MovieChat Forums > Psycho (1960) Discussion > OT: QT on Bill Maher, Kimmel, etc

OT: QT on Bill Maher, Kimmel, etc

posted 3 years ago by swanstep (2619)
48 replies | jump to latest

QT has been out on several talk shows this week (clips available on youtube if you search on the obvious terms) promoting his new, paperback-novel version of Once Upon a Time In Hollywood. On Kimmel about the only points of note were that QT saluted Israel's covid performance (he lives in Tel Aviv for the most part these days) as 'world best' [Israel has about 600 per million death rates so far, about the same as Canada. That's 1/3 of the death rates in US, UK, Brazil and other pretty hapless countries but is miles away from world-best.], and he mentioned in passing that Jaws 'may be the greatest movie ever made'.

On Bill Maher things were more interesting. Maher chastised him for committing to make only one more movie, and QT squirmed a bit in response. Then they began discussing the current climate of culture and film production as being shadowed by ideology/virtue-signalling/political correctness/etc.. QT suggested that nowadays is just the new '80s (which itself was just the new '50s) when a certain sort of conformity of thought (and film financing) smothered the sort of culture that QT likes. QT went on to paint a simplified history of Hollywood: '40's and noir films good; '50s conformity and sentimentality and censorship bad; 1960-1966 is 'the '50s part 2'; 1967-1979 the real sixties and New Hollywood arrives and everything's wild and great; 1980s is awful corporatization and political correctness; '90s is the new '70s when QT himself saves the day; and by now we're back to the '80s model which is horrible.

This simple periodization irritated me. For one thing, I see noir and other code-skirting continuing and intensifying throughout the '50s and leaking into Westerns, general dramas, etc.. Great edgy films occur throughout the '50s and early '60s, and QT's own films show lots of their influence. E.g.,The Killing and Kiss Me Deadly were all over both Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. And most of the naturalistic acting styles that people QTs films just *were* built up through the period that QT here pooh-poohs. Without Brando, Clift, Caroll Baker, et al., you don't get Sweet Smell, Face in the Crowd, Touch of Evil, Wrong Man, Psycho by the end of the '50s, let alone the Pacino/De Niro '70s.

Anyhow, QT is entertaining and worth checking out even if what he's saying is his usual mixed bag.

[–] swanstep (2619) 3 years ago

The NY Times's review of the OUATIH novelization:

Quentin Tarantino Turns His Most Recent Movie Into a Pulpy Page-Turner

By Dwight Garner

June 28, 2021

Quentin Tarantino’s first novel is, to borrow a phrase from his oeuvre, a tasty beverage.

It’s his novelization of his own 2019 film “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” (the book’s title omits the ellipsis). It’s been issued in the format of a 1970s-era mass-market paperback, the sort of book you used to find spinning in a drugstore rack.

It’s got a retro-tacky tagline: “Hollywood 1969 … You shoulda been there!” If it weren’t so plump, at 400 pages, you could slip it into the back pocket of your flared corduroys.

Tarantino isn’t trying to play here what another novelist/screenwriter, Terry Southern, liked to call the Quality Lit Game. He’s not out to impress us with the intricacy of his sentences or the nuance of his psychological insights.

He’s here to tell a story, in take-it-or-leave-it Elmore Leonard fashion, and to make room along the way to talk about some of the things he cares about — old movies, male camaraderie, revenge and redemption, music and style. He gets it: Pop culture is what America has instead of mythology. He got bitten early by this notion, and he’s stayed bitten.

The novel is loose-jointed. If it were written better, it’d be written worse. It’s a mass-market paperback that reeks of mass-market paperbacks. In my memory, it’s the smell of warm coconut oil and dust mites and puddling Mercurochrome.

“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” runs along the same tracks as the film. Some dialogue is similar, just about word for word. But the novel departs from the movie in ways small and large.

[–] swanstep (2619) 3 years ago

(cont.) The movie’s Grand Guignol ending, for example, which culminates with the aging actor Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) torching a member of the Manson family with a flamethrower, is dispensed with, early in the novel, in a few sentences.

The killings make Rick, whom we discover is bipolar, famous. He hated hippies anyway. Now he becomes “a folkloric hero of Nixon’s ‘silent majority’” and a regular on “The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson.” Yet, from his acting career, he remembers every misstep, every mortification, every slight.

New Manson family scenes are tucked in. Tarantino goes so deep into Manson’s once-promising music career, you may feel you’re reading a back issue of Rolling Stone or Mojo magazine. He considers Charlie’s “ooga-booga” dances.

