Idk maybe just wanted to show how much of a badass pitt was supposed to be.
Did you catch when bruce shitted on chuck norris?
New Trailer: Tarantino: Once Upon a Time In Hollywood - Charles Manson story
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Did you catch when bruce shitted on chuck norris?
https://www.spin.com/featured/charles-manson-woodstock-summer-of-69-spin-1994-cover-story/
Charles Manson vs. Woodstock: SPIN’s 1994 Cover Story, ‘Summer of ’69’
Written By Mike Rubin September 25 2015, 1:21 PM ET
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I was flattered, of course, when SPIN decided to put my 5,000-word thinkpiece contrasting the 25th anniversaries of Woodstock and the Manson Family murders on the cover of the September 1994 issue (if I recall correctly, I think it bumped off Kate Moss), but also a little embarrassed. After all, my essay culminated in a screed of decrying the lazy, persistent use of Charles Manson as a countercultural signifier, and now here was Charlie on the cover of SPIN in a bloodcurdling stop-sign red and white, casting his witchy glare from newsstands yet again. Kind of a mixed message, no?
Looking back, the apex of the knee-jerk negativism I was exhorting against was still a few years off, probably cresting with the “Break Stuff” nihilism of Woodstock ’99, while the poster child for the cruel kitsch I termed “concentration camp” would ultimately turn out to be Marilyn Manson, then still a neophyte who I actually interviewed for the story but ended up cutting out because he had nothing remotely interesting or original to say (surprising, eh?). Even though my article was published long enough ago that it recently celebrated its own 15th anniversary, Charles Manson remains a durable icon of lurid fascination — on weekends he’s still the “M” in MSNBC — but does anyone remember who in the helter skelter Evan Dando was?
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— Mike Rubin, as taken from SPIN Greatest Hits: 25 Years of Heretics, Heroes, and the New Rock’n’Roll
[This story was originally published in the September 1994 issue of SPIN. In honor of SPIN’s 30th anniversary, we’ve republished this piece as part of our ongoing “30 Years, 30 Stories” series.]
“Well it’s 1969 OK / All across the U.S.A. / It’s another year for me and you / Another year with nothin’ to do…” — The Stooges, “1969”
It’s a bit unfair to use the benefit of hindsight’s bifocals to cast doubt on the Nostradamic abilities of Iggy Stooge, but in retrospect 1969 was anything but just “another year” for me, you, or anybody. Although 1968 — with its tragic assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and violent upheaval in the streets — is generally considered the most turbulent year in modern American history, 1969, specifically its summer months, has proven to have had a more lasting resonance among the various streams of popular culture.
Consider these cataclysmic happenings. On June 28, 1969, a routine harassment raid by police on a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village touched off several days of rioting, inaugurating the modern gay-rights movement. On July 19, on an island off Martha’s Vineyard named Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy deep-sixed his presidential hopes permanently when his car swerved off a bridge and into the drink; Kennedy escaped, but his companion, young campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne, remained trapped in the car and drowned. Astronaut Neil Armstrong’s stroll on the surface of the moon on July 20 neatly marked the end of the first era of human progress, as man physically reached past the confines of the earth to touch another celestial body and somewhere in Canada, Bryan Adams got his first real six-string, bought at a five-and-dime, and played it till his fingers bled.
The summer of ‘69, however, is most closely associated in the collective memory with Woodstock, the legendary concert festival that has come to symbolize the breakthrough of rock culture into the mainstream as an unchallenged commercial force. From August 15 to 17 in Bethel, New York, a sleepy rural hamlet 90 miles north of New York City, a 600-acre dairy farm and alfalfa field was transformed into what was advertised as the “Woodstock Music and Art Fair Presents an Aquarian Exposition.” Organizers planned for a crowd of 100,000 paying $18 each, but when almost 500,000 young people showed up and stormed the gates, the event became a celebration of things free: music, expression, spirit. A million and a half more concertgoers remained in traffic gridlock for 20 miles outside the site, but those who got in braved a steady downpour and a sea of mud to enjoy a lineup of 27 of rock’s top acts, including the Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and, lest we forget, Sha Na Na, before Jimi Hendrix brought the festival weekend to a close with an electrified rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” which for many heralded the dawning of “the Age of Aquarius.”
But just how long a cultural moment was this Aquarian Age? Across the country in Los Angeles, less than a week before the festival, on the evening of August 9, intruders snuck into the Benedict Canyon home of filmmaker Roman Polanski and brutally murdered his wife, actress Sharon Tate — eight months pregnant — and her guests: Hollywood hairstylist Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger and her boyfriend, Polish emigré and pharmaceutical enthusiast Voytek Frykowski, and wrong-place-at-wrong-time teenager Steven Parent. The next night in L.A.’s Los Feliz neighborhood, grocery-store owner Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, were similarly slaughtered. Linking the two crime scenes was the barbarity — a total of 169 stab wounds between the seven victims — and the bizarre messages scrawled on the walls in the victims’ own blood.
Three thousand miles apart, the crimes and the concert seemed to have no connection, aside from some festival-goers hearing about the murders on the radio as they drove up through the country toward Bethel. But the subsequent arrests of hippie doppelgänger Charles Manson and his confused and drug-addled band of youthful followers proved to be far more sinister and pervasive than any brown acid making the rounds at Max Yasgur’s farm, serving to symbolically bum out all the good vibes that the Woodstock Nation had wrought, and subsequently giving birth to a persistent nihilism and knee-jerk cynicism that dogs rock’s underground circles to this day.
Twenty-five years later, the anniversary of Woodstock is being marked by a fanfare of media memoirs, CD and movie reissues, and at least two different festivals in the general vicinity of the original show. The anniversary of the Tate and LaBianca murders, however, is being celebrated in its own determined, if less spectacular, fashion, especially by a growing subculture that views Manson as some sort of a misunderstood hero. Mythologized, if not lionized, by the likes of Axl Rose, Evan Dando, and Trent Reznor, among others, Manson is now a familiar figure on album covers, poster art, and T-shirts. As the most enduring symbol of the death of flower power, he’s earned a high countercultural Q-rating as an unwitting theoretician of punk, exerting an influence on rock’s anti-establishment attitude that has yet to be fully measured.
To get to the bottom of the purportedly pessimistic outlook of Generalization X (and then go back to the top of the slide), one has to start with Charles Manson. Approaching the silver anniversary of his crimes, Manson is the only figure who can compete with Malcolm X for the kind of iconic power that attracts disenchanted, disenfranchised, and disaffected white kids. Given the option between Woodstock’s and Manson’s subtexts — love or hate, peace or war, tastes-great or less-filling — young people are making a surprising choice, perhaps not even fully certain of who Manson is and what he stands for. In the words of graphic artist and subcultural observer Frank Kozik, “Charlie’s winning.”
CREDIT: Getty Images
Sorting out all its historical significance 25 years down the line, 1969 flickers as a schizophrenic year full of contradictory messages. Of course, the number “69” visually resembles a yin-yang symbol, so a sense of duality does seem implicit. Thus, it’s somehow fitting that there will be not just one, but two anniversary concerts to mark Woodstock’s first quarter-century.
On August 13 and 14, on the original Sullivan County site of Yasgur’s farm, a rather modest show with the name of Bethel ’94 will take place, featuring Woodstock ’69 veterans like John Sebastian, Richie Havens, Melanie, and Country Joe McDonald. Meanwhile, on the same weekend in Saugerties, New York, 50 miles to the northeast, the promoters of the ‘69 festival will present Woodstock ’94, “Two More Days of Peace & Music,” with a lineup of over 24 bands including Aerosmith, Metallica, Arrested Development, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bob Dylan, Porno for Pyros, and, according to the concerts press release, “the greatest array of port-a-johns’ in the history of Western civilization.” The Saugerties show is planned as a massive affair combining good-ol’-days cause-thumping (excepting the booking of unrepentant homophobe Shabba Ranks) and state-of-the-art technology, with an interactive theme park, food markets, an environmental awareness area, pay-per-view satellite hookup, and a feature film and soundtrack album already in the offing. Virtual utopia, anyone?
All the nostalgic hoopla, of course, is predicated on the notion that Woodstock ’69 was an event worth emulating. After all, there were other large music festivals at the time; why doesn’t the zeitgeist cry out for “Monterey Pop ’92” or “Isle of Wight ’95?” According to Woodstock ’94 co-producer Joel Rosenman, Woodstock ushered in an understanding of “Aquarian qualities,” which he defines as “a heightened sense of importance placed on the attributes of community, neighborliness, love for other people, respect for the planet… and tolerance for diversity.”
“It seemed like the dawn of a new age,” says Rosenman. “Kids who had previously been convinced by the establishment that they were aberrations stood up, looked around, and saw half a million of themselves as far as the eye could see, and suddenly realized that they were not weirdos, that they were the new generation.”
“It was the high-water mark of people’s ideals actually coinciding with their behavior,” says Atlantic Records’ president, Danny Goldberg, who covered the ’69 fest for Billboard. “It became a symbol of what people can do as a community, even if most of the time we don’t.”
“It was the first time so many people were together without it being a demonstration,” muses Rick Danko of the Band, who performed at Woodstock ’69 and may also play at the Saugerties show.
“The goal,” says satirist Paul Krassner, who watched the show from the press tent, “was to try to bring the feelings that you had at Woodstock into the real world.”
Ed Saunders, author of The Family, calls Manson “a performance artist” who “probably polishes the swastika on his forehead” when he knows that Barbara Walters is coming.
Back in the real world, not every observer among the countercultural critics present was so enamored of what they had witnessed. Ellen Willis, reviewing the festival for the New Yorker, warned that “before history is completely rewritten… [it should be noted that] the cooperative spirit did not stem from solidarity in an emergency… so much as from a general refusal to adopt any sort of emergency psychology,” adding that “by Sunday I couldn’t help suspecting that some of the beautiful, transcendent acceptance going around was just plain old passivity.”
“Had helicopters not airlifted food and doctors, had water purifiers not been hastily installed, had the locals not caught the sharing spirit, Woodstock would have become Lord of the Flies,” remembers underground journalist Abe Peckin his book Uncovering the Sixties.
“‘I left one thing out of my Woodstock article,'” critic Robert Christgau quotes writer Tom Smucker as saying. “I left out how boring it was.” Musician, poet, and journalist Ed Sanders remembers that even shortly after the fact, Woodstock seemed of little significance to the bohemians on New York’s Lower East Side. “The light from Woodstock did not reach 12th Street and Avenue A.” The ex-Fug attributes Woodstock’s eventual media rhapsodization to “the visual gestalt of it, you know, two naked kids in a pond washing each other.”
At some point after the festival, however, history was indeed rewritten, and the concert became WOODSTOCK in bold capital letters, something approaching paradise on earth for those hip enough and old enough to have been there (or claim that they were). And the proof that there was a nation of millions (or at least 500,000) ready and able to gather and peacefully partake of this crazy rock’n’roll music also meant there was a substantial new market to be catered to and exploited. Everyone wanted to get a piece of the Woodstock mystique, and it was sold in millions of units. There was a feature film, a three-record soundtrack, then another double album of music left off the first soundtrack. Woodstock lent its name not only to a generation, but to the inscrutable yellow bird in Charles Schultz’s Peanuts, who in turn became a fowl-feathered shill for Met Life. This summer, Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner” has been appropriated by Budweiser to hype the World Cup. Somewhere in the translation, Woodstock’s idealism got stuck in the mud.
Young people have been force-fed Woodstock’s monumental importance — its hipness, its bigness, its wowness, its nowness — until it has become an official gospel of the rock’n’roll church, to be swallowed like an Owsley blotter communion wafer. You either jealously wish you had been there to partake in history, or you deny it was anything more than a rustic version of a weekend at MTV’s Beach House. What’s more, the age schism which in the ’60s pitted young against old is still with us, albeit in a more benign manifestation. The generation gap may have been replaced by the Gap Generation, but kids and their parents still march to the beat of a different drum machine.
Bassist Mike Inez, who will perform with his band Alice in Chains at Woodstock ’94, experienced Woodstock like most of his peers, through the soundtrack albums and the movie. “With all those heavyweight musicians thrown into one place at one time, it was kind of magical,” says Inez. While he’s honored that his band was chosen to play at Saugerties, Inez feels that ticket prices — $135, a considerable leap from the $18 that was charged (and rarely paid) in 1969 — are “pretty steep.” Inez adds, “It would be really unfortunate if kids went down to experience Woodstock and got this corporate jerk-off moneymaking thing.”
Many observers fear that’s just what the Saugerties show has become; with a projected cost of $30 million, about $20 million underwritten by PolyGram, some locals have taken to calling the event “Greedstock.” The product of extensive market research, Woodstock ’94 has been meticulously plotted, with regard to transportation, security, and concessions. The concert’s TV ads trumpet the show as a “convergence of generations,” but it’s more a convergence of corporations; even the commercial itself features the familiar dove of peace sitting on a guitar neck, now cloned into two birds, intertwined with a Pepsi logo. “It’s just a gig, except that they’re putting Woodstock, Inc.’ on it,” remarks Henry Rollins, also scheduled to play Saugerties.
