Crew in Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood. In a likely imagined sequence, the director shows Tate going to a bookshop to buy a copy of Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles—which, in reality, she had read while staying in London with Polanski when she last saw him, and had suggested they adapt together for the screen—before impulsively deciding to attend a screening of her comedy. Once Upon a Time ... is imbued with Tarantino's love for Hollywood history, and a spectator unfamiliar with Tate's life story may be occasionally perplexed by the plethora of biographical details—but it would be difficult for anyone not to get emotional when watching Margot Robbie as Tate, watching herself on the big screen, growing giddy while hearing the rest of the audience laugh at Freya's cute klutziness.

Tarantino's tenderness toward Sharon Tate could seem surprising—and although his rewriting of her history doesn't focus much on her as a mother, a wife, or simply a woman—it nevertheless makes clear that he cares greatly about Tate as a symbol of the Hollywood machine itself. Giving Tate a different fate through the power of film is perhaps a little too easy, but since her death was such a terrifying and random event, it makes sense for Tarantino, who has always used cinema as a fantasy machine, to employ that machine to give her a second chance. A second chance not only at simply living on, but also at really making it in the movies.

WorldForgot · August 01, 2019, 02:02:41 PM

Mani Lazic is a great writer!! Thanks for sharing this one on here, eward. Her favorite film is Body Double, which, like, respect.

Alethia · August 01, 2019, 02:33:22 PM

This is more like it.

(SPOILERS BELOW)

Tarantino's Most Transgressive Film

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood celebrates values that have been repeatedly dismissed as dangerous and outdated.

By Caitlin Flanigan

As soon as I heard that Quentin Tarantino was making a movie about the Manson killings, I knew I would be there on opening night. As the release date neared, and the ravishing still photography of Andrew Cooper, Tarantino's regular photographer, began to appear—beginning with a January spread in Vanity Fair, which operated like an injection of Narcan on that slumbering magazine—I wondered if I would be able to make it to July.

I knew that the film would not be a biopic in any conventional sense, and that it would explore the sexually louche Hollywood of the late 1960s alongside the sinister element of the once-joyful hippie movement, an element which was hardly in its infancy before it crested in the Manson murders. ("Just in time," everyone told Joan Didion when she went to San Francisco to report on depravity in the Haight in 1967; "the whole fad's dead now, fini, kaput.") And I knew that Sharon Tate—cipher, beauty, Texas pageant girl, and Euro sophisticate—was a character Tarantino could have invented. I assumed that the film would, in the director's characteristic way, include digressions, set pieces, flights from narrative logic so prolonged they would bring the viewer to points of murderous rage, and that the director would reemerge in the third act, fully in possession of his narrative powers to stick the landing.

Once Upon a Time ... In Hollywood is a swoon of a movie. It's full of so much beauty and menace and humor and intelligence that I couldn't do anything but sit flattened while it rolled over me. In anyone else's hands, the long middle section would have walked the room. In Tarantino's, I just kept watching, helplessly. Eventually that long digression ends and you're back in business, back in the place of childhood daydreams and nightmares. I was seven years old when the Manson killings happened, a child up in Berkeley who, like all children at the time, heard words—Manson, Tate, the killings, something about words written in blood—before radios were switched off and mothers changed the subject.

Every generation has its crime that looms over the children, its details slowly making their way into their nightmares. Leopold and Loeb in the 1920s, the Black Dahlia in the '40s. For my generation—Tarantino's generation—the Manson murders were the crime that had the children's attention. In Berkeley, we lived through Patty Hearst's kidnapping—which everyone had some small connection to, and which dominated the city's life—but when it was over, we went right back to Manson. It's deep in our imagination. The justice critics—the ones who want to count up every movie's sins against approved sensibilities—say that the film is nostalgic, a term intended to damage it. Only another artist would understand the way that Tarantino has deployed that potent force. Guillermo del Toro tweeted that the movie was "[chock-full] of yearning," that it was "a tale of another time that probably never was but feels like a memory."

The justice critics aren't interested in fictions that feel like memories. They want movies that adhere to their vision of the way the world should be. To them, the movie is too white, too violent to women, and too uninterested in Margot Robbie, whose Sharon Tate has few lines. The New Yorker's Richard Brody reviled the picture, calling it "ridiculously white." But Charles Manson was a white supremacist, a fact does tend to put a lot of white people in a movie. The majority of these white people are drugged-out sadists who live in filth, and scrounge in garbage, entirely repellant. And the Hollywood of the time was a deeply insular place from which progressive values flowed easily, but which never stopped to examine itself as a racially exclusive enterprise. Depicting it as inclusive would give the lie to the decades of hard work that has gone into changing that fact, work that is finally beginning to pay off.

