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

Pussycat nods her head. “I’m telling you, Cliff, Charlie’s a far-out cat. You’re gonna dig ’em, and I know he’s gonna dig the fuck outta you.”

As Cliff turns all of his attention back on the road, he admits, “Well, I gotta say, I am rather curious to meet this Charlie fella.”

Chapter Twenty

Sexy Evil Hamlet

While Rick Dalton, with the use of his reel-to-reel tape recorder, is going over the lines for the next scene, he hears a knock on his trailer door. He pushes the pause button on the machine and the tape reels stop in mid-rotation.

“Yes?” he says to the door.

“Hello, Mr. Dalton,” the second-second assistant director says. “If you’re ready, Sam would like to have a word with you on set.”

“I’ll be right out,” Rick tells him.

Rick looks around his trailer. Oh shit, I’m gonna hafta clean this place up before I leave , he thinks. And I’m gonna hafta come up with a good excuse why the window’s broken. The actual reason the window is broken is that when he entered the trailer after performing the last scene he shot, he was so angry with himself, he flung his cowboy hat across the room so hard he broke the window. The reason he was so angry with himself was due to an embarrassing moment on set when he kept fucking up his lines. Now, actors go up on their lines all the time. But the reason it caused Rick anguish was how it made him look. For three hours last night, Rick worked hard learning his lines. Rick knew he had a lot of lines to learn for today’s shoot. Professionals know their lines, and Rick is a professional.

But professionals don’t usually drink eight whiskey sours till they pass out drunk, not remembering how they got to bed. Now, some acting professionals do do that. But over the years they’ve learned how to handle it. But those actors (Richard Burton and Richard Harris) are professional drunks. Rick’s still an amateur.

In the generation before drugs and weed became de rigueur among SAG members, alcohol was the monkey on most of their backs. Now, a lot of them started drinking for the same reasons their children would take drugs. They would just drift into it as an escape, till it got out of hand. But some came by their alcoholism honestly.

You must remember a lot of leading men of the fifties served in World War Two. And a lot of men who became actors in the late fifties and early sixties served in Korea. And a lot of those men saw things during the war they could never unsee. And since their generation understood this, their alcoholism was tolerated, to a large degree.

Both World War Two hero Neville Brand and classic World War Two dogface Lee Marvin were allowed to be drunk on set without the insurance company closing down the production. As Marvin got older, he seemed more and more haunted by the ghosts of the soldiers he killed on the battlefield. During the climax of his 1974 western, The Spikes Gang , when Marvin’s character is supposed to shoot his young co-star Gary Grimes (the young lad from The Summer of ’42 ), apparently Grimes’s look or age or both brought to mind a young soldier Marvin killed during the war. The Oscar-winning tough guy sat in his trailer and drank himself into a stupor in order to have the courage to face what he had done and what he must now pretend to do. And the proof is in the pudding. The rest of The Spikes Gang is an okay seventies’ western. Enjoyable enough to watch, but not memorable enough to stay in the mind. Except for that climactic violent shoot-out and the vicious expression on Marvin’s totem-pole face.

In George C. Scott’s leading-man actor’s contract was a stipulation that three days of the production would be lost due to the actor’s alcoholism.

Before he practically became a skid-row case in the seventies, even Aldo Ray’s excessive drinking was somewhat tolerated by film production companies.

Rick Dalton has no such excuses. His drinking is caused by a three-way combination of self-loathing, self-pity, and boredom.

Rick grabs Caleb’s hat, slides into Caleb’s brown rawhide fringe jacket, and exits the trailer, making sure the second-second AD doesn’t get a good look at the mess he made out of his acting trailer. As the crew hustles and bustles and horses clop their hooves in the dirt, Rick is led down the main street of the Royo del Oro western-town movie set and delivered back to Caleb DeCoteau headquarters, the Gilded Lily saloon. As Rick walks through the batwing doors, he sees the crew setting up the camera on one side of the set. Opposite the 35mm camera lens stands Sam Wanamaker by himself, next to a handsome high-back mahogany chair. His director summons him over with a hand gesture. “Hey, Rick, come over here a minute, I want to show you something.”

“Sure thing, Sam,” Rick says, as he double-times it over to Mr. Wanamaker.

Sam stands behind the sturdy wooden chair, lays his hands on the back of it, and says, “Rick, this is the chair from which you’ll make your ransom demands for Mirabella.”

“Well, great, Sam,” Rick drawls. “That’s a damn good-lookin’ chair.”

“But I don’t want you to think of it as a chair,” Sam corrects.

“You don’t want me to think of it as a chair?” a perplexed Rick repeats.

“No, I do not,” Sam says.

“What do you want me to think of it as?” Rick questions.

“I want you to think of it as a throne. The throne of Denmark!” he concludes.

Having not read Hamlet , Rick has no idea Hamlet was Danish, so he doesn’t comprehend the “throne of Denmark” reference.

He repeats to his director, somewhat incredulously, “The throne of Denmark?”

“And you are a sexy evil Hamlet,” Sam says with flourish.

Oh Christ, this fucking Hamlet horseshit again , Rick thinks.

But instead of saying that, he just repeats what Sam said. “Sexy evil Hamlet.”

Sam points at him with a strong index finger and says, “Ex-act-ly,” as if he’s saying, Eureka! Then Sam continues with his own Shakespearean performance. “And little Mirabella is your pint-sized Ophelia.”

Rick’s not sure who Ophelia is, but he assumes she’s a character in Hamlet , so he just nods along as Sam continues his subtextual Hamlet web-spinning. “Caleb, Hamlet. Both in control. Both in power.”

“Both in power,” Rick repeats.

“Both mad,” Sam says.

“Both mad?” Rick asks.

Sam nods his head yes. “In Hamlet’s case, due to the murder of his father at the hands of his uncle.” Then, as an aside adds, “Who’s also fucking his mother.”

“Actually, I didn’t know that,” Rick mumbles under his breath.

“And in Caleb’s case—syphilis,” Sam says.

“ Syphilis ?” Rick says, surprised. “I got syphilis? I’m crazy?”

Sam nods his head in the affirmative to each question.

“Look, Sam,” Rick reminds him, “I told you I ain’t read much Shakespeare.”

With a dismissive wave of his hand, Sam assures Rick, “That’s not important. All you have to do is seize the throne.”

“Seize the throne?” Ricks repeats.

“You’ve got to rule Denmark,” Sam declares.

I guess Hamlet is Danish , Rick thinks.

And Sam finishes his Prince of Denmark analogy: “And you’re going to rule it violent , rule it cruel , you’re going to rule it like a cowboy De Sade, but you’re going to rule !”

De Sade? Who’s that , wonders Rick, another character from Hamlet?

Sam continues with his directorial pep-talk performance. “Mirabella is the most precious thing in the world to these Lancer men.”

“She’s a beautiful girl,” Rick interjects.