Did you wish Once Upon a Time in Hollywood focused more on the Manson family and less on the film/tv industry of the 60s?

The part of the movie that worked was Spahn Ranch. Austin Nichols really stood out. And most of the scenes with Brad Pitt. Leo’s story was deadly.

No.

Wait?

Are you asking if we wish a movie's story was about something else?

Is that the question?

I liked it as it was, so: no. Besides, it's fiction. Manson and the Sharon Tate murders were not.

I liked it all. One of those flicks I’ll never get tired of watching.

Spahn ranch was a great scene as well as Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate watching herself at the movies.

The flame thrower was over the top but that's Tarintino for ya.

No, OP. It's an excellent movie without them. I was around during the Manson murders and have had sufficient.

I honestly think that part should’ve been scrapped. Or maybe they should’ve made it thinly veiled fictional characters. Or focused on the aftermath of the Cielo drive massacre. Idk, it just didn’t come together properly for me. I still watch it every now and then to catch background details, but it feels like two or three different movies spliced together.

No, I don't. I thought the balance was perfect.

Were pit bulls in existence back then? That's the part I had trouble with.

You didn't hear about pit bulls back then. Doberman's were the demons of note.

Pete the Pup in the "Our Gang" film series of the 20s and 30s was a pitbull, no?

I wanted to stand up and cheer for the flamethrower! But I just sobbed quietly to myself in the dark, wishing it had actually been so.

I didn't think DiCaprio fit, he did ok but Brad Pitt was so much better.

No. The movie is about HOLLYWOOD. And, as someone who lived 100 miles from Hollywood in the '70s, '80s, '90s and '01s, I like exactly how they laid it out. Having a Black guy and a White guy as lovers??? WHAT?!? I found myself thinking. I found that pretty unbelievable, but then, the whole movie is fiction, so I went with it. But it's not called "The Manson Chronicles," so I wasn't expecting anything when I started watching it. I liked it very much, implausibility and all.

“Having a Black guy and a White guy as lovers??”

Wait, what? Am I forgetting something?

Tarantion's films have all become the same. Nazi's get avenged. Slave holders get avenged. The Manson gang gets avenged.

Strange revisionist history.

[quote] as well as Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate watching herself at the movies.

I just couldn't get enough close-ups of Margot Robbie's dirty bare feet in those scenes. Hot, hot, hot!

I would enjoy an entire film of Brad Pitt’s character driving around 1960s LA and listening to the radio in his car. No plot, no traffic, just vibes

No, I thought it was nicely balanced.

This is my favourite Tarantino. It’s a real valentine to that era of Hollywood.

I’ll second R20 and add, or driving up and down that strip showing off the excellent production design.

I remember going to see this the weekend it opened. And then going back to see it again the next day.

Tarantino gave Sharon Tate the ending we wanted for her just like he gave Hitler the ending we wanted for him.

OUTIH was a love letter to to an era changed forever by Manson. I wouldn't change a thing.

I know this is a popular movie, and the friend I watched it with loved it, but man oh man did I dislike this movie. The film itself was fine (acting, directing, cinematography, much of the writing) -- but I just found the ending to be unbelievably offensive. The Tate murders were real and brutal and to change history into some sort of fanfic phantasmagoria was a total cold shower to what had until then be a mostly entertaining, straight-forward movie. It would be like it at the end of Titanic a British submarine emerged out of nowhere and saved all 1,500 people who had drowned in real life. All in all, just done in bad taste.

This spam pr shit.

I liked it a lot. I saw a matinee screening on the same day as the Academy Awards, and I was so thankful that I did that. I found out later that DL fave Lens Dunham played one of the lesser-known Manson girls who called Spahn Ranch home. Wish I’d known that going in, because I couldn’t quite place her.

“Avenge” doesn’t mean what you think it means, r18.

I didn’t notice Austin Nichols. I wonder if r1 is referring to Austin Butler. I suspect so.

