Tarantino’s Bedtime Story: Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood

When I think of the Tate-La Bianca murders, which made headlines fifty years ago this month, I remember first of all how scary L.A. suddenly seemed after news broke of the brutal murders on Cielo Drive. That feeling was reinforced when a student told me he’d grown up in the Los Feliz neighborhood where supermarket executive Leno La Bianca lived with his wife Rosemary. Not movie stars or socialites, they were the kind of homey middle-class people who gave special holiday treats to all the neighborhood kids. That didn’t stop them, alas, from being butchered by Charles Manson’s young thugs.  No Angeleno, I quickly decided, was safe from a home invasion by a crazed hippie with something to prove.

Leave it to Quentin Tarantino to take us back to that terrible time and put his own spin on what happened. Tarantino has a genius for making L.A. look both beautiful and deadly. His camera sweeps down Hollywood Boulevard and the Sunset Strip, capturing the sizzling nightspots I recall from the past, like the young-oriented discotheque known as Pandora’s Box. He films his cast in restaurants I’ve known forever, including the clubby Musso and Frank and the kitschy Mexican eatery called El Coyote, in which the real Sharon Tate and her friends apparently had their last margaritas. Everywhere, in Tarantino’s L.A., there are movie houses, like the classic Village and Bruin, where the movie’s Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) drops in to watch herself on screen in a Dean Martin spy flick, The Wrecking Crew. We also zip past lesser theatres, as well as movie billboards and posters advertising such dreck of the era as Three in the Attic and Joanna. (I suffered through both while serving as a film critic for the UCLA Daily Bruin.) The airwaves are flooded with music I remember well—“Mrs. Robinson” and Joni Mitchell’s “The Circle Game”—along with promos for the teen-oriented KHJ.

Tarantino’s film is well named, and not just because it seems to be an homage to Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a  Time in America. His central subject in his best films is perhaps the making of stories. So it’s appropriate that his take on the Manson murders is far less interested in the killers and in victim Sharon Tate (who appears mostly as a beautiful icon) than in her fictional next-door neighbor, an aging actor struggling to move beyond his TV role in something called Bounty Hunter in order to make use of his genuine but sometimes tortured talent. As played by Leonardo Di Caprio, Rick Dalton is stuck in hackneyed bad-guy roles, a fact he deals with by drinking much too much. Still, he’s a celebrity, one whom everyone else (including the Manson gang) regards with awe for the simple reason that they’ve seen him on their TV screens.

Movie and TV stars, of course, do a lot of shedding of pretend blood. They also do a lot of fighting: even Tate is shown, at that Bruin Theatre screening, in a martial-arts cat-fight scene battling co-star Nancy Kwan in The Wrecking Crew. So it makes sense that playing opposite Di Caprio in Tarantino’s film is Brad Pitt as his stunt double, a guy quite used to getting physical, when he’s not cooking up his pathetic Kraft Mac-and-Cheese dinners in his sad little flat. Movie violence is faked, but Pitt’s character is quite good (possibly too good) at the real thing, which is how the Di Caprio/Pitt story and that of Sharon Tate happen to overlap. In ways, I can’t help saying, that might surprise you before the lights come up.    

Q is for Quentin Tarantino, Roger Corman’s #1 Fan

Those of us who write about movies for the A to Z Challenge have got to be grateful to Quentin Tarantino. He fits snugly into today’s “Q” spot, in the same way that he fits snugly into the Roger  Corman world. Not that Tarantino was ever on Roger’s payroll. But he illustrates what can happen when a dedicated Corman fan decides to make B-movies with A-budgets.

When Tarantino was a lad, he’d sneak out of his mother’s house in suburban Torrance, California and head for the seedy Carson Twin Cinema, where he could watch late-night double bills of New World nurse movies and women-in-prison flicks. As a budding exploitation-film  connoisseur, he developed a special preference for Jonathan Kaplan’s Night  Call Nurses, which he has described as “a classic mix of sex, nudity, and political consciousness.” (His fondness for statuesque woman-warrior Pam Grier led him to star her, years later, in Jackie Brown.)

After dropping out of high school, Tarantino wound up with a job at a video store in a South  Bay shopping mall. There he was befriended by a friend of mine, herself a movie buff with a job in the same mall. Since he always seemed hungry, she took him home and fed him pizza. But they didn’t get too close: for one thing, it didn’t seem that he bathed very often.