As to violence against women, what can I tell you? If you don't like it, don't go to a movie about the Manson killings. Say what you will about Charles Manson, he really empowered women to pursue excellence in traditionally male-dominated fields. From armed robbery to sadistic murder at knifepoint, he put women in positions from which they had been traditionally excluded, and ultimately helped them to break that hardest, highest glass ceiling, the one that makes death row such a male purview. The Manson crimes became famous because of the savagery of the killings, the killers became famous because so many of them were women, and the most famous of the victims was a very specific woman, so particularly feminine—and at the height of femininity: the peak of her young beauty and eight-and-a-half months pregnant—that her slaughter instantly assumed a mythic importance. Moreover, without giving away the ending, for many of us the violent scene that the justice critics hate was something we've been waiting 50 years to see. As for me, I closed my eyes during part of it, an option available to any ticket holder.

Sharon Tate doesn't get many lines, a fact that may not make feminist sense, but which absolutely makes artistic sense. We didn't know her. All we knew were the facts of her murder and of her impossible beauty. We created her from the endless publicity photographs that would appear and reappear in newspapers throughout our childhoods. She was living in the midst of the ascendant and dangerous new Hollywood and yet she was also living a very conventional life. Two photographs in particular, both of them shot in the backseats of limos, came to stand for those things. In one she is wearing a wedding dress and veil, orange blossoms in her hair, her groom beside her. In the other she holding up a tiny, knit sweater as though on her way home from a baby shower.

For a very brief moment it seemed possible to be a sexually free woman of the new era and also to round out that period of freedom with the old, square punctuation points. She was in the midst of the new Hollywood royalty, at the height of the youth movement, and yet she was also a girl living out the dreams of Edith Haupt's Seventeen magazine. Because of this, and because of the blunt force of her beauty, she stood for two of the most powerful forces in history: sexuality and femininity. Hence the scenes of her dancing, first at the Playboy mansion and then in the sun-drenched privacy of her bedroom. In truth, even the most beautiful girls of 1968 didn't spend much time putting on shorts and dancing alone in bedrooms while drenched in the golden light of a California afternoon—but we weren't interested in sociological observations. We were deep into mythic territory.

Tate was an interesting person, the daughter of an Army colonel, a pageant winner at six months—Miss Tiny Tot of Dallas—someone who moved regularly because of her father's job and who was therefore lonely and shy. She went to her senior year of high school at the American School in Italy, already famous in her father's world because a photograph of her in a bathing suit had been published in Stars and Stripes. Margot Robbie's evocation of her as a happy, sexy, beautiful girl who basked in the attention her beauty brought her, brings to life exactly the dream girl we loved so fiercely. And Tarantino has paid Tate the ultimate compliment: When Robbie goes to a movie theater to watch herself in one of her few movie roles, he didn't reshoot that film with the modern actress in the role. We're watching Margot Robbie watching Sharon Tate and the half century that separates those two real women looms over the scenes. Why are Robbie's feet, slipped out of immaculate white gogo boots and slung over a movie seat in front of her, so filthy? That is between Quentin Tarantino and his god.

What's really got the justice critics worked up, however, isn't the violence or the nostalgia or the silencing of Sharon Tate. What's rattling them more than they realize is that this movie is transgressive as hell. Only Tarantino would have the balls to make something like it, something that embraces values that have been repeatedly been proven—proven!—to be dangerous, outdated, the thing that people don't want anymore. Box-office poison. And only Tarantino could do it so skillfully that it's not until you're back in the car that you realize what he's done: made a major motion picture in 2019 about a man with a code, a man who hews to the old values of the western hero.

The movie is about Leonardo DiCaprio's character, Rick Dalton. But this is Brad Pitt's picture, and he carries it so easily that you don't realize it until the end. Rick is the washed-up star of a TV western, whose career has wound down to guest star appearances on other actor's westerns (in the career-killing role of villain), heavy drinking, and indulging in fits of crying. He's weak. Pitt is Cliff Booth, Rick's stunt double, the one who does all of the dangerous things and who—literally—takes no credit. Rick is so dependent on Cliff that he has hired him as driver and houseman, a role that should diminish Cliff in our eyes—1968's Kato Kaelin—but doesn't. Cliff is cool, funny, laconic and tough. His competence and emotional reserve make us more aware of Rick's weakness. So it's a depth charge of misgiving to learn that he's not welcome on some television sets. He brings a bad energy, apparently, because many people believe he killed his wife. It's an anvil dropping: Is he a threat? Did he do it? In the one flashback, the truth is never revealed. For most of the picture, we know we can't trust him, and Pitt plays with us throughout one moment charming, the next lost in something inward.