Speaking of finding Austin Nichols where you don’t expect him, he played one of the local teenagers who memorably fucked Brenda is Six Feet Under.

R24 I disagree. The titanic was not caused by intentional malice. These crimes had occurred over 50 years ago. It isn’t disrespectful to the victims because these are crimes the public knows about very well. It’s giving them the heroic ending that they rightfully deserved in life. Furthermore the altered ending speaks to the theme of Hollywood as not only fiction but also fable. What is reality and what is fiction. Hollywood blurs the lines, and that is expressed all throughout the film. On screen Leo is a courageous handsome alpha. Off screen he is an aging, insecure beta. He might have the power and money but Brad has the actual heroism. This is a brilliant film.

I believe this is also Tarantino’s most existential film. Would it be ironic and rather beautiful if 200 years global citizens think this is how the events actually played out.

I hated the Sharon Tate scenes. Margot Robbie didn’t sell it at all. She seemed like a modern actress dropped into the 60s.

Erm no, actually, it wouidn’t be, R30.

I appreciate R24’s concerns. When I first saw it, opening weekend in the cinema, it was a tense experience wondering how Quentin Tarantino, of all people. would depict the Manson murders. In fact, when the project was first announced, I figured, given that combination, I would probably give it a hard pass. While watching the film, the anticipation of it filled me with dread. (I was a child when the Manson murders happened.)

As the final sequence played out, I thought, there are people here, young people, who probably have no idea of how these nearly 50 year-old events actually played out - the same way they’d be clueless to the appearance of Mama Cass and Steve McQueen at the Playboy mansion. That thought, that they wouldn’t know the real history and accept this as truth, disturbed me more than any of the comic book shenanigans displayed on screen.

I went back to see it again the next day because I wondered if the film actually held up without that tension between the horror of the actual events and Tarantino’s departure; if even the long Spahn Ranch sequence held up knowing it’s just a foreshadowing of the Pitt character’s later heroics. To my mind, it did. I enjoyed the film even more upon a 2nd viewing.

Upon a 3rd viewing about a year later, I realised it’s in keeping with the incredible affection Tarantino holds for the era, an era that in real life came to an abrupt end on that fated night. Of course, it’s revisionist but it’s actually more of a wilful surrealism that allows for that era to be never-ending, to exist forever in Tarantino’s mind.

It’s fun to think for a few moments of DiCaprio’s character becoming what Jack Nicholson became in the 1970’s, due to his sudden proximity to Polankski. (While Nicholson was certainly around in that era, on television and in Corman films, he’s not featured as a character in Tarantino’s film.) Or maybe more significantly, the difference it would’ve made to Polanski’s life. But that thinking doesn’t get one very far and Tarantino knows it which is why the film ends before DiCaprio can even get up his more “in vogue” neighbour’s driveway. Because while the Manson murders may have marked the end of an era in Hollywood, the film Easy Rider had already been on limited release a month before and that was what really changed everything, for good and with finality, in Hollywood.

Tarantino, in his inimitable way, chooses to draw the inevitable end of this era to a close with a kiss, and with great warmth befitting his affection for it, with Sharon Tate dancing up her driveway, than the sordid way it actually did. When taken in the context for the entire film, there’s actually something quite lovely about it.

Margot Robbie has a very contemporary sort of prettiness. I can't think of any actresses who would be a match for Sharon Tate's beauty.

His best movie maybe after Inglorious Basterds.

the ending was the same conceit as Inglorious Basterds. The audience gets the history it wants. Intentionally disconcerting. Transgressive perhaps. But the title told us we were going to see a fairy tale, so we can’t say we weren’t warned.

R32 You are not getting it. Even if some young person wasn’t familiar with the Tate-Bianca crimes they know the events in the ending aren’t non fiction. That is part of the lore. That is apart of the conversation. Charles Manson is a huge iconic figure and generally everyone knows what happened.

