Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novel

Written by Quentin Tarantino

Narrated by Jennifer Jason Leigh

Narrated by Jennifer Jason Leigh

Quentin Tarantino’s long-awaited first work of fiction — at once hilarious, delicious, and brutal — is the always surprising, sometimes shocking new novel based on his Academy Award- winning film.

RICK DALTON – Once he had his own TV series, but now Rick’s a washed-up villain-of-the week drowning his sorrows in whiskey sours. Will a phone call from Rome save his fate or seal it?

CLIFF BOOTH – Rick’s stunt double, and the most infamous man on any movie set because he’s the only one there who might have gotten away with murder. . . .

SHARON TATE – She left Texas to chase a movie-star dream, and found it. Sharon’s salad days are now spent on Cielo Drive, high in the Hollywood Hills.

CHARLES MANSON – The ex-con’s got a bunch of zonked-out hippies thinking he’s their spiritual leader, but he’d trade it all to be a rock ‘n’ roll star.

HOLLYWOOD 1969 – YOU SHOULDA BEEN THERE

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperAudio
• Release date: Jun 29, 2021
• ISBN: 9780063112544

Quentin Tarantino

Quentin Tarantino was born in 1963 in Knoxville, Tennessee. He is the writer-director of nine feature films, the winner of two Academy Awards for Best Original Screenplay, and the author of the novel Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Cinema Speculation is his first work of nonfiction.

Reviews for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

[wbkv54qkg4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Adds so much more to the story that the movie did not include!

[Barry Wilder · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Awesome dialogue with a unsatisfying ending. Overall very good book.

[RED ICE is an interesting site · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

The narration was great. One was constantly aware of Tarantino's leering adolescent mug. He wouldn't know a real novel if it bit him in the rear.

[john9hill-11 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

---Vague spoilers---

So.... No climax? I know that pretty much everyone who reads this will have seen the movie, but the end felt very abrupt and unsatisfying to me, and it left the book without a real climax.

It was great to get so much new backstory, but I was really looking forward to getting a deep dive into the aftermath of the movie. Yes, there was a little snippet of it toward the beginning, but I was hoping for a lot more.

[Frank Sellers · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Quentin Tarantino is a fantastic fiction writer, which should come as a surprise to no one, and Jennifer Jason Leigh does a great job narrating this version of Tarantino’s film. If you’ve never seen the movie, listen to this audiobook (or read the novel) first to get way more background info on the characters thanTarantino could have possibly put in the movie. There are also more characters here and it’s not an exact one-for-one with the movie, which makes it that much more interesting for those who’ve seen the film. Tarantino packs a lot of Hollywood lore in here, too, from juicy gossip to sad tributes to Tinseltown casualties of alcoholism and fallen stars.

[Anthony Jennaway · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Nice expansion of the film’s story lines and JJL is a terrific narrator.

[Andrew Yerkes · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

JJL’s narration great, who knew QT could pull off a novel? Great story set in a bygone monoculture, funny, soaked in pop culture, couldn’t stop listening.