He adds a long, sinister and cinematic scene in which Pussycat (Margaret Qualley in the film) enters a strange house, removes her clothes, inserts a red light bulb into her mouth so that her lips are “wrapping around the silver metal coil” and climbs toward the bedroom of a sleeping elderly couple.

Once up there, Pussycat screws the red bulb into a lamp, turns it on and leaps screaming into the couple’s bed, scaring them witless. The Mansons referred to these sorts of “benign” outings as “creepy crawling.”

“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is, at heart, Cliff Booth’s novel. Booth (Brad Pitt in the film) is Dalton’s gofer and stunt double. His back story gets filled in. In World War II, we learn, he killed more Japanese than any other American soldier, and earned the Medal of Valor twice.

He’s filled with macho advice, which he casually dispenses. If you want to know what killing a man feels like, without actually killing a man, Booth tells Dalton, grab a pig from behind and stick a knife into its throat. Then hold on tight until it dies. It’s as close as you can legally get.

[–] swanstep (2619) 3 years ago

(cont.)Yet Booth has a sensitive side. He’s a movie obsessive. A lot of his opinions resemble Tarantino’s own. There’s good writing here about acting, about foreign films, about B movies, about early movie sex scenes and about television action directors.

Booth is a fan of the actor Alan Ladd, for example, because: “When Ladd got mad in a movie, he didn’t act mad. He just got sore, like a real fella. As far as Cliff was concerned, Alan Ladd was the only guy in movies who knew how to comb his hair, wear a hat or smoke a cigarette.”

Some of these opinions sound perhaps too much like Tarantino’s own: “Once Fellini decided life was a circus, Cliff said arrivederci.” There’s a list of Cliff’s favorite Akira Kurosawa films. About the cinematography in the 1967 Swedish film “I Am Curious (Yellow)”: “Cliff wanted to lick the screen.”

We discover how Dalton and Booth became friends. Booth saved him from an on-set fire, telling him: “Rick, you’re standing in a puddle of water. Just fall down.” We learn how Booth got his pit bull, a star of the movie. He was given the dog, a champion fighter, to pay off a debt. Booth tags along on some of the fights.

In the movie, Booth refuses to let the dog eat until he takes the first bite of his own dinner: macaroni and cheese from a box. About that dish, Tarantino writes: “The directions say to add milk and butter, but Cliff thinks if you can afford to add milk and butter you can afford to eat something else.”

Oh, and Booth did kill his wife. In the film, that plot point is left hanging and has been much debated. Tarantino, happily, doesn’t care if you find Cliff to be lovable.

[–] swanstep (2619) 3 years ago

(cont.)The murder scene is absurdist in its excess, of course. Tarantino rarely lets a killing go to waste. Violence is the wax his skis ride on. He knows how to fill the screen’s rectangle — or a page in a pulp novel.

The couple are on a boat. Tired of being belittled, Booth impulsively shoots his bikini-wearing wife with a spear gun, which essentially tears her in half. He regrets this immediately. He holds the two parts of her together for seven hours while they lovingly recount their whole relationship. When the Coast Guard arrives and tries to move her, she comes apart and dies.

If I longed at that moment for her — her top half, that is — to slowly hoist an enormous handgun and shoot the disbelieving Cliff in his bronze forehead, well, that’s a different novel.

[–] ecarle (14979) 3 years ago

QT has emerged from coronavirus "celebrity lockdown" to pick up where he left off -- pushing this plan of his for "just one more film" (to which I say: hey, what if it doesn't come out until 10 years from now?) and creating, I think, a rather nifty argument about directors and age which stimulates thought.

I didn't see the Kimmel, but I saw the Maher, and I noted that Maher came out swinging: "...this RIDICULOUS idea about only making one more movie. What's the MATTER with you?" It looked a little pre-planned to me, like Maher told QT in advance "Hey, I'll attack you on that -- saying you're at your peak -- and you can have fun coming back at me."

I keep rolling QT's stance around in my head. I think it is unprecedented. A few actors -- like Cary Grant and Spencer Tracy -- told the world: "This is my final film." (Tracy died two weeks after HIS was made.) But directors?

Hitchcock went the other way while promoting Family Plot:

"How could I retire? What would I do, sit in a corner and read a book? I intend to go on forever." And for me as a Hitchcock fan...I would have been fine with that..even if the movies had been no better than Family Plot.

Two new thoughts about QT's idea:

ONE: One thing that IS different for him, is that QT WRITES his own material and that's hard to do. A director who works on the writings of younger people can "go on forever" because frankly (as I understand it), movie directing isn't THAT hard. But screenwriting dialogue at QT's level is...artful. HARD. And -- unlike Billy Wilder, who was still writing 1959 scripts in 1981 -- I don't think that QT's dialogue ever ages.

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