The “gig” is expected to draw a sellout crowd of 250,000, partly a result of the strength of the lineup, and partly due to nostalgia and mystique. The power of the myth of the shared rite is so strong that people are willing to pay the hundred-dollar-plus initiation fee to experience the “magic,” even if it’s a prepackaged simulacrum of the Woodstock vibe. “The idea wasn’t to go to a shopping mall and buy and consume,” says Michael Wadleigh, director of Woodstock, the Academy Award-winning documentary of the original festival. “I have passed on being involved in any of these Woodstock events because all they are trying to do is cash in and make money… We do this to everything — Mom, apple pie, the flag. I guess that’s the American way.”
“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the ’60s ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true.” — Joan Didion, The White Album
Despite 25 years of celebrated killers with flashier stats and higher body counts, America’s hate affair with Charles Manson continues unabated. He’s done the talk-show circuit from Tom Snyder to Geraldo, all without leaving the prison grounds. Comedian Ben Stiller turned him into a gibberish-spouting but lovable Lassie-surrogate on his now-defunct Fox sketch series. When ABC wanted to inaugurate Diane Sawyer’s new Turning Point series this past March, they sent their camera crews behind bars to stage a Family reunion, and the result was the highest-rated debut of a newsmagazine show ever. Manson’s Nielsen following is longstanding; when the made-for-TV docudrama Helter Skelter aired back in April 1976, it earned the top ratings ever for any television show up to that point.
“It’s the most bizarre murder case that we have ever had in America,” says Vincent Bugliosi, the former L.A. deputy district attorney who prosecuted Manson and later went onto write about the case in Helter Skelter, still No. 1 among True Crime books with over six million copies sold. “If you compare the Manson Family’s lifestyle to other mass murderers, it’s certainly much more appealing to kids who want to drop out.” Poster artist (and societal dropout) Frank Kozik agrees: “Most people would like to be Charlie for a day; have a bunch off fine hippie chicks sucking your dick all day long, taking acid, getting off on the system. It has its appeal.” (Ironically, Manson owes a great deal of his durability to the forces of liberal humanitarianism; Manson and his female disciples were all sentenced to be executed, but California repealed the death penalty less than a year after the guilty verdicts. Instead of getting the chair, Manson receives four letters a day in prison.)
Still, all hedonistic fantasies aside, Manson makes for an unlikely role model. At five feet two inches, he was nasty, brutish, and short; a con man, pimp, and car thief who spent most of his formative years buried within the penal system. Released in 1967 after spending 17 of his 32 years behind bars, he headed straight to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, where he quickly donned the costume of a Summer of Love casualty and began recruiting the middle-class cast-offs who, in L.A., would become the bedrock of his Family. Through a combination of prolific psychedelics and even more prolific sex, Manson built a loyal posse of lotus-eaters who were willing to do his bidding, whatever the whim; unlike his co-defendants/co-dependents Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten, and Tex Watson, Manson was charged and convicted not for taking part in the actual slayings, but for masterminding the murders through mind control.
Although their messages were antithetical, Manson and Woodstock are inextricably linked, with Manson considered the Grim Reaper of the Woodstock dream. If the murders and their portrayal in the press didn’t end the Aquarian Age, they at least splattered blood on the moon in the seventh house — one for each of the victims in the Polanski and LaBianca homes.
“It was horror on parade,” remembers Ed Sanders, who headed out from New York to L.A. to cover the trial, with his reportage later becoming the basis for his book The Family. “The right wing couldn’t have bought with a trillion dollars a better death to the ’60s scenario.” After the murders, recalls Paul Krassner, “people stopped picking up hitchhikers, police raided communes.” Older folks who already didn’t trust anyone under 30 now had their worst fears made flesh. “Your whole system is a game,” shouted Van Houten after hearing her guilty verdict. “Your children will turn against you.” It was youth subculture on trial, and President Nixon — elected with a mandate to “restore law and order” — was only too eager to pronounce a nation of defendants guilty.
Manson and the other Family members were indicted in the first week of December, the same week that concert promoter Bill Graham attempted to out-Woodstock Woodstock at a racetrack southeast of San Francisco called Altamont. When Hell’s Angels, acting as security, beat the life out of a young black fan at the front of the stage, it was the spirit of Manson all over again; those observers who weren’t yet convinced that Charlie Company had offed the ’60s now settled on Altamont as the cause of death. An anecdotal story in Christopher Andersen’s 1993 Mick Jagger biography even places Manson backstage at Altamont, smoking a joint and telling Mick what a big Stones fan he is. While totally spurious — Manson was in jail, after all — it is wishful allegorical thinking to place prime suspect Manson right there at the murder site.
Manson, though, was hardly a newcomer to the music scene; his has always been a rock’n’roll saga. In 1968, Manson was linked to Beach Boy drummer Dennis Wilson — the two shared a mutual taste for controlled substances, wild orgies, and good vibrations — with Charlie even living out of Wilson’s pad for some months. Manson tried to use Wilson to jump-start his own career, and one Manson composition, “Cease to Exist,” was indeed rewritten and recorded by the Beach Boys, appearing on their 1968 album 20/20as “Never Learn Not to Love.”
But Manson’s troubadourial endeavors were basically a bust. Manson’s “debut album,” Lie, seems less the work of a twisted, criminal mind than that of someone who doesn’t know how to tune. “Kids buy it thinking they’re going to get devil-worship music,” says Stephen Kaplan of New Jersey’s Performance Records, the distributor of Lie for the last ten years. “But when they get home and find they have an album of mediocre folk songs, a lot of them are disappointed.” Charles Manson Live at San Quentin, a bootleg on the British label Grey Matter packaged as a parody of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, has none of the cellblock charm of, say, Johnny Cash live at the same venue. In 1970, the Family even recorded its own album, imaginatively titled The Manson Family Sings the Songs of Charles Manson, a collection of lightweight campfire sing-alongs occasionally punctuated by demonic laughter. These records have some merit as artifact, but are eminently forgettable as art.
Except that rock’n’roll never forgets. Over the years, performers have consistently stepped forward to perform Manson’s songs, invariably for some reason that has little to do with the music itself. Last December, most notably, came the fallout from Guns N’ Roses’ “secret” cover of Manson’s 1968 “Look at Your Game Girl” at the end of The Spaghetti Incident? As “Charliegate” unfolded, it was unclear which the media found more repellent: the idea of Manson earning an estimated $62,000 in royalties for every one million Spaghettis sold, or Rose’s recommendation to “do yourself a favor and go find the originals.” Although Spaghetti eventually sold 1.1 million copies, the royalties issue ended up a bust. A 1971 federal court judgment diverts all of Manson’s mechanical royalties to Bartek Frykowski, son of murder victim Voytek Frykowski.
More than likely, it was Manson’s punk-rock street cred that brought Rose to perform the song in the first place. Since punk’s inception, Manson’s image has retained a powerful presence in no-future circles. As Johnny Rotten snorted, “The only good hippie is a dead hippie,” so what better poster boy than the man who had symbolically laid waste to them all en masse? “If you think about it, punk rock is about no rules: making your own culture, making your own thing,” suggests Kozik. “Well, he did that.” Oppositional, confrontational, and violent, Manson’s story is a classic punk-rock text.
Not surprisingly then, Manson references abound in the underground. Redd Kross, then still teenagers who could spell Red Cross, cut a version of Manson’s “Cease to Exist” on its 1982 debut album, Born Innocent, as well as its own irony-driven Tate-house tribute called “Charlie” (“Flag on the couch / Lady on the floor / Baby in the gut / Widdle biddy boy”). British proto-industrial pranksters Psychic TV recorded a 1983 cover of Manson’s “I’ll Never Say Never to Always” retitled “Always is Always.” Sonic Youth, with Lydia Lunch along for the ride, explored the taboo territory in “Death Valley 69″ on 1985’s Bad Moon Rising. SST Records was rumored to be releasing an album of Manson’s prison recordings in the mid-’80s, from tapes that Manson had sent to pen pal Henry Rollins, but according to Boston lawyer David Grossack, who was trying to find Manson a deal, the label got cold feet. (A spokesperson for SST denies any such project.)
On a different front, the avant-garde composer John Moran, a protégé of Philip Glass, staged his The Manson Family: An Opera at Lincoln Center in 1990. George Clinton has a Manson skeleton in his closet. Both Funkadelic’s 1971 Maggot Brain and 1972 America Eats Its Young include liner-note essays adapted from writings by the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a Satanic cult with reputed links to Manson that flourished in the late ’60s and early ‘70s. Manson mania might even be emigrating to the hip-hop nation: The name of the upcoming collaboration between Dr. Dre and Ice Cube is Helter Skelter.
But few performers have worked as hard at cornering the market on Manson name checks as the Lemonheads’ Evan Dando. The band’s 1988 album, Creator, includes a cover version of Manson’s “Your Home is Where You’re Happy,” a photo of Dando posing in front of a picture of Manson, and CD booklet thank-you’s to family members “Susan; Lynnette; Gypsy: Katie; Mary, Sandra; Leslie; Snake; Ouish; little Paul; of course, Charlie,” as well as the note “Evan would like to thank No Name Maddox a.k.a. Jesus Christ a.k.a. Soul” — all pseudonyms of Manson. More recently, Dando discussed Manson on “Ballarat” on 1990’s Lovey and, last year, posed with a copy of Manson’s Liein a promo spot for MTV’s 120 Minutes. Dando refused to comment for this article, but in a December 1993 interview with Request he explained his fascination. “Charlie is just like really, really good black humor,” he declared. “I was born in 1967, and it was, like, Manson and Altamont… the one-two punch. It was the first image I saw…of America that really stuck with me.”
Despite Dando’s best efforts, however, first prize in the Man(son) of the Year competition goes to Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor. In 1992, Reznor rented the Tate house on 10050 Cielo Drive where the first night of murders took place, building a portable studio there named “Le Pig,” where most of The Downward Spiral was recorded, including the songs “Piggy” and “March of the Pigs.” “PIG,” of course, was the message written on the front door in Sharon Tate’s blood. Not content with realizing the ’90s version of Jimmy Page renting Aleister Crowley’s mansion, Reznor started but never completed shooting the video for “Gave Up,” from the the 1992 EP, Broken, in the house. “It had bad karma all around,” says a crew member who worked on the aborted shoot. Moreover, in order to keep his, ahem, stranglehold on the title, one of Reznor’s first signings to his own Nothing Records label is the South Florida group Marilyn Manson, whose debut album, Portrait of an American Family, includes the song “My Monkey,” which borrows four lines of lyrics from Manson’s “Mechanical Man.”
More and more, Manson’s mug is turning up in the unlikeliest places, as the now familiar image of him from the cover of Life — the mushroom cloud of hair, the A-bomb stare that follows you across a room — has creepy-crawled out of the fringes and onto a variety of “Mansonia” memorabilia. “That’s one of the most charismatic photos of the f–king century,” says Kozik. “For good or bad, people react to it.” Manson turns up as a frequent muse in Kozik’s poster art, as well as in the work of artists like Joe Coleman and Raymond Pettibon, best known for his work on early Black Flag record sleeves. Rise Records, an Austin, Texas, label, uses Manson’s eyes as their logo (“Rise” was one of the “witchy” messages painted in blood on the living room wall of the LaBianca home).
Perhaps the entrepreneurs most responsible for boosting Manson’s product placement are the Lemmons Brothers of Zooport Riot Gear in Newport Beach, California. For two and a half years, Zooport has been plastering Manson’s face on the front of T-shirts with messages like “Charlie Don’t Surf,” “Support Family Values,” and “The Original Punk” on the back. They’ve sold more than 30,000 Manson shirts, over 20,000 since Axl Rose wore a shirt throughout GNR’s 1993 tour and their “Estranged” video. Zooport’s edge on the competition is that it’s the only Manson merchandising company with a signed royalty agreement with Charlie. The brothers got their share of bad press last year when they sent over $600 to Manson in prison, before Bartek Frykowski’s lawyers interceded. “Why should we give money to a drug dealer’s son?” protests Dan Lemmons. The brothers, who are fundamentalist Christians, instead donate the proceeds to the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.
The support Manson enjoys from right-wingers should come as no surprise. Manson’s white-power agenda was hardly a secret. Helter Skelter, Manson’s concept of an impending race war based on messages he thought the Beatles were transmitting to him through The White Album, would be frightening if it weren’t so harebrained. He forbade his followers to listen to Jimi Hendrix, calling him “black slave music.” “He hates women, hates blacks, hates Jews, likes guns,” says Sanders. “He’s a guy, a real guy.” Manson’s Aryan vision thing is a big hook for folks on the racialist fringe, where he’s a mascot for neo-Nazi groups like the Universal Order.
