THE DELUXE EDITION FEATURING NEW PHOTOS AND BONUS MATERIAL
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.
The sunlit studio back lots and the dark watering holes of Hollywood are the
setting for this audacious, hilarious, disturbing novel about life in the movie
colony, circa 1969.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood tells the story of washed-up actor Rick Dalton.
Once Rick had his own television series, a famous western called “Bounty
Law.” But “it ain't been that time in a long time” and now Rick's only
regular parts are as the heavy, ready to be bested by whichever young
“swingin' dick” the networks want to make a new star out of come pilot
season. When a talent agent approaches Rick about starring in Italian Westerns
(“Eye-talian Westerns”?), it only ignites a new crisis of confidence for the
perpetually insecure actor.
And then there's Rick's stunt double, Cliff Booth, a war hero who killed more Japanese soldiers during the Second World War than any other American, and who never thought he'd make it back home. If Rick's career has stalled, Cliff's has flamed out. Already living under a cloud of suspicion after the strange death of his wife at sea, Cliff makes the mistake of picking the wrong fight on set, and is soon reduced to the status of Rick's full-time gofer.
Right next door to Rick's still glamourous Benedict Canyon home (“the
house that Bounty Law built”) some Hollywood dreams are coming true, and these
dreams belong to Sharon Tate. Not only is she Mrs. Roman Polanski – married
to the only true rock star director – but Sharon is fast becoming a star in
her own right, living life on the upswing in a tough town.
Only a few miles away, in the desert around Chatsworth, lives a different kind
of dreamer. Charles Manson is an ex-con who has spellbound a group of hippie
misfits living with him in squalor on an old “movie ranch.” Little do his
young followers know to what degree Charlie himself is an industry striver, more
desperate for Columbia Records and Tapes's attentions than for the revolution
he preaches.
These indelible characters – and many more: an acting child prodigy beaming with hope; a booze-drenched former A-lister who's lost it all – occupy a vanished world from not so long ago that is brought to brilliant life in these pages. Here is 1969, the music, the cars, the movies and TV shows. And here is Hollywood, both the fairy tale and the real thing, as given to us by a mast