Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novel

Quentin Tarantino has made a novel from the screenplay of his Oscar winning movie ‘Once Upon A Time In Hollywood’ and it is, frankly, wonderful. It is such a good book everyone interested in film and cinema should buy it and read it. If I could give it 6 stars, I would. Novelisation has fallen out of fashion but what QT has done is a tad different: in the book-of-the-film we are showing the extensive back stories of the principal characters which Tarantino had already written before filming, like any good novelist would do *and* he gives a number of ‘lectures’ on the history of film. And you might think that ‘lecture’ would mean dull, plodding exposition and you’d be wrong. It is a total delight, erudite and profoundly understood (he probably wrote most of it from memory because he really is Mastermind Champion on movies, especially westerns). Since devouring this book I’ve found a YouTube interview between QT and a US television news channel; in it he lets the world know three things: 1 he intends to do more novels based on his screenplays (I can’t wait to read Inglorius Basterds – the novel) 2 he’s written a stage play but won’t say what about – given his terrific dialogue writing skills that’s going to be one to watch 3 his movie-making career is likely to come to an end – he’s always said he’ll only make ten pictures and OUATIH was his ninth – afterwards he intends to become ‘a man of letters (his own words). The novel of OUATIH is covers the same general ground as the movie but with many extensions and expansions, and the scenes in a different order. Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) the stunt double for fading actor Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) gets the lion’s share of the novel and develops into a fascinating character study. Buy it.

Always suspected Quentin was a novelist who happened to write screenplays, mainly because like most great novelists his screenplays are happy to let their dialogs between characters tell the story, unhuried, with the impression you're actually hanging out with these people rather than having a forced narrative guiding you to the next scene, it's a more natural organic way of storytelling in my book. In his book? a chance to flesh out his people ,an extra dimension to his characters we "Thought" we knew and loved, it's a perfect medium for what seems his natural storytelling, in short, a great book by someone who knows these characters inside out, Quentin takes us on a drive through of both the film industry and the gossip that follows it like suckerfish feeding on a great white, Quentin captures all the ups the downs of the Hollywood machine of the late 60's early 70's , the downward spiral, the up and coming starlets and the working stiffs of its period, and captures it within that ever turning imagination of his. To put it Simply If you enjoyed the movie, then you'll love the book, Tarantino given the chance to let his overactive imagination run wild and without edit is a journey I'm glad to have experienced and I for one, hope it isn't his last , because if he indeed, decides to finish his film career with one more movie, my suspicion is the man will need an outlet for the characters in his head and going by this book novelization this is a perfect outlet for them.

Tarantino can write beautiful, perfect scripts. His films (for the most part) are borderline genius and he will forever be considered as one of "the greats" even if you aren't a fan of the films yourself. He has worked his way up from the bottom and made most actors want to work with him. Unfortunately, he is not a novelist. The sentences are clunky in places, to the point of being distracting and I just could not get on with the "present day tense" he utilised. "Rick walks into the room." "Marvin answers his phone." It's like he has taken the directions from the script and thrown it into this book and just called it a novel. Give it a go if you want but, this was not for me at all and if present tense would bother you (in quite a thick book with small font) then you might want to swerve it. A shame.

The first work of written fiction by Quentin Tarantino is, to all intents and purposes, a novelisation of his movie “Once Upon A Time…In Hollywood”. And, thank the Gods, it is exactly what you would expect a Tarantino movie to be like…but in word form. The physical appearance of the book is important - it is meant to resemble a 1970s-era mass-market paperback, the sort of cheap book you used to find in an American supermarket (and possibly still do for all I know). It looks and feels like a cheap book - which is what it’s meant to be. Pulp fiction, to coin a phrase. For those who have seen it, the book version of a washed-up TV star differs from the film in several ways, which I won’t spoil, but there is a new, terrifying scene involving one of Charles Manson’s cronies. Elsewhere, QT digs deep into Manson’s failed but weirdly promising music career and stuntman Cliff Booth’s backstory is filled in. Also, Tarantino indulges himself with excellent passages about acting, B movies, sex scenes in films, foreign movies etc. You can tell he enjoyed writing this book. Tarantino is not out to impress us with the intricacy of his sentences or the nuance of his psychological insights - he is not out to endear himself to Guardian readers. This is grossly funny and often violent book, and Tarantino writes (and films) some of the best/worst violence out there. It is sophisticated but rough. If he’d written it better, he’d have written it worse. It’s a mass-market paperback that reeks of mass-market paperbacks, and is all the better for it. Better than the film? Possibly. It certainly doesn’t defame it by existing. It expands the story in a way that does it visceral justice. Tarantino has defied expectations (mine included) by writing a page-turner that is brutally titillating, shockingly salacious and quite, quite brilliant.

If you're a fan of the film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, this book will not change your opinion of that movie, but it will help you understand the minds of the main characters and even where they end up a few years after the events of the movie. Tarantino has written a book which expands on the story presented in OUATIH, but it also tells you about every director, film and product that surrounds our main characters. This book is at times like a drinking session with Quentin as he raves about everything he's obsessed with. His almost autistic love of the movie industry and the smallest details about the 1960's pour out of every page. Some of it seems unnecessary, but you can feel Tarantino's passion seeping through. I would never have known that Cliff Booth was a prisoner of the Japanese during World War 2, and that he's also obsessed with Akira Kurosawa if I didn't read this book. Full disclosure, I'm not completely done with the book, but I do find it engaging so far. I would prefer the four hour extended cut of OUATIH that Tarantino has talked about doing over this novel, but this is a nice way to revisit this world and these characters for now. I do appreciate the fact that Tarantino makes this book different enough that I never got bored, or felt I was just reading a slightly different version of his movie. If you didn't like Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, this book probably won't change that, but if you're a fan (like me) this really does expand on the characters, and it lets you into their world with greater detail and many side stories that the movie never got near.