Meanwhile, in the world of mass murderer bubble-gum trading cards, Manson is a Mickey Mantle rookie card. Serial killers are big business these days, not just in the cultural margins, but in literature (Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Stephen Wright’s Going Native) and film (The Silence of the Lambs, Kalifornia, Natural Born killers). Manson’s name recognition makes him the spiritual figurehead of serial-killer chic espoused in such au courant white rage hate ‘zines as Answer Me! Romanticizing killers such as Manson is a way for these pomo rednecks to lash back against the perceived “marginalization” of white men, asserting their manhood against women, gays, and minorities.
One would assume that Manson fandom tests the limits of irony, to say nothing of good taste; for most people, especially the victims’ families, Manson’s legacy is only viciousness and dread, not a cheap laugh. But in a milieu where John Wayne Gacy is the next Jasper Johns and “political correctness” is portrayed as the greatest threat since the Red Menace, there are no longer any sacred cows. Anything that society would likely find repellent is exalted as a kind of cruel kitsch — call it “concentration camp.” In this mindset, nothing is too touchy to be a potential target for humor, from child molestation to murder. But while making sport of tragedy may seem to rob it of the ability to hurt, it also robs one of the ability to feel at all, not only for others, but for oneself. And that theft takes away something much greater — our humanity.
CREDIT: Getty Images
For a society that thrives on violence as entertainment, Charles Manson is a centerfold pinup. A defective product of the system, his own fallibility enables him to spit society’s hypocrisy right back at it: You don’t like me? Well, you made me what I am. And the more authority figures or the media cluck disapprovingly at him, the more his taboo appeal grows. He’s been chosen by a jury of his peers to be America’s bogeyman, and he plays the role to the hilt. (Ed Sanders calls him a “performance artist” who “probably polishes the swastika on his forehead” when he knows that Barbara Walters is coming.)
Rock has had a rich tradition of collaboration with the devil since Robert Johnson made his fateful deal back in the ’20s, but in an age where authenticity is key, a “realer” devil is needed. Not some abstract horned figure of lore and legend, or a mystical object of gobbledygook incantations and incense burning, but an actual, live devil in the flesh. We may not have Nixon to kick around anymore, but we still have Manson, an original gangsta.
The question of how Manson resonates in the culture as compared to Woodstock tends to break down along generational lines. Baby boomers cling leafy-green salad days, while younger folks in general reluctantly cast their metaphorical vote with negative creeps like Manson. Invoking Manson is a way for young people to exert their displeasure at boomer co-optation of countercultural milestones, at the fact that their very identity is measured in terms of their parents’ anniversaries.
However, the fact that Woodstock is widely considered hippie counterculture’s peak means that everything has been downhill from there — and it has been, at varying rates of velocity, depending on personal perspective or organizational allegiance. Today’s wet-behind-the-ears Mansonites are fueled by the spirit of betrayal, the sense that somewhere along the line the Woodstock generation copped out. For some, hitching their wagon to Manson is not merely wallowing in shock value or patented post-adolescent rebellion, but a reaction against those who are presumed to have dropped the ball. After all, if everything were still at the pristine natural state of the Aquarian Exposition, a new set of young turks would feel no need to disrupt the bliss.
“Look around you,” demands Kozik. “Do you see, like, love and togetherness and positive growth, or do you see everything f–king disintegrating at an exponential rate? You tell me. The empire is crumbling, buddy.” One wishes that this view were wrong, that the Woodstock ideal were the rule, but reality would seem to hold that violence and antipathy are more the norm. Crime and intolerance are on the rise. Nation rises up against nation. Nine Inch Nails is performing at Woodstock ’94.
But just because everything is coming down fast doesn’t make Charlie the winner. Anomie may seem to have carried the day, but that’s hardly cause for rejoicing; it’s tragedy. Even as a figure of righteous resistance to boomer oligarchy, even acknowledging the stuff that makes intellectual and emotional sense, Manson’s nihilistic equation only adds up to weak-ass s–t. In the end, everything he stands for is abhorrent and bankrupt; everything he endorses bitter, empty, reactionary. Is that all there is? Is that the best we can offer as a revolutionary warrior soul? The hippies may have failed, but there’s no bigger failure than Manson himself. He may be put forward as a symbol of insurrectionary power, of getting the fear, but ultimately he’s the very embodiment of cowardice. The Manson saga is fascinating, but only to a point. No matter how it’s retold, he’s still a convicted murderer, still a bigot, still a zero. He’s a loser, baby. So, if only figuratively, why can’t we kill him?
Charles Manson vs. Woodstock: SPIN’s 1994 Cover Story, ‘Summer of ’69’
Written By Mike Rubin September 25 2015, 1:21 PM ET
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I was flattered, of course, when SPIN decided to put my 5,000-word thinkpiece contrasting the 25th anniversaries of Woodstock and the Manson Family murders on the cover of the September 1994 issue (if I recall correctly, I think it bumped off Kate Moss), but also a little embarrassed. After all, my essay culminated in a screed of decrying the lazy, persistent use of Charles Manson as a countercultural signifier, and now here was Charlie on the cover of SPIN in a bloodcurdling stop-sign red and white, casting his witchy glare from newsstands yet again. Kind of a mixed message, no?
Looking back, the apex of the knee-jerk negativism I was exhorting against was still a few years off, probably cresting with the “Break Stuff” nihilism of Woodstock ’99, while the poster child for the cruel kitsch I termed “concentration camp” would ultimately turn out to be Marilyn Manson, then still a neophyte who I actually interviewed for the story but ended up cutting out because he had nothing remotely interesting or original to say (surprising, eh?). Even though my article was published long enough ago that it recently celebrated its own 15th anniversary, Charles Manson remains a durable icon of lurid fascination — on weekends he’s still the “M” in MSNBC — but does anyone remember who in the helter skelter Evan Dando was?
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— Mike Rubin, as taken from SPIN Greatest Hits: 25 Years of Heretics, Heroes, and the New Rock’n’Roll
[This story was originally published in the September 1994 issue of SPIN. In honor of SPIN’s 30th anniversary, we’ve republished this piece as part of our ongoing “30 Years, 30 Stories” series.]
“Well it’s 1969 OK / All across the U.S.A. / It’s another year for me and you / Another year with nothin’ to do…” — The Stooges, “1969”
It’s a bit unfair to use the benefit of hindsight’s bifocals to cast doubt on the Nostradamic abilities of Iggy Stooge, but in retrospect 1969 was anything but just “another year” for me, you, or anybody. Although 1968 — with its tragic assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy and violent upheaval in the streets — is generally considered the most turbulent year in modern American history, 1969, specifically its summer months, has proven to have had a more lasting resonance among the various streams of popular culture.
Consider these cataclysmic happenings. On June 28, 1969, a routine harassment raid by police on a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn in New York City’s Greenwich Village touched off several days of rioting, inaugurating the modern gay-rights movement. On July 19, on an island off Martha’s Vineyard named Chappaquiddick, Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy deep-sixed his presidential hopes permanently when his car swerved off a bridge and into the drink; Kennedy escaped, but his companion, young campaign worker Mary Jo Kopechne, remained trapped in the car and drowned. Astronaut Neil Armstrong’s stroll on the surface of the moon on July 20 neatly marked the end of the first era of human progress, as man physically reached past the confines of the earth to touch another celestial body and somewhere in Canada, Bryan Adams got his first real six-string, bought at a five-and-dime, and played it till his fingers bled.
The summer of ‘69, however, is most closely associated in the collective memory with Woodstock, the legendary concert festival that has come to symbolize the breakthrough of rock culture into the mainstream as an unchallenged commercial force. From August 15 to 17 in Bethel, New York, a sleepy rural hamlet 90 miles north of New York City, a 600-acre dairy farm and alfalfa field was transformed into what was advertised as the “Woodstock Music and Art Fair Presents an Aquarian Exposition.” Organizers planned for a crowd of 100,000 paying $18 each, but when almost 500,000 young people showed up and stormed the gates, the event became a celebration of things free: music, expression, spirit. A million and a half more concertgoers remained in traffic gridlock for 20 miles outside the site, but those who got in braved a steady downpour and a sea of mud to enjoy a lineup of 27 of rock’s top acts, including the Who, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Janis Joplin, Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young, and, lest we forget, Sha Na Na, before Jimi Hendrix brought the festival weekend to a close with an electrified rendition of “The Star Spangled Banner” which for many heralded the dawning of “the Age of Aquarius.”
But just how long a cultural moment was this Aquarian Age? Across the country in Los Angeles, less than a week before the festival, on the evening of August 9, intruders snuck into the Benedict Canyon home of filmmaker Roman Polanski and brutally murdered his wife, actress Sharon Tate — eight months pregnant — and her guests: Hollywood hairstylist Jay Sebring, coffee heiress Abigail Folger and her boyfriend, Polish emigré and pharmaceutical enthusiast Voytek Frykowski, and wrong-place-at-wrong-time teenager Steven Parent. The next night in L.A.’s Los Feliz neighborhood, grocery-store owner Leno LaBianca and his wife, Rosemary, were similarly slaughtered. Linking the two crime scenes was the barbarity — a total of 169 stab wounds between the seven victims — and the bizarre messages scrawled on the walls in the victims’ own blood.
Three thousand miles apart, the crimes and the concert seemed to have no connection, aside from some festival-goers hearing about the murders on the radio as they drove up through the country toward Bethel. But the subsequent arrests of hippie doppelgänger Charles Manson and his confused and drug-addled band of youthful followers proved to be far more sinister and pervasive than any brown acid making the rounds at Max Yasgur’s farm, serving to symbolically bum out all the good vibes that the Woodstock Nation had wrought, and subsequently giving birth to a persistent nihilism and knee-jerk cynicism that dogs rock’s underground circles to this day.
Twenty-five years later, the anniversary of Woodstock is being marked by a fanfare of media memoirs, CD and movie reissues, and at least two different festivals in the general vicinity of the original show. The anniversary of the Tate and LaBianca murders, however, is being celebrated in its own determined, if less spectacular, fashion, especially by a growing subculture that views Manson as some sort of a misunderstood hero. Mythologized, if not lionized, by the likes of Axl Rose, Evan Dando, and Trent Reznor, among others, Manson is now a familiar figure on album covers, poster art, and T-shirts. As the most enduring symbol of the death of flower power, he’s earned a high countercultural Q-rating as an unwitting theoretician of punk, exerting an influence on rock’s anti-establishment attitude that has yet to be fully measured.
To get to the bottom of the purportedly pessimistic outlook of Generalization X (and then go back to the top of the slide), one has to start with Charles Manson. Approaching the silver anniversary of his crimes, Manson is the only figure who can compete with Malcolm X for the kind of iconic power that attracts disenchanted, disenfranchised, and disaffected white kids. Given the option between Woodstock’s and Manson’s subtexts — love or hate, peace or war, tastes-great or less-filling — young people are making a surprising choice, perhaps not even fully certain of who Manson is and what he stands for. In the words of graphic artist and subcultural observer Frank Kozik, “Charlie’s winning.”
CREDIT: Getty Images
Sorting out all its historical significance 25 years down the line, 1969 flickers as a schizophrenic year full of contradictory messages. Of course, the number “69” visually resembles a yin-yang symbol, so a sense of duality does seem implicit. Thus, it’s somehow fitting that there will be not just one, but two anniversary concerts to mark Woodstock’s first quarter-century.
On August 13 and 14, on the original Sullivan County site of Yasgur’s farm, a rather modest show with the name of Bethel ’94 will take place, featuring Woodstock ’69 veterans like John Sebastian, Richie Havens, Melanie, and Country Joe McDonald. Meanwhile, on the same weekend in Saugerties, New York, 50 miles to the northeast, the promoters of the ‘69 festival will present Woodstock ’94, “Two More Days of Peace & Music,” with a lineup of over 24 bands including Aerosmith, Metallica, Arrested Development, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Bob Dylan, Porno for Pyros, and, according to the concerts press release, “the greatest array of port-a-johns’ in the history of Western civilization.” The Saugerties show is planned as a massive affair combining good-ol’-days cause-thumping (excepting the booking of unrepentant homophobe Shabba Ranks) and state-of-the-art technology, with an interactive theme park, food markets, an environmental awareness area, pay-per-view satellite hookup, and a feature film and soundtrack album already in the offing. Virtual utopia, anyone?
All the nostalgic hoopla, of course, is predicated on the notion that Woodstock ’69 was an event worth emulating. After all, there were other large music festivals at the time; why doesn’t the zeitgeist cry out for “Monterey Pop ’92” or “Isle of Wight ’95?” According to Woodstock ’94 co-producer Joel Rosenman, Woodstock ushered in an understanding of “Aquarian qualities,” which he defines as “a heightened sense of importance placed on the attributes of community, neighborliness, love for other people, respect for the planet… and tolerance for diversity.”
“It seemed like the dawn of a new age,” says Rosenman. “Kids who had previously been convinced by the establishment that they were aberrations stood up, looked around, and saw half a million of themselves as far as the eye could see, and suddenly realized that they were not weirdos, that they were the new generation.”