Tarantino exemplifies one of the upstart filmmakers who moved on to fame and fortune by going the film festival route, rather than toiling in Roger Corman’s vineyards. He made a splash at the Sundance Film Festival with his first effort, the brutal but extremely creative Reservoir Dogs (1992), and the rest is movie history. It’s worth noting that, although he dedicated his film to Roger Corman along with such cinema icons as Chow Yun Fat and Jean-Luc Godard, Tarantino never approached Roger when trying to raise financing. Instead he turned to early Corman protégé Monte Hellman (Two Lane Blacktop), who proved invaluable in showing him where the money could be found. In 1996, a Variety reporter asked Roger Corman, “If a Quentin Tarantino came to you with the script of Reservoir Dogs, and asked you for a million dollars to make it, what would you say?” Corman’s reply: “I’d say I’ll give you $750,000 and you’ll do the film.” Maybe that’s why Tarantino kept his distance.

But he’s never lost his appreciation for Roger’s output. At the 2009 ceremony at which Roger was honored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences with an honorary Oscar, Tarantino made a lively speech, summing up the Corman legacy. He ended with a flourish: “Roger, for everything that you have done for cinema, the Academy thanks you, Hollywood thanks you, independent filmmaking thanks you, but most importantly -- for all the wild, weird, cool, crazy moments you’ve put on the drive-in screens -- the movie-lovers of the planet Earth thank you!”

Spoken like a #1 fan.  (I wonder if he’s seen Misery.)

Woody Strode: Django Overlooked

Before seeing Django Unchained, I had pasta for dinner. That seemed entirely fitting, because the Oscar-winning epic (best original screenplay) is writer-director Quentin Tarantino’s salute to spaghetti westerns. His particular model is the original Django, the 1966 Italian horse opera in which a common man who’s suffered great loss is elevated into a hero bent on revenge.

One huge difference, of course, between the original Django and Tarantino’s version is that his is set in the Ante Bellum South, and his avenging angel is not Franco Nero but Jamie Foxx. It’s a black man, not a white one, who rises from near death and lays waste to everyone and everything around him. Casting off the shackles of slavery, Fox’s Django is empowered by righteous anger. Truly, he comes to embody the wrath of God.

It’s the sort of role that didn’t exist for a black man when Woody Strode broke into the movies. Strode had a major career, spanning more than forty years. He was a favorite of some of the greatest action directors in the business, notably John Ford, for whom he appeared in four films, including a key role in Sergeant Rutledge. But though Strode played the title character, a Buffalo soldier in the U.S. Cavalry in the late 1880s, his role is largely that of a victim. He’s been accused of the rape and murder of a white girl, then flees to avoid prosecution. Inevitably it’s that cinematic staple, the Good White Man, who saves him. Top-billed Jeffrey Hunter, as the counsel for the defense, finds the real killer in the courtroom, and Strode is freed.

Along with victims, Strode played the occasional bad guy, most dramatically as the gunslinger in the opening of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a  Time in America. And, inevitably, he played sidekicks. In Richard Brooks’ The Professionals, he’s part of a four-man posse that includes Burt Lancaster, Lee Marvin, and Robert Ryan, but only Strode is omitted from the above-the-title credits. In his best-known part, he’s an African slave forced to fight fellow captives as a gladiator. Audiences have always thrilled to the moment when he sacrifices his life so that Spartacus can live on.

 Woody Strode never planned on being an actor.  He was a multi-sport phenom at UCLA, circa 1940. While former UCLA teammate Jackie Robinson was changing the face of baseball, Strode became one of the first African-Americans to play professional football. Then he moved into professional wrestling, where he discovered (according to his son Kalai) that he could be applauded by white Southerners for beating up a white opponent. It was all in the staging: “My dad could not pounce upon and hit and punish these white wrestlers without the audience’s approval. The white wrestler has to beat my dad up to a pulp. Then my dad has to turn to the audience and say, Shall I really give it to ‘em – shall I do it? They all scream, Yes, hit ‘em, hit ‘em! And then my dad can hit him, and win, and everyone’s cheering.” As Kalai explained to me, Southern fans would “start off white against black, but they’re really good against bad.” And Woody Strode, from the start, struck them as a good guy.

 From wrestling, it was just a short hop to an acting career. He shaved his head to play a native chief in TV’s Ramar of the Jungle, and never looked back. With his strong presence and exotic look (he was almost half Native American), Strode was always a contender. But not, in that era, the mythic hero he could have been. 

Here are some photos from Kalai Strode's collection, one of Woody in a Tarzan film and one taken late in life at his Glendora, California home. Maybe I'll have a chance to write more about Woody Strode (and his family) someday soon.