Квентин Тарантино - Once Upon a Time in Hollywood - The First Novel By Quentin Tarantino

The agent says each name as if he’s reciting the names of the faces carved on Hollywood’s Mount Rushmore.

“Hollywood royalty with a filmography peppered with all-time classics!”

The agent gives a legendary example: “When a drunk Lee Marvin dropped out of the role of Colonel Mortimer in For a Few Dollars More —three weeks before filming—it was me who got Sergio Leone to take his fat ass to the Sportsmen’s Lodge and have coffee with a newly clean-and-sober Lee Van Cleef .”

The agent lets the magnitude of that story settle in the room. Then, taking a nonchalant drag off his Kent, he blows out the smoke and adds another one of his declarative industry statements: “And the rest, as they say, is new world western mythology .”

Marvin zeroes in on the cowboy actor across the glass table. “Now, Rick, Bounty Law was a good show, and you were good on it. A lot of folks come to town and get famous for doing shit. Ask Gardner McKay.”

Rick laughs at the Gardner McKay dig. Marvin continues, “But Bounty Law was a totally decent cowboy show. And you have that and you can be proud of that. But now, on to the future. … But before the future, let’s get a little history straight.”

As the two men smoke cigarettes, Marvin begins quizzing Rick as if he’s either on a game show or being interrogated by the FBI.

“So, Bounty Law— that was NBC, right?”

“Yep. NBC.”

“How long?”

“How long what?”

“How long was the show?”

“Well, it was a half-hour show, so twenty-three minutes with commercials.”

“And how long did it last?”

“We started in the fall schedule of the ’59–’60 television season.”

“And when did you go off the air?”

“The middle of the ’63–’64 season.”

“Didja ever go to color?”

“Didn’t make color.”

“How’d you get the show? You come in off the street, or did the network groom you?”

“I had guested on a Tales of Wells Fargo . I played Jesse James . ”

“So that’s what got their attention?”

“Yes. I still had to screen test. And I had better be fucking good. But yes.”

“Go through the details of the movies you did during your hiatus?”

“Well, the first one,” Rick says, “was Comanche Uprising , starring a very old, very ugly Robert Taylor . But that became a theme in almost all my motion pictures,” Rick explains. “Old guy paired with a young guy. Me and Robert Taylor. Me and Stewart Granger. Me and Glenn Ford. There was never just me on my own,” says the actor, frustrated. “It was always me and some old fuck .”

Marvin asks, “Who directed Comanche Uprising ?”

“Bud Springsteen.”

Marvin makes an observation: “I noticed on your résumé you worked with a helluva lot of those old Republic Pictures cowboy directors—Springsteen, William Witney, Harmon Jones, John English?”

Rick laughs. “The get-it-done guys.” Then he clarifies, “But Bud Springsteen wasn’t just a get-it-done guy. Bud didn’t just get it done. Bud was different than those others.”

That interests Marvin. “What was the difference?”

“Huh?” Rick asks.

“Bud and the other get-it-done guys,” Marvin asks. “What was the difference?”

Rick doesn’t have to think about his answer, because he figured this out years ago when guesting on Whirlybirds with Craig Hill, helmed by Bud.

“Bud had the same amount of time as all the rest of those goddamn directors,” Rick says with authority. “Not one day, not one hour, not one sunset more than anybody else. But it was what he did with that time that made Bud good.” Rick says sincerely, “You were proud to work for Bud.”

Marvin likes that.

“And goddamn Wild Bill Witney gave me my start,” Rick says. “He gave me my first real part. You know, a character with a name. Then he gave me my first lead.”

“What film?” Marvin asks.

“Oh, just one of those juvenile-delinquent hot rod flicks for Republic,” Rick says.

Marvin asks, “What was the title?”

“ Drag Race, No Stop ,” says Rick. “And I did a goddamn Ron Ely Tarzan for him just this last year.”

Marvin laughs. “So you two go back a long way?”

“Me and Bill?” Rick says. “You bet.”

Rick’s getting into his reminiscing and he sees it’s going over well too, so he leans into it. “Let me tell ya ’bout goddamn Bill Witney. The single most underrated action director in this goddamn town. Bill Witney didn’t just direct action, he invented directing action. You said you like westerns—you know that whole Yakima Canutt action gag where he jumps from horse to horse, then falls and goes under the hooves, in John Ford’s fuckin’ Stagecoach ?”

Marvin nods his head yes.

“William fuckin’ Witney did it fuckin’ first, and did it one year before John Ford, with Yakima Canutt!”

“I didn’t know that,” Marvin says. “What picture?”

“He hadn’t even made a feature yet,” Rick tells him. “He did that gag for some fuckin’ serial. Let me tell you what it is like being directed by William Witney. Bill Witney works under the assumption that there was no scene ever written that couldn’t be improved by the addition of a fistfight.”

Marvin laughs.

Rick continues, “So I’m doing a Riverboat , with Bill directing. Me and Burt Reynolds in the scene. So me and Burt are doing the scene, sayin’ the dialogue. Then Bill goes, ‘Cut, cut, cut! You guys are puttin’ me to sleep. Burt, when he says that to you, you punch him. And, Rick, when he punches you, that makes you mad, so you punch him back. Got it? Okay, action!’ And so we do it. And when we get done, he yells, ‘Cut! That’s it, boys, now we got a scene!’”

The two men laugh inside the cloud of cigarette smoke that’s filling up the office. Marvin’s starting to warm up to Rick’s sense of hard-earned Hollywood experience. “So tell me about this Stewart Granger film you mentioned?” Marvin asks.

“ Big Game ,” Rick says. “An African-great-white-hunter piece of crap. They were walking out of it on airplanes.”

Marvin guffaws.

Rick informs the agent, “Stewart Granger was the single biggest prick I ever worked with. And I’ve worked with Jack Lord!”

After the two men chuckle over the Jack Lord dig, Marvin asks the actor, “And you did a picture with George Cukor?”

“Yeah,” Rick says, “a real dog called The Chapman Report . Great director, terrible picture.”

The agent asks, “How did you get along with Cukor?”

“Are you kidding,” Rick asks, “George fucking loved me!” Then he leans a bit over the coffee table and says insinuatingly, in a lower voice, “I mean, really loved me .”

The agent smiles, letting the actor know he gets the insinuation.

“I think that’s a thing George does,” Rick speculates, “He picks a boy on each movie to go ga-ga over. And on that picture it was between me and Efrem Zimbalist Jr., so I guess I won.” He goes on to illustrate, “So in that picture all my scenes are with Glynis Johns. And we go to a pool. So Glynis is in a one-piece swimsuit. All you can see is legs and arms, everything else is covered up. But me, I’m in the teeny-tiniest pair of swim trunks the censors will allow. Tan swim trunks. On black-and-white film, it looks like I’m fucking naked! And it’s not just a shot of me jumping in the pool. I’m in these tiny trunks, doing big dialogue scenes with my ass hanging out, for ten minutes of the fuckin’ movie. I mean, what the fuck—am I Betty Grable over here?”