“It was the high-water mark of people’s ideals actually coinciding with their behavior,” says Atlantic Records’ president, Danny Goldberg, who covered the ’69 fest for Billboard. “It became a symbol of what people can do as a community, even if most of the time we don’t.”
“It was the first time so many people were together without it being a demonstration,” muses Rick Danko of the Band, who performed at Woodstock ’69 and may also play at the Saugerties show.
“The goal,” says satirist Paul Krassner, who watched the show from the press tent, “was to try to bring the feelings that you had at Woodstock into the real world.”
Ed Saunders, author of The Family, calls Manson “a performance artist” who “probably polishes the swastika on his forehead” when he knows that Barbara Walters is coming.
Back in the real world, not every observer among the countercultural critics present was so enamored of what they had witnessed. Ellen Willis, reviewing the festival for the New Yorker, warned that “before history is completely rewritten… [it should be noted that] the cooperative spirit did not stem from solidarity in an emergency… so much as from a general refusal to adopt any sort of emergency psychology,” adding that “by Sunday I couldn’t help suspecting that some of the beautiful, transcendent acceptance going around was just plain old passivity.”
“Had helicopters not airlifted food and doctors, had water purifiers not been hastily installed, had the locals not caught the sharing spirit, Woodstock would have become Lord of the Flies,” remembers underground journalist Abe Peckin his book Uncovering the Sixties.
“‘I left one thing out of my Woodstock article,'” critic Robert Christgau quotes writer Tom Smucker as saying. “I left out how boring it was.” Musician, poet, and journalist Ed Sanders remembers that even shortly after the fact, Woodstock seemed of little significance to the bohemians on New York’s Lower East Side. “The light from Woodstock did not reach 12th Street and Avenue A.” The ex-Fug attributes Woodstock’s eventual media rhapsodization to “the visual gestalt of it, you know, two naked kids in a pond washing each other.”
At some point after the festival, however, history was indeed rewritten, and the concert became WOODSTOCK in bold capital letters, something approaching paradise on earth for those hip enough and old enough to have been there (or claim that they were). And the proof that there was a nation of millions (or at least 500,000) ready and able to gather and peacefully partake of this crazy rock’n’roll music also meant there was a substantial new market to be catered to and exploited. Everyone wanted to get a piece of the Woodstock mystique, and it was sold in millions of units. There was a feature film, a three-record soundtrack, then another double album of music left off the first soundtrack. Woodstock lent its name not only to a generation, but to the inscrutable yellow bird in Charles Schultz’s Peanuts, who in turn became a fowl-feathered shill for Met Life. This summer, Hendrix’s “Star-Spangled Banner” has been appropriated by Budweiser to hype the World Cup. Somewhere in the translation, Woodstock’s idealism got stuck in the mud.
Young people have been force-fed Woodstock’s monumental importance — its hipness, its bigness, its wowness, its nowness — until it has become an official gospel of the rock’n’roll church, to be swallowed like an Owsley blotter communion wafer. You either jealously wish you had been there to partake in history, or you deny it was anything more than a rustic version of a weekend at MTV’s Beach House. What’s more, the age schism which in the ’60s pitted young against old is still with us, albeit in a more benign manifestation. The generation gap may have been replaced by the Gap Generation, but kids and their parents still march to the beat of a different drum machine.
Bassist Mike Inez, who will perform with his band Alice in Chains at Woodstock ’94, experienced Woodstock like most of his peers, through the soundtrack albums and the movie. “With all those heavyweight musicians thrown into one place at one time, it was kind of magical,” says Inez. While he’s honored that his band was chosen to play at Saugerties, Inez feels that ticket prices — $135, a considerable leap from the $18 that was charged (and rarely paid) in 1969 — are “pretty steep.” Inez adds, “It would be really unfortunate if kids went down to experience Woodstock and got this corporate jerk-off moneymaking thing.”
Many observers fear that’s just what the Saugerties show has become; with a projected cost of $30 million, about $20 million underwritten by PolyGram, some locals have taken to calling the event “Greedstock.” The product of extensive market research, Woodstock ’94 has been meticulously plotted, with regard to transportation, security, and concessions. The concert’s TV ads trumpet the show as a “convergence of generations,” but it’s more a convergence of corporations; even the commercial itself features the familiar dove of peace sitting on a guitar neck, now cloned into two birds, intertwined with a Pepsi logo. “It’s just a gig, except that they’re putting Woodstock, Inc.’ on it,” remarks Henry Rollins, also scheduled to play Saugerties.
The “gig” is expected to draw a sellout crowd of 250,000, partly a result of the strength of the lineup, and partly due to nostalgia and mystique. The power of the myth of the shared rite is so strong that people are willing to pay the hundred-dollar-plus initiation fee to experience the “magic,” even if it’s a prepackaged simulacrum of the Woodstock vibe. “The idea wasn’t to go to a shopping mall and buy and consume,” says Michael Wadleigh, director of Woodstock, the Academy Award-winning documentary of the original festival. “I have passed on being involved in any of these Woodstock events because all they are trying to do is cash in and make money… We do this to everything — Mom, apple pie, the flag. I guess that’s the American way.”
“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the ’60s ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true.” — Joan Didion, The White Album
Despite 25 years of celebrated killers with flashier stats and higher body counts, America’s hate affair with Charles Manson continues unabated. He’s done the talk-show circuit from Tom Snyder to Geraldo, all without leaving the prison grounds. Comedian Ben Stiller turned him into a gibberish-spouting but lovable Lassie-surrogate on his now-defunct Fox sketch series. When ABC wanted to inaugurate Diane Sawyer’s new Turning Point series this past March, they sent their camera crews behind bars to stage a Family reunion, and the result was the highest-rated debut of a newsmagazine show ever. Manson’s Nielsen following is longstanding; when the made-for-TV docudrama Helter Skelter aired back in April 1976, it earned the top ratings ever for any television show up to that point.
“It’s the most bizarre murder case that we have ever had in America,” says Vincent Bugliosi, the former L.A. deputy district attorney who prosecuted Manson and later went onto write about the case in Helter Skelter, still No. 1 among True Crime books with over six million copies sold. “If you compare the Manson Family’s lifestyle to other mass murderers, it’s certainly much more appealing to kids who want to drop out.” Poster artist (and societal dropout) Frank Kozik agrees: “Most people would like to be Charlie for a day; have a bunch off fine hippie chicks sucking your dick all day long, taking acid, getting off on the system. It has its appeal.” (Ironically, Manson owes a great deal of his durability to the forces of liberal humanitarianism; Manson and his female disciples were all sentenced to be executed, but California repealed the death penalty less than a year after the guilty verdicts. Instead of getting the chair, Manson receives four letters a day in prison.)
Still, all hedonistic fantasies aside, Manson makes for an unlikely role model. At five feet two inches, he was nasty, brutish, and short; a con man, pimp, and car thief who spent most of his formative years buried within the penal system. Released in 1967 after spending 17 of his 32 years behind bars, he headed straight to San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury district, where he quickly donned the costume of a Summer of Love casualty and began recruiting the middle-class cast-offs who, in L.A., would become the bedrock of his Family. Through a combination of prolific psychedelics and even more prolific sex, Manson built a loyal posse of lotus-eaters who were willing to do his bidding, whatever the whim; unlike his co-defendants/co-dependents Susan Atkins, Patricia Krenwinkel, Leslie Van Houten, and Tex Watson, Manson was charged and convicted not for taking part in the actual slayings, but for masterminding the murders through mind control.
Although their messages were antithetical, Manson and Woodstock are inextricably linked, with Manson considered the Grim Reaper of the Woodstock dream. If the murders and their portrayal in the press didn’t end the Aquarian Age, they at least splattered blood on the moon in the seventh house — one for each of the victims in the Polanski and LaBianca homes.
“It was horror on parade,” remembers Ed Sanders, who headed out from New York to L.A. to cover the trial, with his reportage later becoming the basis for his book The Family. “The right wing couldn’t have bought with a trillion dollars a better death to the ’60s scenario.” After the murders, recalls Paul Krassner, “people stopped picking up hitchhikers, police raided communes.” Older folks who already didn’t trust anyone under 30 now had their worst fears made flesh. “Your whole system is a game,” shouted Van Houten after hearing her guilty verdict. “Your children will turn against you.” It was youth subculture on trial, and President Nixon — elected with a mandate to “restore law and order” — was only too eager to pronounce a nation of defendants guilty.
Manson and the other Family members were indicted in the first week of December, the same week that concert promoter Bill Graham attempted to out-Woodstock Woodstock at a racetrack southeast of San Francisco called Altamont. When Hell’s Angels, acting as security, beat the life out of a young black fan at the front of the stage, it was the spirit of Manson all over again; those observers who weren’t yet convinced that Charlie Company had offed the ’60s now settled on Altamont as the cause of death. An anecdotal story in Christopher Andersen’s 1993 Mick Jagger biography even places Manson backstage at Altamont, smoking a joint and telling Mick what a big Stones fan he is. While totally spurious — Manson was in jail, after all — it is wishful allegorical thinking to place prime suspect Manson right there at the murder site.
Manson, though, was hardly a newcomer to the music scene; his has always been a rock’n’roll saga. In 1968, Manson was linked to Beach Boy drummer Dennis Wilson — the two shared a mutual taste for controlled substances, wild orgies, and good vibrations — with Charlie even living out of Wilson’s pad for some months. Manson tried to use Wilson to jump-start his own career, and one Manson composition, “Cease to Exist,” was indeed rewritten and recorded by the Beach Boys, appearing on their 1968 album 20/20as “Never Learn Not to Love.”
But Manson’s troubadourial endeavors were basically a bust. Manson’s “debut album,” Lie, seems less the work of a twisted, criminal mind than that of someone who doesn’t know how to tune. “Kids buy it thinking they’re going to get devil-worship music,” says Stephen Kaplan of New Jersey’s Performance Records, the distributor of Lie for the last ten years. “But when they get home and find they have an album of mediocre folk songs, a lot of them are disappointed.” Charles Manson Live at San Quentin, a bootleg on the British label Grey Matter packaged as a parody of the Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds, has none of the cellblock charm of, say, Johnny Cash live at the same venue. In 1970, the Family even recorded its own album, imaginatively titled The Manson Family Sings the Songs of Charles Manson, a collection of lightweight campfire sing-alongs occasionally punctuated by demonic laughter. These records have some merit as artifact, but are eminently forgettable as art.
Except that rock’n’roll never forgets. Over the years, performers have consistently stepped forward to perform Manson’s songs, invariably for some reason that has little to do with the music itself. Last December, most notably, came the fallout from Guns N’ Roses’ “secret” cover of Manson’s 1968 “Look at Your Game Girl” at the end of The Spaghetti Incident? As “Charliegate” unfolded, it was unclear which the media found more repellent: the idea of Manson earning an estimated $62,000 in royalties for every one million Spaghettis sold, or Rose’s recommendation to “do yourself a favor and go find the originals.” Although Spaghetti eventually sold 1.1 million copies, the royalties issue ended up a bust. A 1971 federal court judgment diverts all of Manson’s mechanical royalties to Bartek Frykowski, son of murder victim Voytek Frykowski.
More than likely, it was Manson’s punk-rock street cred that brought Rose to perform the song in the first place. Since punk’s inception, Manson’s image has retained a powerful presence in no-future circles. As Johnny Rotten snorted, “The only good hippie is a dead hippie,” so what better poster boy than the man who had symbolically laid waste to them all en masse? “If you think about it, punk rock is about no rules: making your own culture, making your own thing,” suggests Kozik. “Well, he did that.” Oppositional, confrontational, and violent, Manson’s story is a classic punk-rock text.
Not surprisingly then, Manson references abound in the underground. Redd Kross, then still teenagers who could spell Red Cross, cut a version of Manson’s “Cease to Exist” on its 1982 debut album, Born Innocent, as well as its own irony-driven Tate-house tribute called “Charlie” (“Flag on the couch / Lady on the floor / Baby in the gut / Widdle biddy boy”). British proto-industrial pranksters Psychic TV recorded a 1983 cover of Manson’s “I’ll Never Say Never to Always” retitled “Always is Always.” Sonic Youth, with Lydia Lunch along for the ride, explored the taboo territory in “Death Valley 69″ on 1985’s Bad Moon Rising. SST Records was rumored to be releasing an album of Manson’s prison recordings in the mid-’80s, from tapes that Manson had sent to pen pal Henry Rollins, but according to Boston lawyer David Grossack, who was trying to find Manson a deal, the label got cold feet. (A spokesperson for SST denies any such project.)
On a different front, the avant-garde composer John Moran, a protégé of Philip Glass, staged his The Manson Family: An Opera at Lincoln Center in 1990. George Clinton has a Manson skeleton in his closet. Both Funkadelic’s 1971 Maggot Brain and 1972 America Eats Its Young include liner-note essays adapted from writings by the Process Church of the Final Judgment, a Satanic cult with reputed links to Manson that flourished in the late ’60s and early ‘70s. Manson mania might even be emigrating to the hip-hop nation: The name of the upcoming collaboration between Dr. Dre and Ice Cube is Helter Skelter.