[wb4ever1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I am a huge fan of Quentin Tarantino’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD. It just might be the best film of the past decade, and just about my favorite one, though QT is always an easy sell with me. So of course I was going to buy and read his novel based on the film. Tarantino has never actually written and published a book before, so for us fans it was a big deal. Was it worth the price? Did it live up to expectations? Is Tarantino as good of a storyteller on the printed page as he is on the movie screen? I think every fan may have a different answer, for this book is very much written for the fans. If you haven’t seen the movie, you are really going to be in over your head reading it. This book, like the film, is definitely not plot driven, we simply hang with a set of characters for a set period of time in the Hollywood of 1969, get to know them, and wait for the inevitable conclusion when a certain group of hippie killers collide with a has-been TV western star and his loyal stuntman friend. Only in the book, that ending of the film is just mentioned in passing about halfway, for this is not a straight screen to page novelization of the film, but mainly a companion piece to it where the author/director fills in some back stories, and elaborates on what was happening behind the scenes. In the book, we again meet up with Rick Dalton, the former star of Bounty Law, now reduced to guest spots on other actor’s shows and contemplating traveling to Italy and Spain to make spaghetti westerns for Sergio Corbucci, which Rick sees as the ultimate degradation, and Cliff Booth, a hero of WWII and veteran stuntman with some unsavory incidents in his past. We also spend some time with Sharon Tate, the beautiful starlet on the verge of major stardom, and married to the very hot director, thanks to Rosemary’s Baby, Roman Polanski. And lurking around is Charles Manson, the leader of a hippie “family” made up of cast off and runway kids, the epitome of the counter culture, who in reality, just badly wanted to be a rock star, if only the powers that be wouldn’t keep brushing him off. We learn a lot about Rick’s early days in TV westerns and how the industry worked in those days, and Cliff’s background is fleshed out, and the question of whether he murdered his wife is answered. We meet up with Sharon in a flashback that poignantly recounts her journey from Texas to Los Angeles to seek her fortune in the movie business, and later on her visit to the movie theater where the Matt Helm film where she was a featured player is playing. There are some interesting anecdotes on TV in the ‘60s told by Rick that is clearly Tarantino just riffing on the past, and the same with a section where Cliff muses on his favorite foreign films that is clearly the author speaking. There are long passages where the pilot script of the western TV series Lancer is gone into in great detail, which makes it sound much more dramatic and interesting than a show that came in on the tail end of the TV western fad in the late ‘60s and soon faded into obscurity. Lots of now obscure names are dropped, everybody from George Maharis to George Peppard to Ty Hardin to Kaz Garas, and if you haven’t heard of them, they were big deals for a very short time in Hollywood long ago. There was a section on the excessive drinking habits of some famous actors of the time that is interesting if true. Tarantino often touches on how fleeting fame is in a cruel business that uses talent and throws it away. This is made plain in a sad encounter Cliff has in Spain with the wreck that was once Aldo Ray. Fame, attention, adoration and the wealth and sex that came with it was the measure that everyone was judged against, and once you’d obtained it, you were never free of the fear of losing it. And if you felt it slipping away, you scrambled and grabbed at anything which would get it back. In 1969, guys who wore pompadours and were big deals when Kennedy was President, now had to put on hippie wigs and fake moustaches in order to try and fit in among the long hairs and denims of a new Hollywood. Though many readers have complained that parts of this book are indulgent, while other parts are just a wallow in a past that they know nothing about, I’m not among them. I totally dug the vibe of this book, and happily went along for the ride, trusting in where Tarantino was taking me. I like that Tarantino really has genuine affection for this time and place, and the people who made it so unique—the rising stars, the has-beens, and the never-weres. He doesn’t judge them, except for the truly evil Manson, he just asks us to take them as they were, and the stories their lives told. Other writers on this period would be quick to condemn the casual sexism, racism, homophobia, and “toxic masculinity,” of 1969, but Tarantino, never one to parade his virtue, lets the time and place speak for itself, and the reader take from it what they will. There’s a part of me that hopes he is not completely done with Rick and Cliff yet. Maybe a sequel that gives us a hint at what happened in the years ahead. Does the fame that would come after dispatching a gang of hippie killers lead Rick to a comeback? Does Cliff find a new career as a director of ‘70s action films? And I really liked it that the book was produced like a mass market paperback from the era, always thought it was a mistake for the publishing industry to get away from that model. Like 1969, one more thing that came and went, and is fondly remembered.

[azbob1951 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Today I finished reading Quentin Tarantino's book-post-the-movie 'Once Upon A Time in Hollywood.' I thought it was pretty good, giving it 4-Stars. I'm not certain how many readers who weren't both Baby Boomers and saw the movie would find it that interesting. It pretty much reprises everything in the flic. Some scenes are mentioned then skipped over, while some are quite a bit longer delving into what the character is thinking. If you're an actor, you'll really delight in reading the interactions between the 8 year old actor, Trudi and Rick Dalton. If you were old enough to have been raised on 1930's thru 70's TV and movies you'll delight in the stories (which I believe are facts) that Tarantino's characters recount. The book has quite a bit less stressful ending than the movie.

[polaris4_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Tarantino’s reimagined late ‘60s alternate reality/reality adjacent fiction debut reads as a strangely engrossing Hollywood criticism - pulp novel hybrid. This was the first time I read a ‘novelisation’ of a film, and I haven’t seen the film, but being a self-confessed past-obsessive of Bugliosi’s ‘Helter Skelter’, and the changing power dynamics in the ‘Hollyweird’ of Biskind’s superb ‘Easy Riders, Raging Bulls’; I felt reasonably prepared. QT introduces us to the world of almost washed up TV cowboy/action star Rick Dalton and his best (only?) buddy and intermittent stunt double Cliff Booth. Dalton’s neighbours on Cielo Drive, in LA’s Benedict Canyon are the lauded young auteur-director Roman Polanski and his new wife, rising star Sharon Tate. The rest isn’t ‘quite’ “history as we know it”, as the author plays fast and loose with what does or doesn’t happen, to these characters - seemingly at opposite ends of their career arcs. The richly depicted supporting cast of Tinseltown residents; the engagingly set scene of 1969 Los Angeles; the blurring of reality with the solid bedrock of Tarantino’s trivia-rich understanding of mid-century cinema; and the pop culture that surrounds it; makes for an evocative and highly compelling read. If you like that sort of thing. The book’s era-specific pulp packaging adds to the flavour of this particular period fantasy.

