Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novel

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is a novelization of the 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino. Tarantino began writing the film, which focuses on the end of Hollywood’s golden era, in a novel format before he wrote the screenplay. The film stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton, Brad Pitt as Cliff Booth, and Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate. Since Tarantino was a child in 1969, he recreated the film from his romanticized memory of the city, before events such as the Manson murders ruined these fantasies. The 1968 spaghetti Western film Once Upon a Time in the West inspired the novel’s title, which evokes the idea of a fairy-tale retelling of Hollywood’s glory days.

The novel follows the main plot of the film, with a few major differences. In the film, Cliff Booth and Rick Dalton kill three members of the Manson family after they enter Dalton’s house in the penultimate scene, providing the film’s dramatic (and graphically violent) climax, and the last scene depicts Sharon Tate inviting Dalton to have a drink at her house. In the novel, the attack happens much earlier in the novel, in Chapter 7, in reference to a future event, and the novel ends with Rick running lines with Trudi over the phone and Rick’s realization of how lucky he is to have the job of his dreams.