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

Sitting next to his empty director’s chair on the wooden walkway directly in front of the swinging saloon doors is the little girl dressed in the period clothes he saw talking to Sam when he first arrived. He doesn’t know her real name and can’t remember her character’s name, but she plays Murdock Lancer’s eight-year-old daughter (by yet another mother, but this one didn’t skedaddle the first chance she got. Instead, she tragically broke her neck when she was thrown from the beautiful strawberry roan Murdock gifted her for their third-year anniversary. The same strawberry roan Murdock Lancer shot in the head once he got home from her funeral).

Later in the script, Caleb will kidnap the little girl and hold her for ten-thousand-dollars ransom.

The kidnapping of the child will end up being the emotional turning point in the story. While Johnny Lancer was brought to town by his father to defend the ranch against Caleb and his men, the screenwriters of the pilot had a twist in store for that standard scenario. One, Johnny hates the father he hasn’t seen since he was ten years old. And two, as luck would have it, unbeknownst to anybody on the ranch, Johnny Madrid and Caleb DeCoteau both know and like each other. At any rate he likes Caleb a damn sight better than the father he blames for the death of his mother. Getting revenge for his mother by killing his father has been a dream of the son since he buried her eighteen years earlier in the Ensenada dirt.

A revenge that Caleb DeCoteau is quite successfully executing. Which ends up putting Johnny in the difficult, but dramatically rewarding, position of having to decide not only which side is he on but who is he? Lancer or Madrid? With Caleb’s kidnapping of the child being the emotional catalyst that ultimately pushes Johnny over to the side of the angels and sets him up for a weekly western television show alongside his newfound family.

Rick has a scene with the young actress later today where he negotiates his ransom demands with Scott Lancer, as the little girl sits on his lap with a pistol barrel pressed against the side of her temple. But it’s tomorrow when he and the little girl will have their biggest scene together. As he examines the little dishwater blonde from a distance, sitting in her director’s chair reading a big black hardcover book, she looks to be about twelve years old. She’s spending her lunchtime sitting on the set by herself, with no adult guardian or no sign of a lunch. She doesn’t raise her eyes from the book she’s reading when he walks up to the saloon’s front-porch steps. Not even after he clears his throat and says, “Hello?”

Oh boy , he thinks, this little bitch is gonna be a pip. Hitting his greeting much harder, he repeats, “Hello?”

Raising her eyes from the book opened up in her lap, apparently annoyed, she says, “Hello,” to the hairy cowboy standing at the bottom of the porch steps.

Holding up the western paperback in his hand, he asks her, “Would it bother you if I sat next to you and read my book too?”

She looks at him, poker-faced, with the bitchy timing of a pint-sized Bette Davis. “I don’t know. Would you bother me?”

That was pretty clever , Rick thinks. What, does this little squirt walk around with a team of gag writers supplying her bitchy comebacks to rhetorical questions?

“I’ll try not to,” Rick softly replies.

She lays the big black book on her lap and examines him for a moment, then turns to the empty director’s chair, examines it, and looks back at Rick again. “That’s your chair, ain’t it?”

“Yep,” Rick says.

“Who am I to tell you not to sit in your chair?”

Removing his cowboy hat and giving her a gracious bow, “Nevertheless,” he says, pouring on the charm, “I thank you kindly.”

She neither giggles nor smiles, just lowers her eyes back to her reading material.

Fuck this fucking little cunt , Rick thinks. So, noisier than need be, his cowboy boots clomp up the wooden steps of the porch. He heads to his director’s chair, climbs himself backward into the seat, making the slight moaning sound he always makes when he climbs himself backward into his director’s chair.

She ignores him.

He then removes his fucked-up pack of cigarettes from his black Levi’s pants pocket, takes one from the sweaty crumpled pack, and sticks it in his mouth underneath the horsetail glued to his upper lip. He lights his cancer stick with his silver Zippo in the flashy (noisy) way of a fifties-era cool daddy-o. After he’s accomplished setting the end on fire, he slams the lid of the Zippo closed with what looks like a diagonal karate chop; metal slams down on metal with a loud snap.

She ignores him.

He takes a big drag of his cigarette, filling his lungs with smoke, the way when he was a younger actor he used to watch Michael Parks do, only in hungover Rick’s case the exhale triggers a coughing fit, which causes him to cough up another one of his green-mixed-with-crimson loogies, which splatters in a colorful glob on the wooden walkway.

That she doesn’t ignore.

A look of horror crosses the little lady’s little face, as if Rick just pissed in her Wheaties; she stares in disbelief at both Rick and the gooey loogie refuse on the ground.

Okay, that was a little too much , Rick thinks, so he sincerely apologizes to his little co-star. She tries to blink the image out of her eyes as her head lowers back down to find the place in the big black book where she left off.

The fact is, after assuring her he’d try not to bother her while she was reading, he’s frankly done nothing but. And he’s still not through. Pretending to read his paperback, as he tries to mask that he’s digging a stubborn booger lodged up his nose, he asks her casually, “You don’t eat lunch?”

She answers back flatly, “I’ve got a scene after lunch.”

Rick asks her, “Yeah?” As if he’s saying, So?

Now he finally gets her attention, so she closes the book, lays it in her lap, and turns to explain to him her methodology.

“Eating lunch before I do a scene makes me sluggish. I believe it’s the job of an actor—and I say actor , not actress , because the word ‘ actress’ is nonsensical—it’s the actor’s job to avoid impediments to their performance. It’s the actor’s job to strive for one hundred percent effectiveness. Naturally we never succeed, but it’s the pursuit that’s meaningful.”

Rick just stares at her for a beat or two without saying anything, till he finally says, “Who are you?”

“You can call me Mirabella,” she says.

“Mirabella what?” he asks.

“Mirabella Lancer,” she says obviously.

Rick waves that away with his hand and asks, “No no no, I mean, what’s your real name?”

Again she answers in a tutorial-like fashion. “When we’re on set, I’d prefer to only be referred to by my character’s name. It helps me invest in the reality of the story. I’ve tried it both ways, and I’m just a tiny bit better when I don’t break character. And if I can be a tiny bit better, I want to be.”

Rick doesn’t really have anything to say back to that. So he just smokes.

The young girl who calls herself Mirabella Lancer looks the cowboy bedecked in the fringe rawhide jacket up and down with her eyeballs and says, “You’re the bad guy, Caleb DeCoteau,” she says—not asks—and she pronounces the name like Jean Cocteau .

Rick blows out some more cigarette smoke and says, “I thought it was pronounced Caleb Da-kota .”

As she turns back to her big black book, Mirabella says like a know-it-all smarty-pants, “I’m pretty sure it’s pronounced day-coc-too.”