That time in Hollywood is Quentin Tarantino's long-awaited first novel
In this book, the renowned American director draws on his Oscar-winning film of the same name and develops its themes with astonishing vigour.
Here, as on screen, we follow actor Rick Dalton, who is increasingly despairing about the decline of his career, and his understudy, chauffeur and friend Cliff Booth. Both of them have to cope with their own ageing and the transformation of film culture, in which they are finding it difficult to find their place. Rick is all the more bitter about this knowledge because his closest neighbours on Cielo Drive are Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, a Hollywood star couple at the height of their fame. And circling around is Charles Manson and his "family" of beleaguered hippies who want to start a social revolution through massacre.
However, we learn far more about the fates of these people and about the Hollywood of the golden era of the late 1960s than could be captured on film. The author has taken the chance to portray the previous lives of his protagonists in great detail, including some shocking revelations, fiction is intertwined with reality, and the adventures of Rick and Cliff are interspersed with darker stories from the real history of Hollywood. In a few passages Tarantino changes the point of view and also gives more prominent space to characters who were somewhat sidelined in the film, especially Sharon Tate and the young Trudi Fraser.
The novel Once Upon a Time in Hollywood clearly proves that as Tarantino is a great director, he is also a great writer. On the pages of the book, he has managed to bring Tarantino-esque black humour, a sense of grotesque situations, surprising twists and turns and a tendency to provoke. The story oozes his nostalgic relationship with old Hollywood, his love of filmmaking and his infectious joy of storytelling.
The novel hit the bestseller lists immediately upon its release - offering readers unfamiliar with the film a full literary experience of Hollywood in the wild 1960s, and film fans a wealth of additional information, unexpected revelations and deviations from the script.
