Quentin Tarantino’s first novel is an adaptation of his own film “Once upon a time in Hollywood “. The star director took over the title, added a few details to the story, shortened in places. Murder, blood, machos – a somewhat nostalgic look at the film industry of the sixties.
Imagine a time when it wasn’t easy for everyone to watch movies in their own home; a time in which video recorders and DVD players, and certainly not Amazon Prime, Netflix and other providers, were to be thought of. If you wanted to bring the cinema into your living room at that time, as it is often hot today, you only had one option: You bought adaptations of the novel, novel versions of the film. Many film buffs today rightly look back with nostalgia at this time when the cinema was the cinema, the living room, the living room and the film was an event. One of these cineastes is the star director Quentin Tarantino, who became famous with films like “Pulp Fiction”, “Kill Bill” or Django Unchained “. With his novel” Once Upon a Time in Hollywood “Tarantino has the format of”Novelization “, the English term for the adaptation of the novel, was brought back to life. The template for this was provided by his own film “Once upon a time in Hollywood “, the title of which echoes the nostalgia of the good old days of cinema.
Musing in Hollywood
In Hollywood in the 1969s, we meet actor Rick Dalton, whose career is just beginning to crumble. At his side appears his stuntman Cliff Booth, who now only works as Rick’s chauffeur, it is rumored that he killed several people. What remains unresolved in the film is narrated more broadly in the novel. There’s a scene in which Cliff breaks the neck of a certain Buster, kills him, and watches television next to his corpse. For a few hours.
In general, we always have to deal with people who provide us with a multitude of details, ponder for pages about their encounters and experiences in show business, only to then disappear again. You can clearly see here that Tarantino has an immense desire to draw from his 30 years of film experience. The stories are there, you just need the characters who think or can tell them. And after they have fulfilled their quota, they are dropped and disappear on the edge of the story of Rick and Cliff.
It was precisely this telling of a subject that was important to Tarantino from the start. Do not force an already existing material into the length of a feature film, but go in the opposite direction, lavish and lavish. On a podcast he said it was his intention “the unwieldy version of the film “. He succeeded.
The Manson Family weakened a little
The main characters are also given more history in the novel. This is especially true for Cliff, who taciturns and seems to roam the spheres of the film business next to the former western film star Rick. Of course, if you’ve already seen the film, the faces of Pratt and Pitt are always floating Leonardo DiCaprio in mind, which makes decorating the figures not necessarily easier, but absolutely necessary. The different characters are most convincing when they enter into dialogue. This is hardly surprising, because this is where Tarantino can best fall back on his years of experience as a screenwriter.
What plays a much smaller role in the novel, however, is the story of the Manson Family and the murder of Roman Polanski’s wife Sharon Tate. In the film this motif provided wonderful scenes, in the book the Manson story casually ripples along.
Turning away from film?
Finally, Quentin Tarantino delivers with “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” an entertaining but entertaining book, which provides interesting insights into the film industry of the sixties. The characters themselves look a bit pale in the shadow of their actors; although it must be said that it would be an almost impossible task to make them appear congenial in the book.
The greatest thing about Tarantino’s book is the fact that you immediately get the pressure to read your basic motivation, the enormous passion for cinema, on every page. No, this great director will not become a great novelist, that seems hardly conceivable in the 21st century, in which, not least, the film has recorded at shimmering speed. The fact that Tarantino’s next film will also be his last, before he says he wants to devote himself entirely to writing books, shows that this director knows very well about the power of different media. Because the media surplus, the buzzing floods of information, the increasingly aggressive advertising, the BILD blood terror videos etc, etc, primarily attack the film landscape in which Quentin Tarantino feels at home. Blood, murder, Hollywood folklore, all of this has long been sad everyday life on all platforms.
Quentin Tarantino: “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood”; Kiepenheuer & Witsch, 2021, 410 pages, 25 euros
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