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

Also, because the debate was allowed to grow, it led to more pertinent and practical questions. Like exactly what would the military do if Sweden was occupied by a foreign adversary? And what should they do?

Cliff never wondered what Americans would do if the Russians, or the Nazis, or the Japanese, or the Mexicans, or the Vikings, or Alexander the Great ever occupied America by force. He knew what Americans would do. They’d shit their pants and call the fucking cops. And when they realized the police not only couldn’t help them but were working on behalf of the occupation, after a brief period of despair, they’d fall in line.

But the more the film unspooled, the more confusing it became. Cliff could see a lot of that was on purpose and some of it was just that it’s a weird movie.

But the more he watched it, the more intrigued he was by the film’s gamesmanship. What is the real Lena story and what is Vilgot’s film?

At one point, he wondered why the movie is getting so damn melodramatic. Then he realized, it’s Vilgot’s movie that’s getting melodramatic. The movie Vilgot isn’t as good a filmmaker as the real Vilgot.

The implications of what’s real and what’s a movie interested Cliff. Especially when Cliff thought about it later and realized the implications of Lena’s father’s involvement in the movie. Wait a minute, so the whole story of Lena’s father isn’t real? Is he her father, or is he just an actor playing the role of her father? And that’s acknowledging that in real life he is an actor playing her father. But is he the movie Lena’s father, or is he an actor playing her father in Vilgot’s movie ?

All these cinematic questions intrigued Cliff far more than they did Miss Himmelsteen. He felt her leaning back from the screen, while she felt him lean forward. At some point, he heard her say under her breath, “I am bored yellow.”

That’s cool , he thought. It’s a weird movie.

Okay, all this cinema verité stuff is all well and good, but what about the movie’s claim to fame, the fucking? That’s why Cliff came to see the movie (not entirely), but he was curious. And it’s most definitely the reason he took Miss Himmelsteen. The man who engages Lena in the sex scenes that originally got the film seized by customs when it was first sent over from Stockholm is not Vilgot (Cliff was glad he didn’t have to see that tub of shit fuck). It’s a shady married guy (played by Börje Ahlstedt) who Lena meets through her father.

While watching the first real sex scene ever projected in American cinemas, between Lena and Börje in the young woman’s apartment, Cliff had the sensation he was watching something new. Recently, other mainstream films had played patty-cake with these types of scenes. The nipple-suckle lesbian seduction between Susannah York and Coral Browne in The Killing of Sister George. Anne Heywood’s masturbation scene in The Fox. Oliver Reed and Alan Bates’s nude wrestling match by the fireplace in Women in Love (Cliff never saw that flick, but the trailer for it made his jaw drop). But Sjöman’s nude sex scene broke new ground for mainstream theatrical distribution. The film was originally seized by U.S. Customs on the grounds of obscenity. The movie’s American distributor, Grove Press, went to court to fight for it, lost the first battle when a federal district court upheld the customs ban. But that was Grove Press’s strategy. They wanted to appeal and have the judgment overturned. That way, a judgment would be passed down that didn’t just apply to this film but to all films with this type of provocative sexual material. And that’s exactly what happened when the U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the findings of the federal court, turning Vilgot Sjöman’s film I Am Curious (Yellow) into the cause célèbre film of the moment. And ushered in a new wave of sexuality into modern mainstream cinema. It became the first and by far the most profitable of a small wave of artistically minded erotic films that would prosper for a few years, while both the film industry and audiences decided how far down this road they were willing to go—with the pornographers momentarily sidelined, wondering how much ground the mainstream was willing to cede.

As Cliff and Miss Himmelsteen watched the sex scene in Lena’s apartment, they were both gripped by the exciting sensation of seeing something new for the first time, and they intertwined fingers once the scene got going.

Cliff thought back to what Richard Schickel wrote in that Life magazine in Marvin Schwarz’s outer office:

Ten—even five—years ago, this would have been dreadfully shocking aesthetically and culturally, not to mention morally. But we have in every area of thought and art been brought so teasingly close to this level of explicitness that it’s a relief to arrive there and finally be done with it.

The first sex scene in I Am Curious (Yellow) , and for all intents and purposes modern cinema, wasn’t exactly erotic (Cliff didn’t get an erection), but the first flash of explicit nudity was for sure titillating. But what really made it memorable was how witty it was. Director Vilgot Sjöman filmed the first real sex scene to hit these shores like the comedy of errors most quickie trysts turn out to be. Sjöman strives to stress the realistic awkwardness involved in coupling. The couple wants to get it on; we the audience, who have been waiting for this the whole movie, want them to get it on; but the director throws one realistic obstacle after another in the way of their midday quickie. After many attempts, Börje can’t get Lena’s pants unbuttoned, and she slightly bitches him out for his fumbling (“Can’t you do it?”), till she’s forced to stop kissing and take matters in her own hands, removing her pants herself. He tries to fuck her standing up; she stops him (“I can’t do that”), a statement obviously based on past experience. When they have to go to another room to retrieve a mattress, they shuffle like little toy soldiers with their pants binding their ankles together. They practically destroy a room retrieving the mattress, yank it into the living room, then realize Lena’s recording equipment is stacked all over everything (reel-to-reel tape recorders, loose tapes, microphones), so they need to pile all that shit up if they want to lay the mattress on the floor and fuck.

Cliff thought it was one of the best scenes in a movie he’d ever seen. It’s definitely the most realistic. He’s been in apartments like that, fucked a girl like that on a mattress like that on a floor like that. Cliff has quickly stacked up magazines, comic books, paperbacks, and record albums to fuck girls on floors, couches, beds, and the backseats of cars. Cliff has also been known to travel great distances with his pants tight around his ankles with only his fully erect penis to guide the way.

And Cliff thought the fucking-on-the-bridge scene was even sexier. Cliff loves fucking in public. He loves making out in public, getting his cock sucked in public, and being jerked off in public. After those two scenes, Cliff thinks he’s seen the film’s two big moments. But neither he nor Miss Himmelsteen were prepared for the pubic hair scene. It’s the scene where Lena and Börje lie naked together and talk as they fondle each other, her face right next to his flaccid penis, her fingers moving in and out of his generous bush of pubic hair, planting light kisses on his cock. Sitting in the cinema in Westwood, holding hands with Miss Himmelsteen, watching a scene like that in a real movie, starring a real actress , Cliff felt that he was watching the dawn of a new day in cinema.