In 2019 Quentin Tarantino's film Once Upon A Time In Hollywood was released, and in 2021 Tarantino's novelization of his own film released, his debut novel.
It's good. It's basically just like the film, but more. More back story, more inner thoughts, more clarity on a few situations left vague in the film, more Manson cultists, more Sharon Tate, more Hollywood talk. A lot more Hollywood talk. Way more explaining the plot and backstory of Lancer (the show-within-the-movie/book that the main character of the film/book, Rick Dalton (Leo DiCaprio in the film), is guest-starring in the pilot episode of), as well as basically everyone connected to it, let alone everyone connected to just about everything.
This is... good. If you liked the movie, you will probably appreciate a lot of this.
There is just a lot of it. Like... a lot. By two thirds of the way through the book I was starting to get a little tired of the multiple digressions into the career of some 60s actor I didn't and still don't care much about. Sure, some of these digressions are interesting, some help set the scene, some help establish character. All of them are Tarantino geeking out about something he's passionate about. BUT at a certain point you have to stop and ask yourself "How much do I really want or need to know about James Stacy to understand what Lancer is about? And how much of this extra Lancer backstory is all that necessary for anything that this book is or is about?"
A lot of this extra info is factual, real life history (or at least really stories that have been told as if true) about real people who worked in Hollywood at the time of the book. There are obvious fictional elements, notably any time Rick Dalton is mentioned or connected to someone, as he is a fictional person, though the people he mentions and interacts with are mostly all real (exception to this is the other main character of the film and book, Cliff Booth, portrayed by Brad Pitt in the film), though some of the movies mentioned aren't (specifically the one starring Dalton), and obviously the real life Paul Wendkos couldn't have known and liked the fictional Rick Dalton.
On that note, the Lancer of Tarantino's imagination is a bit different from the actual Lancer show as it exists in our universe. I can say this definitively because I have actually seen the Lancer pilot episode, the one our fictional Rick Dalton guest stars in (and though his character is slightly revised in Tarantino's imagination, including the character's name, the character is mostly pretty true to what was on screen in our reality, down to looking like he could be played by someone who looked like DiCaprio). For a late 60s TV Western, I thought it was a decent watch. I mean, I'm not actually all that versed in that genre, but considering I was watching that genre from that time period with modern eyes, I thought it was fine. And, even if I think the changes Tarantino made for the film and book would have also been good (and more to the point, served the narrative he was telling), the fact that he goes over pages and pages and pages of backstory and explanation does kinda drag the pacing.
Tarantino also makes a couple weird choices. The book is structurally non-linear, allowing him to weave in and out of various digressions at will. This mostly works, but it makes for a fundamentally wild change to the ending of the book vs the movie.
Anyone who has seen the movie will definitely remember the fiery conclusion. I wouldn't want to ruin the film for any who might watch it and hasn't, so if that's you, then honestly go watch it first, then come back here.
If you're still here, let me just say the film does a great job at building tension, but then allowing the bulk of that tension to dissipate (intentionally so). As a consequence, the viewer begins to wonder if Tarantino has decided to, for once, make a film that doesn't feature explicit violence?
But at the same time, anyone who knows anything about Charles Manson's "Family," who feature prominently in the film/book, and the fate of Sharon Tate, knows that in our reality these plot-lines merge in a terribly violent, horrible tragedy. And so while a lot of the film's immediate tension is released with little fan-fare, there is an undercurrent of tension building up, particularly in any scene featuring Tate or the Manson family.
And thus, in the film Tarantino indulges in that hyper-real hyper-violent fantasy. The murderous hippies, who in reality invaded the home of Sharon Tate and Roman Polanski and brutally murdered the pregnant Tate, in the film and book they are nudged off that path and instead invade the home of Rick Dalton while his stuntman and friend Cliff Booth is there, who in addition to being a stuntman is a former war hero, former PoW, and man who has gotten away with murder. And the explosion of extreme violence is the release of the tension. The existence and relevance of a flamethrower is brought up before, almost in passing, and boy howdy does that Chekov's "gun" go off. It is a brutally violent yet extremely satisfying hyper-violent catharsis. With this alternate history we get to indulge in the fantasy of Tate surviving, of her never even really being in danger as the Manson cult never actually invades her home. It is revenge, almost. It is Tarantino wishing that something could have happened differently. Its him making up just the right people to fit into the world at that time who could have stopped the Tate murders.
In the book, though, that catharsis doesn't really happen. What is the final sequence in the film is given to us as essentially an aside, way earlier in the book, somewhere between the first quarter and first third. It is mentioned that the Manson-following hippies invaded Rick Dalton's home and that he and Cliff defended themselves, and thus we know the Tate murder was prevented. But we don't really see it happen on the page. We don't really get the explosive catharsis. More words are spent on the aftermath and how it re-vitalized Dalton's popularity, than on what was in the film the climax, the peak of the tension getting released.
I assumed, especially as Tarantino repeats himself about a couple other things (mostly Lancer stuff), that we'd get the scene in more detail at the end. But it doesn't happen.
And so while the film seems to be about A) A loving send-up to 1969 Hollywood and B) A fantasy revenge for a senseless and horrible tragedy, I'm left wondering what the book is actually about when that B is so subdued as to barely exist.
Yes, it is still a good read, I would suggest it if you liked the movie and like to read. It's just that the focus feels a little off from what you might have previously expected. Tarantino loves old Hollywood, that much is clear. He may be one of the world's most well known filmmakers, but in his own mind he's more of a film fanatic than even that, and that has never been more clear than in this book. It's a love letter to that era of Hollywood as much as it is, in a sense, fan fiction of Tarantino's own works.
The ending is not a huge culmination of all the storylines, it isn't the high point climax that the film gets. It does, in a sense, fit the book's more slow burn, meandering style and tone better. It ends on a positive note for Rick Dalton, it has hope for him, and by extension for all of Hollywood. And in a sense that's more what the book is about. In the book, Sharon Tate's survival is, instead of a climax and catharsis, just one piece of the puzzle that is a vision of a still mostly pretty true to life but slightly more hopeful Hollywood.
And yet the book is still clear that Hollywood was full of boozers, cheaters, egos, literal murderers (and in one of the main characters, even), and all sorts of scandals. So yes, stopping the Manson family before they would do their worst would have been a great thing, but does the rest of Hollywood deserve the redemption that is implied?