But few performers have worked as hard at cornering the market on Manson name checks as the Lemonheads’ Evan Dando. The band’s 1988 album, Creator, includes a cover version of Manson’s “Your Home is Where You’re Happy,” a photo of Dando posing in front of a picture of Manson, and CD booklet thank-you’s to family members “Susan; Lynnette; Gypsy: Katie; Mary, Sandra; Leslie; Snake; Ouish; little Paul; of course, Charlie,” as well as the note “Evan would like to thank No Name Maddox a.k.a. Jesus Christ a.k.a. Soul” — all pseudonyms of Manson. More recently, Dando discussed Manson on “Ballarat” on 1990’s Lovey and, last year, posed with a copy of Manson’s Liein a promo spot for MTV’s 120 Minutes. Dando refused to comment for this article, but in a December 1993 interview with Request he explained his fascination. “Charlie is just like really, really good black humor,” he declared. “I was born in 1967, and it was, like, Manson and Altamont… the one-two punch. It was the first image I saw…of America that really stuck with me.”
Despite Dando’s best efforts, however, first prize in the Man(son) of the Year competition goes to Nine Inch Nails’ Trent Reznor. In 1992, Reznor rented the Tate house on 10050 Cielo Drive where the first night of murders took place, building a portable studio there named “Le Pig,” where most of The Downward Spiral was recorded, including the songs “Piggy” and “March of the Pigs.” “PIG,” of course, was the message written on the front door in Sharon Tate’s blood. Not content with realizing the ’90s version of Jimmy Page renting Aleister Crowley’s mansion, Reznor started but never completed shooting the video for “Gave Up,” from the the 1992 EP, Broken, in the house. “It had bad karma all around,” says a crew member who worked on the aborted shoot. Moreover, in order to keep his, ahem, stranglehold on the title, one of Reznor’s first signings to his own Nothing Records label is the South Florida group Marilyn Manson, whose debut album, Portrait of an American Family, includes the song “My Monkey,” which borrows four lines of lyrics from Manson’s “Mechanical Man.”
More and more, Manson’s mug is turning up in the unlikeliest places, as the now familiar image of him from the cover of Life — the mushroom cloud of hair, the A-bomb stare that follows you across a room — has creepy-crawled out of the fringes and onto a variety of “Mansonia” memorabilia. “That’s one of the most charismatic photos of the f–king century,” says Kozik. “For good or bad, people react to it.” Manson turns up as a frequent muse in Kozik’s poster art, as well as in the work of artists like Joe Coleman and Raymond Pettibon, best known for his work on early Black Flag record sleeves. Rise Records, an Austin, Texas, label, uses Manson’s eyes as their logo (“Rise” was one of the “witchy” messages painted in blood on the living room wall of the LaBianca home).
Perhaps the entrepreneurs most responsible for boosting Manson’s product placement are the Lemmons Brothers of Zooport Riot Gear in Newport Beach, California. For two and a half years, Zooport has been plastering Manson’s face on the front of T-shirts with messages like “Charlie Don’t Surf,” “Support Family Values,” and “The Original Punk” on the back. They’ve sold more than 30,000 Manson shirts, over 20,000 since Axl Rose wore a shirt throughout GNR’s 1993 tour and their “Estranged” video. Zooport’s edge on the competition is that it’s the only Manson merchandising company with a signed royalty agreement with Charlie. The brothers got their share of bad press last year when they sent over $600 to Manson in prison, before Bartek Frykowski’s lawyers interceded. “Why should we give money to a drug dealer’s son?” protests Dan Lemmons. The brothers, who are fundamentalist Christians, instead donate the proceeds to the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue.
The support Manson enjoys from right-wingers should come as no surprise. Manson’s white-power agenda was hardly a secret. Helter Skelter, Manson’s concept of an impending race war based on messages he thought the Beatles were transmitting to him through The White Album, would be frightening if it weren’t so harebrained. He forbade his followers to listen to Jimi Hendrix, calling him “black slave music.” “He hates women, hates blacks, hates Jews, likes guns,” says Sanders. “He’s a guy, a real guy.” Manson’s Aryan vision thing is a big hook for folks on the racialist fringe, where he’s a mascot for neo-Nazi groups like the Universal Order.
Meanwhile, in the world of mass murderer bubble-gum trading cards, Manson is a Mickey Mantle rookie card. Serial killers are big business these days, not just in the cultural margins, but in literature (Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Stephen Wright’s Going Native) and film (The Silence of the Lambs, Kalifornia, Natural Born killers). Manson’s name recognition makes him the spiritual figurehead of serial-killer chic espoused in such au courant white rage hate ‘zines as Answer Me! Romanticizing killers such as Manson is a way for these pomo rednecks to lash back against the perceived “marginalization” of white men, asserting their manhood against women, gays, and minorities.
One would assume that Manson fandom tests the limits of irony, to say nothing of good taste; for most people, especially the victims’ families, Manson’s legacy is only viciousness and dread, not a cheap laugh. But in a milieu where John Wayne Gacy is the next Jasper Johns and “political correctness” is portrayed as the greatest threat since the Red Menace, there are no longer any sacred cows. Anything that society would likely find repellent is exalted as a kind of cruel kitsch — call it “concentration camp.” In this mindset, nothing is too touchy to be a potential target for humor, from child molestation to murder. But while making sport of tragedy may seem to rob it of the ability to hurt, it also robs one of the ability to feel at all, not only for others, but for oneself. And that theft takes away something much greater — our humanity.
CREDIT: Getty Images
For a society that thrives on violence as entertainment, Charles Manson is a centerfold pinup. A defective product of the system, his own fallibility enables him to spit society’s hypocrisy right back at it: You don’t like me? Well, you made me what I am. And the more authority figures or the media cluck disapprovingly at him, the more his taboo appeal grows. He’s been chosen by a jury of his peers to be America’s bogeyman, and he plays the role to the hilt. (Ed Sanders calls him a “performance artist” who “probably polishes the swastika on his forehead” when he knows that Barbara Walters is coming.)
Rock has had a rich tradition of collaboration with the devil since Robert Johnson made his fateful deal back in the ’20s, but in an age where authenticity is key, a “realer” devil is needed. Not some abstract horned figure of lore and legend, or a mystical object of gobbledygook incantations and incense burning, but an actual, live devil in the flesh. We may not have Nixon to kick around anymore, but we still have Manson, an original gangsta.
The question of how Manson resonates in the culture as compared to Woodstock tends to break down along generational lines. Baby boomers cling leafy-green salad days, while younger folks in general reluctantly cast their metaphorical vote with negative creeps like Manson. Invoking Manson is a way for young people to exert their displeasure at boomer co-optation of countercultural milestones, at the fact that their very identity is measured in terms of their parents’ anniversaries.
However, the fact that Woodstock is widely considered hippie counterculture’s peak means that everything has been downhill from there — and it has been, at varying rates of velocity, depending on personal perspective or organizational allegiance. Today’s wet-behind-the-ears Mansonites are fueled by the spirit of betrayal, the sense that somewhere along the line the Woodstock generation copped out. For some, hitching their wagon to Manson is not merely wallowing in shock value or patented post-adolescent rebellion, but a reaction against those who are presumed to have dropped the ball. After all, if everything were still at the pristine natural state of the Aquarian Exposition, a new set of young turks would feel no need to disrupt the bliss.
“Look around you,” demands Kozik. “Do you see, like, love and togetherness and positive growth, or do you see everything f–king disintegrating at an exponential rate? You tell me. The empire is crumbling, buddy.” One wishes that this view were wrong, that the Woodstock ideal were the rule, but reality would seem to hold that violence and antipathy are more the norm. Crime and intolerance are on the rise. Nation rises up against nation. Nine Inch Nails is performing at Woodstock ’94.
But just because everything is coming down fast doesn’t make Charlie the winner. Anomie may seem to have carried the day, but that’s hardly cause for rejoicing; it’s tragedy. Even as a figure of righteous resistance to boomer oligarchy, even acknowledging the stuff that makes intellectual and emotional sense, Manson’s nihilistic equation only adds up to weak-ass s–t. In the end, everything he stands for is abhorrent and bankrupt; everything he endorses bitter, empty, reactionary. Is that all there is? Is that the best we can offer as a revolutionary warrior soul? The hippies may have failed, but there’s no bigger failure than Manson himself. He may be put forward as a symbol of insurrectionary power, of getting the fear, but ultimately he’s the very embodiment of cowardice. The Manson saga is fascinating, but only to a point. No matter how it’s retold, he’s still a convicted murderer, still a bigot, still a zero. He’s a loser, baby. So, if only figuratively, why can’t we kill him?
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/n...tims-friend-posits-alternative-motive-1227729
Manson Victim's Friend Posits Alternative Motive: "I Never Bought Into the Race War Theory"
by Tatiana Siegel
July 30, 2019, 6:00am PDT
Charles Manson-directed murders. (In the movie, Sebring is a key character played by Emile Hirsch.) By Markham's side was his wife of 32 years, Cheryl — the daughter of Dan Genis, special effects guru behind Star Wars — who came of age during the Manson era.
Revisiting the weeks that followed the killings is both painful and cathartic for Markham, now 75 and fabulously wealthy thanks to founding four hair-care companies, including Pureology Serious Colour Care, which he sold to L'Oréal in 2007 for $280 million. (He pocketed more than $100 million on that deal alone.) Markham has never talked in detail about his entanglement in the infamous investigation that captured headlines worldwide and continues to fascinate new generations. His tale reveals his previously unknown role in the critical months after the murders, as law enforcement attempted to identify the killers and decipher their motives with no break in the case.
Courtesy of Jim Markham
Markham was Paul Newman's longtime haircutter.
Bettmann/Contributor
Charles Manson, arrested in 1969.
Days after the murders, and at the behest of Sebring's father, Markham began living at the house where he had been a frequent guest: Sebring's Bavarian-style home, once owned by Jean Harlow and located on Easton Drive in Beverly Hills — just one mile away from the Polanski-Tate residence on Cielo Drive. "I'm living in Jay's house with raccoons on the roof — it would sound like somebody walking on the top of the house," he says. "I finally had to move out. I thought I was going to be next. They hadn't caught Manson. Nobody knew why it happened."
As Markham remembers, Tate's father, a colonel in Army intelligence, began working with federal agents on the investigation. The agents told Markham that they believed the killers were connected to the salon (murder victim Folger also had a connection to the hair enterprise given that she was an investor in Sebring International). The salon was bugged, but ultimately that line of inquiry lost steam. Once the Manson Family became suspects, however, about six months after the murders, the feds enlisted a willing Markham to set up a sting at his rented Brentwood home. He was to host a meeting between a woman and a man she had met at a bar, someone who had recounted to her at length how he had met Manson in jail. The former inmate was thought to have information pertaining to the cult leader's motive for the murders. But Markham doesn't believe any of the taped conversation from the sting was used in the trial that took place in 1970 and 1971. "This guy looked spooked, really scared," he says of the meeting.
Five decades later, Markham floats his own theory, one that deviates from the official "Helter Skelter" scenario put forth by Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi: that the cult leader ordered the Tate murders in hopes that it would spark an apocalyptic race war as foretold to him in what he believed were coded lyrics on The Beatles' White Album.
Though Markham is reluctant to denigrate the memory of Sebring, who was his mentor and after whom he named his son, he claims that the late hairdresser knew Manson and suggests that the murders were the result of a drug deal gone bad — an account that aligns with a once-popular explanation that fell out of favor as the Helter Skelter narrative became dominant. Back in 1969, Sebring was nicknamed The Candyman and was said to have used his salon to peddle drugs to the stars.
"I don't want to get into the drugs, but I never bought into the race war theory. I believe Manson had gone up to the house" — Polanski was away shooting a movie — "and Manson wanted to sell cocaine and marijuana," he says. "He showed Jay and Wojciech the product. They were going to buy some of it, but the two of them beat him up at the gate. The next night, Manson sent the Family up [to kill them]." Markham adds, "I've lived with that for 50 years. I still believe that." He declines to elaborate further given that he is still in touch with Sebring's nephew Anthony DiMaria, who is planning a movie about the murders.
In Once Upon a Time, Manson appears before the killings at the Cielo Drive house. The filmimplies that Manson was looking for record producer Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day, who with girlfriend Candice Bergen had moved out before the murders. (In real life, Manson, an aspiring musician, was introduced to Melcher, who declined to sign him, by The Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson.)
Once Upon a Time offers a revisionist history of the murders and introduces fictitious characters into the blood-soaked narrative, namely Leonardo DiCaprio's actor Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt's stunt double Cliff Booth. Margot Robbie plays Tate, while Polanski has a bit part, played by Rafal Zawierucha. Markham mostly approves of the film, but he bristles at the depiction of Sebring. "I thought Jay was marginalized, and that upset me," he says. "They portrayed him as this sort of houseboy. This was a very powerful man at the time."