R34 That’s why always say Tarantino is the best director of all time. He has so many greats that are really exceptional films that still hold up even years later. Pulp Fiction, Django, Jackie Brown, Inglorious, Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill, and this film.

I like Tarantino and think he's an enormously talented. Jackie Brown I think is a perfect film, a great favorite, and Pulp Fiction is brilliant and fun. His worst films are very much worth watching... But "Once Upon a Time..." was a huge disappointment for me. There were only small moments that I thought were evocative or otherwise well done. I've waited a long time to view it again and expect my opinion will improve, somewhat. What q disappointment to hate (or just about) one of his films.

I like some of his films very much, but others (Django and the Hateful 8) leave me cold. Hollywood is somewhere in the middle.

I keep reading this thread title as "Did you wish Once Upon a Mattress focused more on the Manson family and less on the film/tv industry of the 60s?"

Has Tarantino ever done a comedy. I guess this film is the closest thing to it. Though it is equally a drama as well.

I think of most of his films as comedies.

I liked it a lot.

I remembered a lot of the TV shows that Leo's character was involved in: "The FBI", for example. I used to watch "Lancer", the western he was working on with the little girl. (However, the character of the girl in the TV show was not a child, but rather a pretty young woman.)

What got me most about this was the feeling that was projected when Pitt was driving around and would see a group of hippie girls on a street corner. Followed by his visit to Spahn ranch and that whole scene.

When I reflected about the movie afterward I was able to put a name to what I was feeling from those scenes: Dread.

On the surface nothing was visible to anyone at the time, but looking backward and understanding what it was leading up to, dread was the right word.

Adding in the scene where Leo goes out to complain about about the Manson's group noisy car which was funny and scary at the same time.

(I read that the owner of that car offered to loan it to Tarantino, but he apparently wouldn't go that far.)

I had to rewatch the last 20 minutes or so because it all happened so fast that I needed to get it straight in my head.

I don't think actually seeing more of the Manson group was necessary. If you saw the movie, you would have already known how things actually happened. and what they were.

And it was a fairy tale, after all.

[Quote] I enjoyed the Sharon Tate scenes and the Spahn Ranch sequence the most.

Both of which were related to the Hollywood film/tv industry (yes, including Spahn Ranch).

Rewatching this now. Sydney Sweeney is in this!

Who R45? Was that the little girl in the western?

R45 - She played Shelley Winters eating a bowl of spaghetti in the background.

Having rewatched this now, Tarantino achieves an incredible duality in the final sequence. Even though I know what he’s going to do, I still feel this tremendous amount of dread and sadness as it plays out. It’s almost like a controlled, contained response to the real events as his scripted rendering plays out. And it’s so brutal - the brutality in the film is in relation to the real life savagery. Tarantino has no sympathy for the Manson family at all. I did wonder where Leslie Van Houton was, why she’s not named, since he identifies Tex Watson. It’s definitely a cinematic karmic comeuppance.

Mikey Madison’s character gets the worst of it and even seems to be calling back to the opening scene of Jaws once she’s in the swimming pool. It’s incredibly brutal but we feel nothing for these characters. They’re pathetic.

The rest of the film is amazing - how great is Al Pacino in that opening scene! It’s so incredibly cast - with major talent and legendary talents and new talents that in no time, a few years, emerge as major talents in their own right. And his gang.

He just nails the 1960s entertainment landscape so well - just nails it. I love the scene when all the neon lights up.

This pairs really well with Licorice Pizza. :)

I didn’t really care about the Rick Dalton character. And I didn’t like Tarantino’s use of Bruce Lee.

I saw it at a matinee with mostly elderly people and they burst out laughing at the flamethrower scene. I will say that Emile Hirsh was unrecognizable (in a good way). Tarantino actually made him look cute for a change.

R32 nailed my reaction too. I was enjoying the movie but began to dread the Sharon Tate ending - so I'm glad it went in a different direction. So no OP, I don't wish. I think the movie is fine as it is.