done this last 10 years.”
Still, a lot remains. A huge, juicy slab of storytelling, shot
on 35mm film, chronicling a few days that went down 50 years
ago, back in 1969. The 45 minutes of footage that Tarantino
proceeds to unveil, him sitting behind us frequently hooting
with laughter at what’s going on up on the screen, is thrilling,
ambitious and, yes, funny. There are things you would
expect: fantastic music, shots of young women’s feet, big
stars delivering crackerjack dialogue.
And then there are three lead characters who aren’t what
you expect at all.
Get ready to meet Rick, Cliff and Sharon.
ON’T CONDESCEND ME, MAN. I’ll fucking kill
you, man,” says Leonardo DiCaprio, eyeballing Brad
Pitt and gripping a vape pen. Sitting beside him on a
sofa in the Four Seasons Beverly Hills, Pitt arches his
eyebrows in surprise. Sadly for any paparazzi who may
be hiding nearby, this isn’t the beginnings of an A-list rumble
for the ages. DiCaprio is actually showing off a hitherto
unknown knowledge of the details of True Romance, specifically
the zonked-out performance of Pitt as stoner Floyd. While the
two stars have had “run-ins” (DiCaprio’s word) over the years,
they have largely admired each other’s work from afar. “We’ve
grown up in the same ecosystem,” says Pitt. “We came up in the
same time period. I guess there’s just a natural magnetism.”
They just never quite crossed paths professionally, though there
were close calls, like the fact they both guest-starred on the same
late-’80s family sitcom, Growing Pains.
“I was, like, the cute little blond kid that was in the
closet, just there to flirt with girls and do some stuff,” explains
DiCaprio. “I think Hilary Swank was there too. Did you
know that?”
“No. I didn’t know that,” replies Pitt. “I played two guys.
I don’t remember the second, but one was a rock star who was
the idol of the younger son and of course shattered his dreams.”
“You were a jerk?” DiCaprio asks.
“Oh, I was an asshole.”
It’s taken Tarantino (who, incidentally, has not seen those
episodes of Growing Pains; even his pop-culture omniscience
has limits) to put them together. He of course wrote Floyd’s
dialogue for True Romance (he and Pitt met for the first time
at the premiere; “Both of us had had three too many, but we
just had a laugh,” the actor recalls), then cast Pitt as Nazi-
scalping hillbilly Aldo Raine in Inglourious Basterds. DiCaprio,
meanwhile, played highly strung cotton king Calvin Candie
in Django Unchained. Now, with Once Upon A Time In...
Hollywood, they’re finally a double-act.
The two characters, actor Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) and
his stunt double Cliff Booth (Pitt), arrived in Tarantino’s brain
at roughly the same time. “I was interested in the concept
of a guy who had a hit show from a decade ago, who failed to
pull off the transition from TV to movies,” the director says
of Rick. “He’s very much in the same boat as George Maharis
and Edd Byrnes, Ty Hardin, a lot of guys like that. Who
spent their whole careers running pocket combs through their
pompadours. Being a likeable, masculine leading man was
what it was all about. And then all of a sudden they blink and
now the leading men are shaggy-haired, androgynous types.
Usually the hippy sons of famous people, such as Peter Fonda
or Michael Douglas.”
Tarantino is fascinated by the transformations that occurred
at the end of the 1960s. As America in general was rocked by
change, traditional Hollywood faltered and New Hollywood —
young filmmakers making dark, visceral films influenced by