Manson Victim's Friend Posits Alternative Motive: "I Never Bought Into the Race War Theory"
by Tatiana Siegel
July 30, 2019, 6:00am PDT
Charles Manson-directed murders. (In the movie, Sebring is a key character played by Emile Hirsch.) By Markham's side was his wife of 32 years, Cheryl — the daughter of Dan Genis, special effects guru behind Star Wars — who came of age during the Manson era.
Revisiting the weeks that followed the killings is both painful and cathartic for Markham, now 75 and fabulously wealthy thanks to founding four hair-care companies, including Pureology Serious Colour Care, which he sold to L'Oréal in 2007 for $280 million. (He pocketed more than $100 million on that deal alone.) Markham has never talked in detail about his entanglement in the infamous investigation that captured headlines worldwide and continues to fascinate new generations. His tale reveals his previously unknown role in the critical months after the murders, as law enforcement attempted to identify the killers and decipher their motives with no break in the case.
Courtesy of Jim Markham
Markham was Paul Newman's longtime haircutter.
Bettmann/Contributor
Charles Manson, arrested in 1969.
Days after the murders, and at the behest of Sebring's father, Markham began living at the house where he had been a frequent guest: Sebring's Bavarian-style home, once owned by Jean Harlow and located on Easton Drive in Beverly Hills — just one mile away from the Polanski-Tate residence on Cielo Drive. "I'm living in Jay's house with raccoons on the roof — it would sound like somebody walking on the top of the house," he says. "I finally had to move out. I thought I was going to be next. They hadn't caught Manson. Nobody knew why it happened."
As Markham remembers, Tate's father, a colonel in Army intelligence, began working with federal agents on the investigation. The agents told Markham that they believed the killers were connected to the salon (murder victim Folger also had a connection to the hair enterprise given that she was an investor in Sebring International). The salon was bugged, but ultimately that line of inquiry lost steam. Once the Manson Family became suspects, however, about six months after the murders, the feds enlisted a willing Markham to set up a sting at his rented Brentwood home. He was to host a meeting between a woman and a man she had met at a bar, someone who had recounted to her at length how he had met Manson in jail. The former inmate was thought to have information pertaining to the cult leader's motive for the murders. But Markham doesn't believe any of the taped conversation from the sting was used in the trial that took place in 1970 and 1971. "This guy looked spooked, really scared," he says of the meeting.
Five decades later, Markham floats his own theory, one that deviates from the official "Helter Skelter" scenario put forth by Manson prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi: that the cult leader ordered the Tate murders in hopes that it would spark an apocalyptic race war as foretold to him in what he believed were coded lyrics on The Beatles' White Album.
Though Markham is reluctant to denigrate the memory of Sebring, who was his mentor and after whom he named his son, he claims that the late hairdresser knew Manson and suggests that the murders were the result of a drug deal gone bad — an account that aligns with a once-popular explanation that fell out of favor as the Helter Skelter narrative became dominant. Back in 1969, Sebring was nicknamed The Candyman and was said to have used his salon to peddle drugs to the stars.
"I don't want to get into the drugs, but I never bought into the race war theory. I believe Manson had gone up to the house" — Polanski was away shooting a movie — "and Manson wanted to sell cocaine and marijuana," he says. "He showed Jay and Wojciech the product. They were going to buy some of it, but the two of them beat him up at the gate. The next night, Manson sent the Family up [to kill them]." Markham adds, "I've lived with that for 50 years. I still believe that." He declines to elaborate further given that he is still in touch with Sebring's nephew Anthony DiMaria, who is planning a movie about the murders.
In Once Upon a Time, Manson appears before the killings at the Cielo Drive house. The filmimplies that Manson was looking for record producer Terry Melcher, the son of Doris Day, who with girlfriend Candice Bergen had moved out before the murders. (In real life, Manson, an aspiring musician, was introduced to Melcher, who declined to sign him, by The Beach Boys' Dennis Wilson.)
Once Upon a Time offers a revisionist history of the murders and introduces fictitious characters into the blood-soaked narrative, namely Leonardo DiCaprio's actor Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt's stunt double Cliff Booth. Margot Robbie plays Tate, while Polanski has a bit part, played by Rafal Zawierucha. Markham mostly approves of the film, but he bristles at the depiction of Sebring. "I thought Jay was marginalized, and that upset me," he says. "They portrayed him as this sort of houseboy. This was a very powerful man at the time."
Adam West's Daughter Adored 'Batman' References in 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood'
AUGUST 01, 2019 12:00PM by Ryan Parker
Adam West as Batman (insert: Quentin Tarantino) | Photofest; Tony Barson/FilmMagic
The use of a retro commercial featuring the late actor that is both in the film and on the soundtrack was OK'd by the family.
Holy Tarantino, Batman!
The daughter of Adam West recently saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and told The Hollywood Reporter she got a kick out of the references to her late father's work, which included a radio commercial he did more than 50 years ago.
THIS WEEK IN HEAT VISION BREAKDOWN
Slide 1 of 16
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"That point in time in Hollywood history, that was the height of my dad's popularity, and it was like watching all these stories from my childhood come to life," Nina Tooley tells THR. "The scenes where Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) is drinking and struggling with his insecurities, these are all things I know that my father went through. I had many conversations with him, specifically after Batman, about his struggle to get other roles."
The Batman series is mentioned early in the Quentin Tarantino movie when Rick Dalton is meeting at the Hollywood staple Musso & Frank Grill with his agent, Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino), who suggests someday the actor could do some Batman-style action project, adding in a "Boom! Pow! Bang!"
"Marvin was straight out of some of my dad's stories; just everything — the wardrobe, the smoking, the style, the drinking. It was so right on," she said.
The Dalton and Schwarz exchange somewhat foreshadows a hero moment, when Dalton uses a gadget to protect himself, which was not lost on Tooley.
Other similarities that hit home for West's daughter included the relationship between Dalton and his stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), as her father was close with his stuntman, Hubie Kerns. West also appeared in the 1978 film Hooper in which Burt Reynolds played a stunt double to West's character. Another connection: West starred in the 1965 spaghetti Western I 4 Inesorabilior The Relentless Four. DiCaprio's character tries to break into film by way of this genre.
Another Once Upon a Time in Hollywood moment that cracked Tooley up was when James Stacy (Timothy Olyphant) hops on his bike and leaves the set of his TV series for the day. "I have a picture of my dad in almost that exact outfit on that exact motorcycle," she said, laughing.
West himself even makes an appearance in the Sony film via a retro KHJ radio station Batman promotion played during the end credits, which Tarantino asked the West family to use, Tooley said. (The commercial also appears on the official Once Upon a Time in Hollywood soundtrack).
"When we were contacted about the clip they used, we were excited to hear they were considering it," she explained. "Quentin's people reached out to my mom, more than anything to get our blessing. I don't think they had to reach out to us, but it was a really nice gesture on their part."
Batman, starring West and Burt Ward, aired on ABC for three seasons from Jan. 12, 1966, to March 14, 1968.
West died in 2017 at the age of 88.
Listen to the Batman commercial below.
AUGUST 01, 2019 12:00PM by Ryan Parker
Adam West as Batman (insert: Quentin Tarantino) | Photofest; Tony Barson/FilmMagic
The use of a retro commercial featuring the late actor that is both in the film and on the soundtrack was OK'd by the family.
Holy Tarantino, Batman!
The daughter of Adam West recently saw Once Upon a Time in Hollywood and told The Hollywood Reporter she got a kick out of the references to her late father's work, which included a radio commercial he did more than 50 years ago.
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"That point in time in Hollywood history, that was the height of my dad's popularity, and it was like watching all these stories from my childhood come to life," Nina Tooley tells THR. "The scenes where Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) is drinking and struggling with his insecurities, these are all things I know that my father went through. I had many conversations with him, specifically after Batman, about his struggle to get other roles."
The Batman series is mentioned early in the Quentin Tarantino movie when Rick Dalton is meeting at the Hollywood staple Musso & Frank Grill with his agent, Marvin Schwarz (Al Pacino), who suggests someday the actor could do some Batman-style action project, adding in a "Boom! Pow! Bang!"
"Marvin was straight out of some of my dad's stories; just everything — the wardrobe, the smoking, the style, the drinking. It was so right on," she said.
The Dalton and Schwarz exchange somewhat foreshadows a hero moment, when Dalton uses a gadget to protect himself, which was not lost on Tooley.
Other similarities that hit home for West's daughter included the relationship between Dalton and his stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), as her father was close with his stuntman, Hubie Kerns. West also appeared in the 1978 film Hooper in which Burt Reynolds played a stunt double to West's character. Another connection: West starred in the 1965 spaghetti Western I 4 Inesorabilior The Relentless Four. DiCaprio's character tries to break into film by way of this genre.
Another Once Upon a Time in Hollywood moment that cracked Tooley up was when James Stacy (Timothy Olyphant) hops on his bike and leaves the set of his TV series for the day. "I have a picture of my dad in almost that exact outfit on that exact motorcycle," she said, laughing.
West himself even makes an appearance in the Sony film via a retro KHJ radio station Batman promotion played during the end credits, which Tarantino asked the West family to use, Tooley said. (The commercial also appears on the official Once Upon a Time in Hollywood soundtrack).
"When we were contacted about the clip they used, we were excited to hear they were considering it," she explained. "Quentin's people reached out to my mom, more than anything to get our blessing. I don't think they had to reach out to us, but it was a really nice gesture on their part."
Batman, starring West and Burt Ward, aired on ABC for three seasons from Jan. 12, 1966, to March 14, 1968.
West died in 2017 at the age of 88.
Listen to the Batman commercial below.
The Bet on Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Is Paying Off
By Chris Lee
“Sony essentially gave the world away to get a Quentin Tarantino movie.” Photo: Photo: Andrew Cooper/© 2019 CTMG, Inc.
Last Monday, after Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s opening weekend in theaters, marketing executives at the film’s distributor Sony gave themselves a round of applause for having pulled off the seemingly impossible. The ninth film by Quentin Tarantino exceeded all box-office expectations to take in $41 million over its first three days in theaters, surpassing the studio’s own pre-release projections by $11 million, and becoming the Pulp Fictionfilmmaker’s strongest opening to date; Once Upon a Time toppled Tarantino’s previous record with Inglourious Basterds which debuted to $38 million in 2009.
According to a studio executive (who asked not to be named because the person is not authorized to publicly comment on the film’s box-office performance), the victory was all the sweeter considering OUATIH’s two-hour, 41-minute run time, its hard R-rating for language and violence, its provenance as an original film hitting theaters in a season chock-a-block with spinoffs, step sequels, and reboots. Then there was OUATIH’s competition: Disney’s photo-real remake of The Lion King, which was in its second weekend of release but still predicted to suck up most of the oxygen at the multiplex — especially against a director whose movies tend to perform more like art house offerings than popcorn-season blockbusters domestically. And with its $90 million budget, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood had been a risky bet for Sony head honcho Tom Rothman, who lobbied vigorously to finance and distribute the film and trumped other studio suitors by offering Tarantino a rare and exceedingly complex deal in which ownership of the film’s copyright transfers from Sony to the filmmaker in 30 years.
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw. (The Dwayne Johnson–Jason Statham film took in an estimated $60.8 million, amounting to one of the lowest grossing premieres for a Fast & Furious installment, but the biggest opening for a non-Disney domestic film this summer, surpassing John Wick: Chapter 3’s $56.8 million.) OUATIH’s ten-day earnings came in at $78.8 million, setting the stage for ultimate profitability. Due to prints and advertising costs, the film needs to hit about $250 million to break even. Tarantino’s directorial efforts tend to make most of their money in Europe, but it won’t hit screens there until the middle of the month.
Plenty of analysts are already calling Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s early returns a victory for the movie industry: proof that a non-superhero-centric, adult-skewing film can still break through as a tentpole in an era of franchise saturation. This at a time when a crowded market for comic-book IP is increasingly rendering the grown-up drama an endangered species (outside of OTT streaming services).
RottenTomatoes editor Jacqueline Coley takes a decidedly narrower view of the way OUATIH has been connecting with audiences, however. She points out that holding Tarantino’s talky, pop-culturally referential movies separate from mega-budget superhero fare in the modern movie marketplace presents a kind of false dichotomy.
“A lot of people are looking at it like, ‘You can tell an original story, have it be R-rated and adult-driven, and people will still show up for it outside of huge IP,’” Coley says. “But it’s not really the case. Quentin Tarantino is IP. He’s the biggest star of his movies. So in the sense that Quentin Tarantino is an original director and all his movies are different, yes. But no, in the sense that there are expectations people have when they go see a Tarantino film, he benefits from the same thing the [Marvel Cinematic Universe] benefits from. It may be a different demographic of people. But the reason why they continue to show up is almost the same.”
Further, she feels that given the mega-wattage of OUATIH’s primary cast (which includes Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate) and Sony’s marketing blitzkrieg, the film’s financial success was already somewhat of a foregone conclusion. “The fact that it has three of the biggest movie stars on the planet and a host of other actors people care about, it is getting the most glitzy Hollywood roll-out possible,” says Coley. “Sony essentially gave the world away to get a Quentin Tarantino movie. So if this movie doesn’t pull in what it is, it would be even more depressing!”