[hcnewton · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.---WHAT'S ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD About?This is novelization—and retooling (as I understand)—of Tarantino's 2019 movie. It follows two days (with typical Tarantino flashbacks and flashforwards for many of these characters) in the lives of a few people in 1969 Hollywood. A former TV star who had his shot at movie fame, and missed—he's now a traveling bad guy ("heavy") guest star on TV shows. His stunt double/gofer/driver, notorious for getting away with murder (and is somehow possibly the most sympathetic character. Also, Sharon Tate, Squeaky Fromme, and Charlie Manson.THE PACKAGINGI trust whoever put this book together got a nice bonus—or at least a good bonhomie slap on the back—it's so well done. The whole thing is a throwback—the cover style looks like a movie novelization from the 70s/early 80s, with stills from the film. Inside you get a lot of the full-page advertisements for novels (and novelizations) that were era-appropriate and common in the back of Mass Market Paperbacks at the time.It was a nice little treat.SO, WHAT DID I THINK ABOUT ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD?Eh...I'm not sure. I guess I should say that I didn't watch the film—outside of the writer/director—there was nothing about it that appealed to me. I only picked this up out of curiosity about Tarantino as a prose-writer. That colored my appreciation of the novel for sure. It's not surprising at all that a movie that didn't appeal to me resulted in a novel that left me unmoved.I'm glad I got to see what Tarantino was like as a novelist. I know what he's like as a screenplay writer and director. And this was different—but similar. Had this been anyone else writing, I'd have commented on how well they capture the Tarantino-vibe. There are so many (seemingly?) aimless stories shared by characters that can only come from him (or someone trying to rip him off).There's also this nice recurring thing where a story is being told—characters introduced, etc.—that turns out to be the characters and story of the pilot episode that the has-been actor is shooting. Sort of a novelization within a novelization. That was neat—and there's so much more going on in that story and with those characters than is possible for a 1969 TV Western, that I give myself a little slackBut as for the novel itself? Eh, I don't know. I guess I think I understand the point—I just don't see where they were stories that need to be told. It wasn't a bad novel, and I don't resent the time I spent reading it (as I frequently do with books that don't work for me)—and I enjoyed bits of it quite a lot. But I've got nothing to say good or ill about it. Put this down as the most tepid of 3 stars.

[invisiblelizard · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

As a fan of the movie, in fact a fan of all of Tarantino's movies, I was (not surprisingly) very excited at the idea of reading his own novelization. I've read a number of movie novelizations in my day, particularly back in the 80's when it was more popular. Before the advent of the home video collection, if a movie's fan wanted to revisit the film they loved so much, they would buy the book and read and re-read to their heart's content. These were typically written on assignment by a known (but not too popular) author. Alan Dean Foster comes to mind as someone who probably made a pretty good living writing movie novelizations.So when Tarantino decided to write his own, it was with a bit of perplexed curiosity that I approached the novel. As this is typically farmed out to someone completely separate and independent of the original film, obviously this project started off from a different footing. The big question I asked myself was, why? Why was he writing this?The answer came across loud and clear in the 400+ pages of this little book: He had more of this story he wanted to tell. Characters in the movie get fleshed out with much more depth in this novel. We get backstory and inner monologues (the use of the omniscient narrator is in full use here as we often get to hear thoughts from every character in a scene). He also wanted to dish out his thoughts on Hollywood from the 50's and 60's, and man-oh-man does he have a lot of thoughts. If you removed all of the rambling discourse on this subject, the book would easily be 2/3rds its size. In fact, that's my only gripe, here. I'm sure QT would be highly qualified to write a non-fiction book about the evolution of television and movie properties during these decades (and, I'm sure, easily traveling forward into the 70's and beyond) and perhaps he should do that, but to blend it into the middle of a "novel" like this detracted from the story and these characters. Not that it wasn't interesting, just that I wanted to know what my characters were doing, not the presumed motivations behind the casting of dozens of shows and movies that I'd never heard of.Also, I suspect, Tarantino wanted a chance to revisit the now-infamous Bruce Lee scene from the movie. If you haven't seen it, the stuntman character of Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt, easily defeats Bruce Lee in fight and shows Bruce to be an over-hyped egomaniac. Whether this is historically accurate or not is irrelevant: this is how Tarantino depicted him in this film. Lee's daughter very publicly slammed both Tarantino and this movie when it came out and made quite a bit of noise about it, garnering some notable online attention. In reading this scene with the aforementioned inner monologues and motivations revealed to us, it felt like Quentin was toning down his rhetoric and softening the blow. I doubt this was the sole reason he wrote this book, but it was certainly part of it. That's for sure.Beyond all of that, it's actually a very good book. If the movie had never been made, this would have been a great read. However, because the movie came first, this book's deviations from the film were highly detracting. For instance, the grand climax of the film never takes place in this book. It's only mentioned in passing in chapter 7, about a quarter of the way through the book. The book takes place over a 2 day period while Rick is filming scenes for a TV pilot, which is shown in the movie. That climax would have taken place months later. Tarantino throws that entire scene out there in a couple paragraphs where he fast forwards through Rick's (the main character) entire career before coming back to the "present" and resuming the story. For those hoping the book would end similar to the film, better luck next time. But if this had been a standalone book, the story of Rick (primarily) and hist stuntman Cliff (secondarily) was laid out in a much better fashion than the movie, which needed some extra action sequences to keep it from being too bland of a drama for what audiences would have expected from Quentin Tarantino.If this had been a standalone book, not a movie first, and if it had not included probably 100 pages of mostly irrelevant discussion about this history of Hollywood in the 50's and 60's, I would have given this 5 stars. As it is, 4 stars ain't bad.Also, one final thing which struck me as odd, Tarantino writes this in the present tense, and when he show scenes from the past (back story) he wrote them in the past tense, which is fine, lots of authors do this. But when he includes future stories (like in chapter 7 when he fast forwards and talks about what happens to Rick's career after the flame thrower incident) he also writes those in the past tense. It's as if his rule was: present tense for the 2 days during which the book actually takes place, and past tense for any other time periods. Curious choice. I kind of agree that writing all of those fast forwarded future scenes in the future tense would have been awkward. "The next day, Rick's adventures hit the news, and it became the talk of the town," is how it reads now, even though this scene takes place 7 months in the future. To have that read: "The following day, Rick's adventures will hit the news, and it will become the talk of the town," well that's fine for a single line, but several paragraphs work could be difficult for a reader to follow. I don't know. I'm still mulling over this choice. Still feels odd to me.