It's at the end of the movie, after he's redeemed tenfold, we realize who he was all along and why we couldn't help falling for him—a hero. Rick spent the movie trying to portray a hero; Cliff spent it being one—and like all heroes, he didn't spend any time bringing attention to the fact. The beautiful teenager who keeps trying to get him to give her a ride finally succeeds, but when she tries to seduce him, she doesn't have a chance. He spares her feeling by telling her that it's because she doesn't have a photo ID to prove she's over 18, but that's not the reason. He doesn't need "affirmative consent." He has a code: a man doesn't sleep with teenagers.

Cliff faces great danger at the Manson compound to make sure an elderly man of his slight acquaintance is safe. He doesn't start fights, but if he gets into one he'll lay out the challenger. His dog loves him, he doesn't like to see a man crying, and he's got his passions under control. One afternoon, he climbs to Rick's roof to fix his television antenna, a potent symbol of Rick's failing television career, but also one more reminder of their relationship: Rick's things are broken, and Cliff repairs them. In the bright sun, he takes off his shirt (Heaven help us) and then he hears music from the house next door. It's Tate, alone in her room. He glances over—does he see her? Maybe. But he's not a man who climbs on roofs for a peep show, and he turns back to his work. Most of all, he's loyal—even when Rick might not deserve that loyalty. In the end, he's Gary Cooper facing Frank Miller all by himself.

We can't have a movie like this. It affirms things the culture wants killed. If men aren't encouraged to cry in public, where will we end up? And the bottom line is the bottom line: Audiences don't want to see this kind of thing anymore. The audience wants the kind of movies the justice critics want. But the audience gave Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood the biggest opening of Tarantino's career. The critics may not get it, but the public does. Is Tarantino making a reactionary statement at a dangerous time? Or does the title tell the truth, that the whole thing—including those old masculine values—was always just fairytale, a world "that never really existed, but feels like a memory?"

In the sexiest scene in the movie, Cliff roars out of Rick's driveway up in the canyons in his rusted blue Kharman Gia, Bob Seger blaring,—"I was born lonely, down by the riverside"—taking mountain turns at impossible speeds, racing across the old LA freeways late at night, bound for Van Nuys and sliding across lanes with ultimate cool. But in a TMZ video clip, you see Pitt surrounded by a large crew trying to make the easiest part of the journey—the three-point turn out of Rick's driveway—at about five miles an hour and falling short every time, despite a closed road. Over and over the crew pushes the car back up the driveway, while Pitt sits in it miserably, much more Rick than Cliff.

What's real? Who knows? It's all Hollywood.

WorldForgot · August 01, 2019, 03:55:27 PM

Bob Richardson on the film's cinematography, and constant artistic self-doubt.

csage97 · August 01, 2019, 08:04:00 PM

Quote from: WorldForgot on August 01, 2019, 03:55:27 PM
Bob Richardson on the film's cinematography, and constant artistic self-doubt.

Thanks for posting this! I love info about cinematography, and I love Bob Richardson's work.

Tictacbk · August 02, 2019, 04:41:10 AM

Everyone should see this movie twice.

wilberfan · August 02, 2019, 11:27:42 AM

Couldn't resist sharing this. A couple of us in Row G at the Anima screening a few weeks ago hit it off and have been emailing a little since then. She sent me the following yesterday, regarding her having seen OUATIH (emphasis mine):

QuoteI thought it was long. I found myself about half way through wondering what the point was. And then I just started checking off the signature Tarantino elements. Lots of dialogue, heavy swearing, graphic violence. So it's a classic. People were leaving the theater in a steady stream around the 2 hour mark. It will win everything.

jenkins · August 02, 2019, 11:53:03 AM

it's gorgeous hearing things like that. thank you wilber

Alethia · August 02, 2019, 02:32:06 PM

Audiences have been very enthusiastic each time I've seen it, no walkouts that I've noticed, and these were not - from what I could tell - acolyte-heavy screenings either. How interesting.

Jeremy Blackman · August 02, 2019, 02:48:49 PM

Same. I saw it in a pretty full auditorium, and the movie seemed to be a real crowd-pleaser, especially when it picks up. Everyone laughed at the mid-credits scene.