By Chris Lee
“Sony essentially gave the world away to get a Quentin Tarantino movie.” Photo: Photo: Andrew Cooper/© 2019 CTMG, Inc.
Last Monday, after Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s opening weekend in theaters, marketing executives at the film’s distributor Sony gave themselves a round of applause for having pulled off the seemingly impossible. The ninth film by Quentin Tarantino exceeded all box-office expectations to take in $41 million over its first three days in theaters, surpassing the studio’s own pre-release projections by $11 million, and becoming the Pulp Fictionfilmmaker’s strongest opening to date; Once Upon a Time toppled Tarantino’s previous record with Inglourious Basterds which debuted to $38 million in 2009.
According to a studio executive (who asked not to be named because the person is not authorized to publicly comment on the film’s box-office performance), the victory was all the sweeter considering OUATIH’s two-hour, 41-minute run time, its hard R-rating for language and violence, its provenance as an original film hitting theaters in a season chock-a-block with spinoffs, step sequels, and reboots. Then there was OUATIH’s competition: Disney’s photo-real remake of The Lion King, which was in its second weekend of release but still predicted to suck up most of the oxygen at the multiplex — especially against a director whose movies tend to perform more like art house offerings than popcorn-season blockbusters domestically. And with its $90 million budget, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood had been a risky bet for Sony head honcho Tom Rothman, who lobbied vigorously to finance and distribute the film and trumped other studio suitors by offering Tarantino a rare and exceedingly complex deal in which ownership of the film’s copyright transfers from Sony to the filmmaker in 30 years.
Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw. (The Dwayne Johnson–Jason Statham film took in an estimated $60.8 million, amounting to one of the lowest grossing premieres for a Fast & Furious installment, but the biggest opening for a non-Disney domestic film this summer, surpassing John Wick: Chapter 3’s $56.8 million.) OUATIH’s ten-day earnings came in at $78.8 million, setting the stage for ultimate profitability. Due to prints and advertising costs, the film needs to hit about $250 million to break even. Tarantino’s directorial efforts tend to make most of their money in Europe, but it won’t hit screens there until the middle of the month.
Plenty of analysts are already calling Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’s early returns a victory for the movie industry: proof that a non-superhero-centric, adult-skewing film can still break through as a tentpole in an era of franchise saturation. This at a time when a crowded market for comic-book IP is increasingly rendering the grown-up drama an endangered species (outside of OTT streaming services).
RottenTomatoes editor Jacqueline Coley takes a decidedly narrower view of the way OUATIH has been connecting with audiences, however. She points out that holding Tarantino’s talky, pop-culturally referential movies separate from mega-budget superhero fare in the modern movie marketplace presents a kind of false dichotomy.
“A lot of people are looking at it like, ‘You can tell an original story, have it be R-rated and adult-driven, and people will still show up for it outside of huge IP,’” Coley says. “But it’s not really the case. Quentin Tarantino is IP. He’s the biggest star of his movies. So in the sense that Quentin Tarantino is an original director and all his movies are different, yes. But no, in the sense that there are expectations people have when they go see a Tarantino film, he benefits from the same thing the [Marvel Cinematic Universe] benefits from. It may be a different demographic of people. But the reason why they continue to show up is almost the same.”
Further, she feels that given the mega-wattage of OUATIH’s primary cast (which includes Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate) and Sony’s marketing blitzkrieg, the film’s financial success was already somewhat of a foregone conclusion. “The fact that it has three of the biggest movie stars on the planet and a host of other actors people care about, it is getting the most glitzy Hollywood roll-out possible,” says Coley. “Sony essentially gave the world away to get a Quentin Tarantino movie. So if this movie doesn’t pull in what it is, it would be even more depressing!”
Who’s Who in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Character Guide
By Rebecca Alter
Your handy Hollywood Hills map to the real-life stars in Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film. Photo: Columbia Pictures and Getty Images
Warning: spoilers ahead.
Quentin Tarantino plays fast and loose with historical revisionism like he’s a kid left alone with action figures, or a Harry/Louis slash-fic writer drowning in AO3 tags. He takes a piece of history that’s captured his imagination, creates a Mary Sue or two to beat the boogeymen at the boss level, and poof! His avenging avatars kill Hitler, save Sharon Tate, and burn down one more plantation blighting the earth. Like Inglourious Basterds before it, Tarantino populates his ninth film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,with real figures alongside more reality-adjacent ones. So for those of us (all of us) less versed in his brand of fanboy ephemera, here’s a map to the stars, real and pretend, in OUATIH.
Rick Dalton
Leo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton (left) versus ’60s-era actor Ty Hardin (right). Photo: Columbia Pictures and Shutterstock
Tarantino didn’t base Leo DiCaprio’s washed-up matinee cowboy Rick Dalton on any one actor, but the director has cited inspiration from ’60s-era actors like Ty Hardin, whose career has shades of Dalton: Hardin went from starring in a TV show called Bronco to late-career Spaghetti Westerns. (Tarantino also mentions Tab Hunter as Dalton inspiration, lending credence to the Rick-Cliff shippers out there.)
Cliff Booth
Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth (left) versus the most probable real-life inspiration for his character: Hal Needham, Burt Reynolds’s best buddy and stunt double (right). Photo: Columbia Pictures and Getty Images
There’s a clearer real-life parallel to stuntman Cliff Booth: Hal Needham, Burt Reynolds’s best buddy and stunt double. Like Booth, Needham served in the Army before pivoting to stunt work, and met his professional partner on a black-and-white TV Western (Reynolds’s Riverboat). Needham and Reynolds even lived together for five years. Needham went on to write and direct Smokey and the Bandit and direct Cannonball Run. In 2012, one year before Needham passed away, Quentin Tarantino presented him with an Honorary Academy Award at the Governors Awards.
Serenityalready gave 2019 moviegoers the Citizen Kane of fishing-boat murders. For another, the whispers and ambiguity surrounding the circumstances of Mrs. Booth’s death echo the eternal Hollywood mystery of Natalie Wood’s passing, off a boat near Catalina Island in 1981. An L.A. County sheriff named her husband Robert Wagner a person of interest in 2018.
Roman Polanski
Rafal Zawierucha as Roman Polanski (left) versus the real Roman Polanski (right). Photo: Getty Images
Polanski, who married Tate in 1968 and who was in London on the night of the murders, fled the United States after pleading guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse” with 13-year-old Samantha Gailey in 1979. He still directs and evades extradition between France and Poland, and has served time under house arrest in Switzerland. Since then, many more women have come forward with accusations of Polanski assaulting them as minors.
Sharon Tate
Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate (left) versus the real Sharon Tate (right). Photo: Columbia Pictures and Shutterstock
Despite some criticism about Margot Robbie’s lack of screen time, her portrayal of Sharon Tate has earned praise for its depth and accuracy from Tate’s own sister (who’s been outspoken about her distaste with past depictions). Tate really did train with Bruce Lee and sustain relationships with Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Wojciech Frykowski. Tate also really did have lunch on the day before she was killed, with her friend Joanna Pettet (Rumer Willis), who retired from acting in the ’90s.
Jay Sebring
Steve McQueen got a lot of it right at that Playboy Mansion scene: Jay Sebring (played by Emile Hirsch) did indeed date Tate until she met Polanski on the London set of The Fearless Vampire Killers in 1966. The real-life McQueen, along with Bruce Lee, were both close friends of Sebring’s and clients at his salon. Sebring remained close with Tate, befriended Polanski and Frykowski, and had been involved with their mutual friend Abigail Folger. Sebring’s legacy lived on in Hollywood as the inspiration for Warren Beatty’s hairdresser character in Shampoo.
Bruce Lee
Mike Moh as Bruce Lee (left) versus the real Bruce Lee (right). Photo: Columbia Pictures and Shutterstock
Cliff’s rooftop flashback shows Bruce Lee (Mike Moh, wearing the Kato jacket) behind the scenes of The Green Hornet,which aired for one season in the mid-1960s. What the scene doesn’t show is that Sebring, an amateur karate enthusiast, had seen Lee at an event in 1964 and is the one who first recommended him to Hollywood producers. And as shown in Tate’s flashback, Lee’s first Hollywood movie gig was as the “karate adviser” for her scene in The Wrecking Crew.Lee would go on to become one of the most iconic action stars of the 1970s before passing away suddenly at the young age of 32 in 1973.
Wojciech Frykowski
Wojciech (stylized Voytek in English) Frykowski (played by Costa Ronin) was an old friend of Polanski’s and was also involved with Abigail Folger. His son Bartek worked as a cinematographer in Poland until his death in 1999.
The HullabalooDancers
The Hullabaloo Dancers. Photo: Columbia Pictures
Of all the genre pastiches teased in the promotional materials for OUATIH,my favorite might have been this Corny Collins–style variety show. Hullabaloo was in fact a real program on NBC that had the misfortune of being slotted as counterprogramming to the much more popular American Bandstand.The Mamas and the Papas — who we see partying with Tate at the Playboy Mansion — made an appearance on the series in 1966. Those pigtailed Hullabaloo Dancers we see twisting with Rick Dalton had some surprising careers beyond this two-season oddity: One of the show’s go-go girls, Lana St. Edmund, went on to become the highest paid Hollywood stunt woman of all time.
Steve McQueen
Damian Lewis as Steve McQueen (left) versus the real Steve McQueen (right). Photo: Getty Images and Shutterstock
McQueen, who will henceforth be known as the guy who robbed Rick Dalton of that Great Escape gig, did many of his own stunts, but he was also one of the first major action stars to publicly credit his stunt double. In real life, McQueen passed on an invitation to a party at Tate’s house on the night of the murders, and it was later reported that his name was on Manson’s hit list. McQueen had a persistent cough (not unlike Dalton’s) that led to a fatal mesothelioma diagnosis.
James Stacy
Timothy Olyphant as James Stacey (left) versus the real James Stacey (right). Photo: Columbia Pictures and CBS
The TV cowboy played by Timothy Olyphant really did star as one of three Lancer family gunslingers on the 1960s Western series Lancer.Fitting with the hinting references to mythical Hollywood tragedies that hang over OUATIH, the real-life Stacy had his left arm and leg amputated after suffering a motorcycle accident in 1973, not long after the events of Tarantino’s film.(In Once Upon a Time, Olyphant’s character drives a motorcycle off set.) Stacy died from an anaphylactic reaction to antibiotics in 2016.
Wayne Maunder
Luke Perry as Wayne Maunder (left) versus the real Wayne Maunder (right). Photo: Columbia Pictures and CBS
A blond Luke Perry briefly appears as actor Wayne Maunder, who really did play the flashier Lancer (that leopard print!) on Lancer.The actor went on to do stints on other OUATIH-featured series, including The FBI.Curiously, Maunder only acted in two films, one being the Manson-tinged Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,by pulp king Russ Meyer. Not only does the original 1967 Dolls get a mention for Sharon Tate’s performance in the film, but Tarantino referenced Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill! in his film Death Proof,and of course, named a character Pussycat in OUATIH.
Trudi Fraser/Mirabella Lancer
“Johnny gets more than he bargained for when he goes after a horse trader who cheated him and ends up taking care of the trader’s feisty 10-year-old niece.” That’s the IMDb plot description for a 1968 episode of Lancer called “The Heart of Pony Alice,” and it’s the closest thing in the show’s history to the episode we see in OUATIH (featuring Julia Butters as Trudi Fraser as Mirabella Lancer). The feisty 10-year-old in question was played by Eve Plumb, although it’s unclear if she applied Trudi’s rigorous commitment to her craft on the set of The Brady Bunch.Others have suggested that Trudi may be an avatar for a young Jodie Foster, who made guest appearances on shows like Gunsmoke.
Sam Wanamaker
Nicholas Hammond plays the actor turned director who insists on that floppy mustache for Leo on Lancer (great call, by the way) and likens the Dalton role to Hamlet. The year after the events of OUATIH, the real Wanamaker made it his life’s mission to restore Shakespeare’s original Globe to a working theater. His foundation raised millions for the project by the time he passed away in 1993, and he is still credited in England with leading the charge for restoring the icon.
Pussycat
Margaret Qualley as Pussycat (left) versus the real Pussycat (right). Photo: Columbia Pictures and Shutterstock
Margaret Qualley’s hitchhiking Manson girl is probably a composite rather than a direct historical figure. Many have drawn comparisons, though, between Qualley’s character and 17-year-old Kathryn Lutesinger, nicknamed Kitty Kat. Kitty has been cited as giving one of the testimonies that helped detectives crack the Tate-LaBianca case. She got married in 1973 and has not been heard from since.