[breic-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Really fun. Slightly overgrown (but never too much). I flew through it.

[adonisguilfoyle · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

I enjoyed the 2019 film, which introduced me to the real lives of Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring. The novelisation, even when written by Tarantino himself, I could honestly have lived without. Less is more, which the director-author seems to have forgotten. Cliff, played by Brad Pitt on screen - which don't impress me much - is a laidback charmer with an ambiguous past. Here, Tarantino removes all the ambiguity and turns the stuntman into a macho moron who did kill his wife and various other people besides, uses and abuses women, put his beloved Brandy through the ordeal of vicious dog fights to get back money he is owed, and peppers his dialogue with racist slurs. Vast improvement, thanks QT!I really only wanted to read the novelisation for 'extended' scenes with Sharon and Jay, which we sort of get, but even without repeating key scenes from the film, I'm not sure this exercise in self-promotion really adds to what we see onscreen. Apart from making me hate Cliff. The mileage of male readers may vary.Plateauing at 3 stars for the cute pulp novel packaging complete with ads for other books in the back.

[bobbybslax · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Conceptually complicated. A novelization of a movie on its own is simple, but when done by a writer-director of that movie in his reverent postmodern way it adds another layer. This one gave himself and his step-dad a shoutout through his characters. If you like the movie, this works as a good companion piece. It’s a novelization after all. But it’s not just the script with perfunctory prose added around. It’s got that Tarantino Narrator voice to it. It’s not amazing prose, but it’s functional, and it’s definitely got his style to it—a lot of the Lancer-focused chapters serve very little purpose and explain details in several pages that are ultimately too simple to need all that space, but the man likes to take his time. He also expands a lot, and even changes around a few things. Not only does it provide “extended” versions of scenes from the film, but it also provides extra details on what happens to the main characters long after the story’s end, and it switches small things like point of view or setting to great effect. I especially appreciated the expansion of the precocious child actor Trudi, whose presence alongside Rick adds a further layer of likability to the story. Meanwhile, Cliff’s expanded awfulness left a worse impression. On the whole, the story is approached in an entirely different light, so it’s worth a look. (less)

[etxgardener · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I have not devoured a book in a long time, but Tarantino’s novelization of his movie of the same name (without the ellipsis) is a totally fin read not only for people who liked his movie, but also people who love movie lore. In this book Tarantino fills in the backstories of his main characters (like how Cliff killed his wife) and also to his asides on Hollywood really worked back in the 1950’s and ‘60’s. And with a nod to another of his films, this book was released as a mass market paperback. It’s total summer reading fun.