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

She remembers an incident that happened on the set of Rosemary’s Baby , which drove this point home. The cinematographer, Billy Fraker, had set up a shot; it was of Ruth Gordon’s character, Mrs. Castevet. She’s in Rosemary’s apartment and she asks to use the telephone in the other room. Rosemary tells her to go into the bedroom and make the phone call, so Mrs. Castevet sits on the bed and talks for a moment on the telephone. And the shot was Rosemary’s perspective of a quick glance of the old woman in her bedroom making the call. So Billy Fraker set up the camera in the hallway and lined up the camera to shoot Ruth Gordon through the doorway. And the way Fraker lined up the shot, you could clearly see Ruth Gordon framed between the two sides of the door. When Roman looked through the viewfinder, he didn’t like it, so he adjusted it. When they did what Roman wanted, Mrs. Castevet wasn’t clearly framed. She was obscured by the left side of the doorway. When Sharon looked through the camera viewfinder (she always looked at Roman’s shots through the viewfinder), she couldn’t understand why Roman changed it. If the shot was meant to be of Mrs. Castevet, it clearly wasn’t as good as the earlier one. She was cut in half.

The cinematographer couldn’t understand it either. But Roman was the director, so Fraker did what he was told. While Roman sat on an apple box, sipping coffee from a white styrofoam cup, as the camera crew readjusted the camera, Sharon asked him why he changed the shot.

Roman just gave her a knowing elfin grin and said, “You’ll see.” Then he got up and scooted away.

Whatever the hell that means? Sharon thought. Then she forgot about it till six months later. The two of them were together at the very first audience test screening, which was being held at the Alex Theatre in Glendale, California. Roman and Sharon sat toward the back of the auditorium, holding hands. Roman, who usually liked to sit closer to the screen when he watched other people’s movies, liked to sit toward the back when he watched his own—because he was watching the audience even more than he was watching the movie.

The cinema was packed. The scene with Mrs. Castevet in Rosemary’s apartment came on. Ruth Gordon asks Mia Farrow if she can use the phone in the other room. Mia says yes and points her toward the bedroom.

Roman leaned closer to his wife and whispered to her, “You remember when you asked me why I changed the shot?”

She had forgotten it, but she remembered now. “Yes.”

“Watch this,” he said, and pointed, but he didn’t point at the screen. He pointed instead at the whole sea of heads that sat before them, about six hundred of them.

On-screen, Mia Farrow as Rosemary takes a glance at the old woman in her bedroom, and the movie cuts to what she sees. Which is the shot of Ruth Gordon as Mrs. Castevet sitting on the bed, talking on the telephone, partly obscured by the left-hand doorframe.

Then suddenly Sharon witnessed all six hundred heads in front of her lean slightly to the right in order to see around the doorframe. Sharon let out a small gasp at the sight. Of course they couldn’t see any better by moving their heads—the shot was the shot. Nor did they intellectually know they leaned to the right; they did it instinctively. So Roman had manipulated six hundred people, and soon that number would grow to millions all over the world, to do something they would never do if they were thinking. But they weren’t thinking. Roman was doing their thinking for them.

Why did he do it?

Because he could.

She looked at him and he gave her that same knowing elfin grin he had given her on the set that day, but this day she understood it. The only thought in her head was: WOW!

There are times when Sharon knows she didn’t just fall in love with and marry a good movie director. She fell in love with and married a cinematic Mozart. That was one of those times.

Yet the 35mm print that is being projected on the Bruin’s screen that she’s in is about as far away from that level of cinematic artistry as the earth was to the moon. The Wrecking Crew isn’t a film, it’s a movie. And it isn’t even a good movie. That is, unless you get a laugh out of seeing Dean Martin play Matt Helm. And since this is Dean Martin’s fourth Matt Helm movie, apparently a lot of people get a laugh out of seeing Dean Martin play Matt Helm. (Dean Martin’s deal on the Matt Helm movies was so good that he made more money on the first three than Sean Connery made on the first five Bond movies. Which infuriated the Scottish tightwad Connery.)

As Sharon makes her way down the darkened auditorium aisle looking for a seat, she can see that the scene being projected on the screen is the one of Matt Helm landing in Denmark.

Oh, great , she thinks, the hotel scene where she makes her big entrance is next. As she scooches sideways down an empty row, she glances around the dim auditorium. There are about thirty-five to forty people scattered around the huge picture palace.

As she takes a seat toward the middle of the row, on-screen Dean as Matt makes a quip to a sexy stewardess, and the audience laughs.

Good , she thinks, they’re laughers and they’re enjoying the movie. Sharon removes from her purse the huge glasses she wears whenever she watches a movie, puts them on, and settles into her seat just as secret agent Matt Helm, dressed in his turtleneck-and-sport-coat ensemble, enters the lobby of the Danish hotel.

Two different villainous female spies, Elke Sommer and Tina Louise, keep him under surveillance. As Helm speaks to the Danish desk clerk, “ T. Louise ,” speaking in what sounds like it’s supposed to be a Hungarian accent, approaches the secret agent, making both contact and a date for later that night.

When she slinks away, Matt Helm turns to the desk clerk, quipping in his familiar Dean Martin delivery, “This is some hotel you have here.”

Enter Sharon Tate as her clumsy character, undercover secret agent “Freya Carlson” …

As Sharon stood off camera, on location in Denmark, waiting for her director, Phil Karlson, to call action, she thought back to when she first read the script, five months earlier.

When she heard she was being offered a part in the new Dean Martin/Matt Helm secret-agent spoof, she naturally assumed she’d be playing a seductive chic-styled spy-film sexpot. And if she’d been offered one of the roles the film’s other three leading ladies—Elke Sommer, Nancy Kwan, and Tina Louise—were playing, she would have been correct. But her character, Freya Carlson, was Matt Helm’s beautiful but inept and bumbling sidekick. Sharon had already acted in two comedies prior to The Wrecking Crew : the Tony Curtis sex farce Don’t Make Waves and Roman’s film The Fearless Vampire Killers . But neither comedy allowed her to be funny. While the other actors (Tony Curtis, Roman Polanski, Jack MacGowran) in both films ran around maniacally, did pratfalls, and made faces, Sharon was just asked to act vacant and look alluring (or “sexy little me”). How ridiculously good she looked in a bikini in Don’t Make Waves was played for some comic effect. But, unlike with Leigh Taylor-Young in I Love You, Alice B. Toklas !, the film never took advantage of her character’s comic possibilities.

But the role of Freya Carlson was different. In this comedy, she was supposed to be the comic relief. Comic relief opposite Dean Martin, one of the best light comedians in the business. Also since her character was a klutz, a performance built around physical comedy (pratfalls, falling in mud puddles, knocking over things), in essence she was being asked to play the Jerry Lewis part opposite Dean Martin! Sharon jumped at the opportunity.