Reviews

Harper, 2021, 416 pages, C$12.99 mmpb, ISBN 978-0063112520

Novelizations live in a strange corner of the literary universe. They literally exist to adapt in prose a story told in another medium, usually as squarely mercantile effort. I won’t belittle the authors of novelizations – while they’re rarely the authors of the original screenplay on which the novelization is based, they’re asked to do a quasi-impossible task on tight deadlines, transforming an outline of a story into a readable novel. Some of them do better jobs than others, fixing plot points, making the technical details more plausible, adding credible backstories and executing in prose form moments that were designed for the screen. I still have a fond memory of the very entertaining Down with Love adaptation, and Orson Scott Card’s legendary work on adapting The Abyss actually fed into the movie itself. Cinephiles often looked at novelizations to get glimpses of scenes cut during editing, or get a second-hand glimpse at information included in the script that may not have been all that clear in the finished product. In the luckiest of cases, you had the screenplay author writing or co-writing the novelization.

Novelizations, inevitably, are not what they once were. Originally produced in a context where movies played on the big screen for a few weeks and then disappeared forever, they became far less important once home video offered wider availability and endless replays. In an age of streaming, they often feel like relics of a rougher age, like VHS video stores and DVD audio commentary. (Keep in mind that I liked all of those and wish they’d be back.)

Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood gloriously revels in the nostalgia aspect of, well, nearly everything about it. Movie or novel, it remains a story set in 1969, looking back at the fashions, obsessions and characters of the time, and the quaintly charming feeling of a novelization clearly plays along the same lines. Much as Tarantino paid homage to a past generation of actors and filmmakers, it makes sense that a novelization would also tap into the movie marketing of an earlier age. Even the design of the book harkens back to the yellowing paperbacks of the era – the only thing missing being the Bantam rooster.

But this isn’t a simple novelization. For one thing, obviously, it’s from Tarantino himself – the book is from the same creative mind as the movie, and it doesn’t take a long time for the book to show that it’s a different riff. Whatever stories, anecdotes, telling details and strange connections that Tarantino couldn’t fit in the movie are brought forth here. From the acknowledgement page (which thanks notables such as Bruce Dern and Burt Reynolds), we understand that the project, filmed or written, was largely driven by conversations with acting legends who were active back in 1969, and there’s a clear intention to capture those recollections in more permanent form. (If you’re aware of Reynolds’ past as a stuntman, you can almost feel his stories weaved into the narrative.)

As with most novelizations, we get a deeper look at the characters themselves – Rick Dalton’s inner struggles as an actor are far more detailed, as is the very troubled past of his deuteragonist Cliff Booth. We get access to their inner monologue, and the characters become richer for it. Dalton’s innate goodness is amplified, but the biggest surprise here is Booth’s violent streak. From a record body count in World War II to the violent murder of two mafiosos to the confirmation that he did intentionally kill his wife (an event often referred to in the film, but here detailed in gruesome detail), Booth does not come across as well in the book – absent Brad Pitt’s charisma and his biggest heroic moment (I’ll explain in two paragraphs), he comes across as a very scary, utterly ruthless character who just happens to be hanging with a likable protagonist. Ironically, the one moment that annoyed many people in the film, his confrontation with an atypically arrogant Bruce Lee, is considerably softened here – it’s obvious from the narrative that Lee’s lack of coordination over his “mock” fights with other stuntmen had left many bloodied, and Booth is on set as a “ringer” explicitly to teach Lee a bruising lesson.

But there’s more to it. Tarantino, basking in the creative freedom of his literary debut (he’s had many screenplays published in book form before, but never a prose narrative), gets to add scenes, digressions and heartfelt rants. When Booth reflects upon his cinematic likes and dislikes, it’s as if we get a good film critic’s rant from Tarantino himself. When Polanski showboats as a director, it’s hard to say whether this is Tarantino reflecting on his own art. There’s a sequence featuring a deeply alcoholic Aldo Ray that allows Tarantino to expound on his admiration for the fallen actor. If you wanted to learn more about Charles Manson’s improbable musical career as he turned murderous cult leader, it’s right here even if, thankfully, the novel doesn’t spend a lot of time with Manson and his acolytes. There are even two chapters written as if from a western novel, as even the pilot-show-within-a-movie Lancer gets its own expansion.

More crucially, Tarantino also gets to mess around with his own story. If you’re expecting a retelling of the film with additional details, page 123 will slap you across the face, as it summarizes not only the event of the film’s third act and climax, but gives a flash-forward to Dalton’s revitalized career throughout the 1970s. In other words, the climax of the novel is not going to be the climax of the film, and the two works diverge considerably. Don’t expect different events – but expect a climax with a different emphasis, preoccupied not with a hippie-face-smashing action climax, but with Dalton regaining confidence in his own powers as an actor. Technically, the novel ends two thirds of the way into the film — The rest is handled in flashforwards, including one chapter skipping six months later inserted at the fourth-fifth mark. For fans of the film, you can clearly see the appeal of the book – it’s recognizably from the same origin, but it eventually does its own thing.

One of the big questions for a story set in 1969 and about 1969 is how credible it is in its references. I obviously can’t tell from first-hand experience, but after years of immersion in Hollywood history, I was impressed at the depths of some of Tarantino’s references throughout the film. There’s a deft interweaving of fact and fiction here, with some very deep cuts to lesser-known films (geez, Cukor’s The Chapman Report?) that don’t feel like Tarantino merely repeating reference works. (Which is surprisingly obvious – you can tell they’re references, but they don’t jell together. Here they do.)

I quite liked the result. Tarantino’s prose style is not always smooth – his strength is clearly in dialogue and storytelling, not necessarily in strong descriptive writing. The novel is told at the present tense, which echoes the way that screenplays are written, but quickly becomes useful as the novel skips back in time to tell stories of 1950s/60s Hollywood, then flashes forward for glimpses of what the future awaits for some characters (including one who gets nominated three times for Oscars in the 1980s/90s – first for a role played in our reality by Elizabeth McGovern, another by Meg Tilly, and a final one in a Tarantino film that doesn’t exist in this timeline). But as an alternate take on a pretty good film, it’s a rather wonderful companion that bifurcates just enough to keep things interesting. It’s obviously indulgent, digressive and showy – in other words, qualities that we’ve come to associate with Tarantino’s films themselves. It could have been a better-controlled narrative with more polished prose that stuck closer to the film, but then it may not have been a Tarantino novel. If his longstanding promise of retirement from directing comes to pass (it won’t), I can see a pretty good career ahead of him as a writer.

In the meantime, there’s the novelization that’s more than a novelization – it’s a great book about 1969 Hollywood as well, a quirky novel and a gift to fans of the film. In fact, it may make you like the film even more – I revisited it right after finishing the novel and, coupled with more reasonable assumptions about the film’s pacing and narrative structure, had arguably an even better time than the first viewing.