Tex Watson
Austin Butler as Tex Watson (left) versus the real Tex Watson (right). Photo: Getty Images
Following in the proud tradition of teen idols playing true-crime murderers, Austin Butler plays Tex Watson, a member of the Manson family who committed the Tate-LaBianca murders alongside Susan Atkins (Mikey Madison), Linda Kasabian (Maya Hawke), and Patricia Krenwinkel (Madisen Beaty). Tex really did tell his victims, “I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s work,” but now he is a fervent Christian and very online minister, who frequently blogs his preachings to his e-congregation from prison.
‘Squeaky’ Fromme
Dakota Fanning as “Squeaky” Fromme (left) versus the real “Squeaky” Fromme (right). Photo: Columbia Pictures and Getty Images
Dakota Fanning plays creepy, stringy-haired Manson devotee Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who did reportedly sleep with and tend to George Spahn (Bruce Dern). She remained a Manson devotee for life. After decades in prison, she now lives in a skull-adorned house in upstate New York with her husband, another Manson acolyte.
Gypsy
Lena Dunham as Gypsy (left) versus the real Gypsy. Photo: Columbia Pictures and Getty Images
Manson family member Gypsy, played by Lena Dunham in OUATIH,did not directly participate in any of the murders, although she was charged along with Squeaky for attempted murder in 1971. Unlike Squeaky, however, Gypsy began distancing herself from and speaking out against the Manson cult after she was released from prison in the 1970s. She had a son with Manson family member “Clem” Grogan, who you’ll know as the character Cliff punches out on the ranch in the film.
George Spahn
Bruce Dern plays the old, incapacitated owner of Spahn ranch, who in reality really did rent it out to the Manson family in exchange for sexual favors with the women. Spahn, not Manson, is the one who gave the women their nicknames. Furthering the film’s connection to the story of stuntman Hal Needham, Burt Reynolds was originally meant to play Spahn in OUATIH before passing away in 2018.
Terry Melcher and Candice Bergen
In the movie, when Manson first scouts out the Cielo Drive house, he’s told that “Terry and Candi” don’t live there anymore. Terry Melcher, a record producer and Doris Day’s son, had previously passed on recording Manson’s music. He went on to win a Golden Globe for writing “Kokomo.” The “Candi” in question was his then-girlfriend Candice Bergen, who has never spoken about the murders. In addition to starring in Book Club and the recently canceled Murphy Brown reboot, Bergen has a very delightful hobby and side-hustle: painting portraits of people’s dogs on their Louis Vuittons.
Husband and Wife Stunt Team Randy and Janet
If Zoë Bell’s stunt-coordinator character is based on anyone, it’s probably herself. While there’s no record of a female stunt coordinator on the original Green Hornet TV series, Bell has worked as a stunt double in Tarantino’s films since Kill Bill: Vol. 1,and was the stunt coordinator on OUATIH.Meanwhile, Kurt Russell’s stunt-coordinator character does not appear to line up with any one Hollywood figure in particular, but Tarantino notesthat Kurt Russell helped him keep the Lancer scenes period-authentic, as the son of a Western character actor (Bing Russell) who himself starred in the 1963 TV Western The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters.
Marvin Schwarzs
Al Pacino’s Marvin Schwarz (right). Photo: Andrew Cooper/Columbia Pictures
Al Pacino’s colorful Hollywood-agent character doesn’t have an immediately identifiable real-life counterpart, although real-life producer Marvin Schwarz, who worked on shoot-em-ups with Kirk Douglas, Burt Reynolds, and Rock Hudson in the ’60s and ’70s, may have given Tarantino the idea for the name.
Francesca Cappucci
Claudia Cardinale. Photo: Getty Images
Chilean actress Lorenza Izzo says that she based her portrayal of Rick Dalton’s wife on actresses like Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale, and Virna Lisi, all of whom became well-known Stateside in the 1960s. IMDb also lists an actress named Francesca Cappucci, who seems to exclusively play reporters.
By Rebecca Alter
Your handy Hollywood Hills map to the real-life stars in Quentin Tarantino’s ninth film. Photo: Columbia Pictures and Getty Images
Warning: spoilers ahead.
Quentin Tarantino plays fast and loose with historical revisionism like he’s a kid left alone with action figures, or a Harry/Louis slash-fic writer drowning in AO3 tags. He takes a piece of history that’s captured his imagination, creates a Mary Sue or two to beat the boogeymen at the boss level, and poof! His avenging avatars kill Hitler, save Sharon Tate, and burn down one more plantation blighting the earth. Like Inglourious Basterds before it, Tarantino populates his ninth film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood,with real figures alongside more reality-adjacent ones. So for those of us (all of us) less versed in his brand of fanboy ephemera, here’s a map to the stars, real and pretend, in OUATIH.
Rick Dalton
Leo DiCaprio as Rick Dalton (left) versus ’60s-era actor Ty Hardin (right). Photo: Columbia Pictures and Shutterstock
Tarantino didn’t base Leo DiCaprio’s washed-up matinee cowboy Rick Dalton on any one actor, but the director has cited inspiration from ’60s-era actors like Ty Hardin, whose career has shades of Dalton: Hardin went from starring in a TV show called Bronco to late-career Spaghetti Westerns. (Tarantino also mentions Tab Hunter as Dalton inspiration, lending credence to the Rick-Cliff shippers out there.)
Cliff Booth
Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth (left) versus the most probable real-life inspiration for his character: Hal Needham, Burt Reynolds’s best buddy and stunt double (right). Photo: Columbia Pictures and Getty Images
There’s a clearer real-life parallel to stuntman Cliff Booth: Hal Needham, Burt Reynolds’s best buddy and stunt double. Like Booth, Needham served in the Army before pivoting to stunt work, and met his professional partner on a black-and-white TV Western (Reynolds’s Riverboat). Needham and Reynolds even lived together for five years. Needham went on to write and direct Smokey and the Bandit and direct Cannonball Run. In 2012, one year before Needham passed away, Quentin Tarantino presented him with an Honorary Academy Award at the Governors Awards.
Serenityalready gave 2019 moviegoers the Citizen Kane of fishing-boat murders. For another, the whispers and ambiguity surrounding the circumstances of Mrs. Booth’s death echo the eternal Hollywood mystery of Natalie Wood’s passing, off a boat near Catalina Island in 1981. An L.A. County sheriff named her husband Robert Wagner a person of interest in 2018.
Roman Polanski
Rafal Zawierucha as Roman Polanski (left) versus the real Roman Polanski (right). Photo: Getty Images
Polanski, who married Tate in 1968 and who was in London on the night of the murders, fled the United States after pleading guilty to “unlawful sexual intercourse” with 13-year-old Samantha Gailey in 1979. He still directs and evades extradition between France and Poland, and has served time under house arrest in Switzerland. Since then, many more women have come forward with accusations of Polanski assaulting them as minors.
Sharon Tate
Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate (left) versus the real Sharon Tate (right). Photo: Columbia Pictures and Shutterstock
Despite some criticism about Margot Robbie’s lack of screen time, her portrayal of Sharon Tate has earned praise for its depth and accuracy from Tate’s own sister (who’s been outspoken about her distaste with past depictions). Tate really did train with Bruce Lee and sustain relationships with Jay Sebring, Abigail Folger, and Wojciech Frykowski. Tate also really did have lunch on the day before she was killed, with her friend Joanna Pettet (Rumer Willis), who retired from acting in the ’90s.
Jay Sebring
Steve McQueen got a lot of it right at that Playboy Mansion scene: Jay Sebring (played by Emile Hirsch) did indeed date Tate until she met Polanski on the London set of The Fearless Vampire Killers in 1966. The real-life McQueen, along with Bruce Lee, were both close friends of Sebring’s and clients at his salon. Sebring remained close with Tate, befriended Polanski and Frykowski, and had been involved with their mutual friend Abigail Folger. Sebring’s legacy lived on in Hollywood as the inspiration for Warren Beatty’s hairdresser character in Shampoo.
Bruce Lee
Mike Moh as Bruce Lee (left) versus the real Bruce Lee (right). Photo: Columbia Pictures and Shutterstock
Cliff’s rooftop flashback shows Bruce Lee (Mike Moh, wearing the Kato jacket) behind the scenes of The Green Hornet,which aired for one season in the mid-1960s. What the scene doesn’t show is that Sebring, an amateur karate enthusiast, had seen Lee at an event in 1964 and is the one who first recommended him to Hollywood producers. And as shown in Tate’s flashback, Lee’s first Hollywood movie gig was as the “karate adviser” for her scene in The Wrecking Crew.Lee would go on to become one of the most iconic action stars of the 1970s before passing away suddenly at the young age of 32 in 1973.
Wojciech Frykowski
Wojciech (stylized Voytek in English) Frykowski (played by Costa Ronin) was an old friend of Polanski’s and was also involved with Abigail Folger. His son Bartek worked as a cinematographer in Poland until his death in 1999.
The HullabalooDancers
The Hullabaloo Dancers. Photo: Columbia Pictures
Of all the genre pastiches teased in the promotional materials for OUATIH,my favorite might have been this Corny Collins–style variety show. Hullabaloo was in fact a real program on NBC that had the misfortune of being slotted as counterprogramming to the much more popular American Bandstand.The Mamas and the Papas — who we see partying with Tate at the Playboy Mansion — made an appearance on the series in 1966. Those pigtailed Hullabaloo Dancers we see twisting with Rick Dalton had some surprising careers beyond this two-season oddity: One of the show’s go-go girls, Lana St. Edmund, went on to become the highest paid Hollywood stunt woman of all time.
Steve McQueen
Damian Lewis as Steve McQueen (left) versus the real Steve McQueen (right). Photo: Getty Images and Shutterstock
McQueen, who will henceforth be known as the guy who robbed Rick Dalton of that Great Escape gig, did many of his own stunts, but he was also one of the first major action stars to publicly credit his stunt double. In real life, McQueen passed on an invitation to a party at Tate’s house on the night of the murders, and it was later reported that his name was on Manson’s hit list. McQueen had a persistent cough (not unlike Dalton’s) that led to a fatal mesothelioma diagnosis.
James Stacy
Timothy Olyphant as James Stacey (left) versus the real James Stacey (right). Photo: Columbia Pictures and CBS
The TV cowboy played by Timothy Olyphant really did star as one of three Lancer family gunslingers on the 1960s Western series Lancer.Fitting with the hinting references to mythical Hollywood tragedies that hang over OUATIH, the real-life Stacy had his left arm and leg amputated after suffering a motorcycle accident in 1973, not long after the events of Tarantino’s film.(In Once Upon a Time, Olyphant’s character drives a motorcycle off set.) Stacy died from an anaphylactic reaction to antibiotics in 2016.
Wayne Maunder
Luke Perry as Wayne Maunder (left) versus the real Wayne Maunder (right). Photo: Columbia Pictures and CBS
A blond Luke Perry briefly appears as actor Wayne Maunder, who really did play the flashier Lancer (that leopard print!) on Lancer.The actor went on to do stints on other OUATIH-featured series, including The FBI.Curiously, Maunder only acted in two films, one being the Manson-tinged Beyond the Valley of the Dolls,by pulp king Russ Meyer. Not only does the original 1967 Dolls get a mention for Sharon Tate’s performance in the film, but Tarantino referenced Meyer’s Faster, Pussycat, Kill! Kill! in his film Death Proof,and of course, named a character Pussycat in OUATIH.
Trudi Fraser/Mirabella Lancer
“Johnny gets more than he bargained for when he goes after a horse trader who cheated him and ends up taking care of the trader’s feisty 10-year-old niece.” That’s the IMDb plot description for a 1968 episode of Lancer called “The Heart of Pony Alice,” and it’s the closest thing in the show’s history to the episode we see in OUATIH (featuring Julia Butters as Trudi Fraser as Mirabella Lancer). The feisty 10-year-old in question was played by Eve Plumb, although it’s unclear if she applied Trudi’s rigorous commitment to her craft on the set of The Brady Bunch.Others have suggested that Trudi may be an avatar for a young Jodie Foster, who made guest appearances on shows like Gunsmoke.
Sam Wanamaker
Nicholas Hammond plays the actor turned director who insists on that floppy mustache for Leo on Lancer (great call, by the way) and likens the Dalton role to Hamlet. The year after the events of OUATIH, the real Wanamaker made it his life’s mission to restore Shakespeare’s original Globe to a working theater. His foundation raised millions for the project by the time he passed away in 1993, and he is still credited in England with leading the charge for restoring the icon.
Pussycat
Margaret Qualley as Pussycat (left) versus the real Pussycat (right). Photo: Columbia Pictures and Shutterstock
Margaret Qualley’s hitchhiking Manson girl is probably a composite rather than a direct historical figure. Many have drawn comparisons, though, between Qualley’s character and 17-year-old Kathryn Lutesinger, nicknamed Kitty Kat. Kitty has been cited as giving one of the testimonies that helped detectives crack the Tate-LaBianca case. She got married in 1973 and has not been heard from since.
Tex Watson
Austin Butler as Tex Watson (left) versus the real Tex Watson (right). Photo: Getty Images
Following in the proud tradition of teen idols playing true-crime murderers, Austin Butler plays Tex Watson, a member of the Manson family who committed the Tate-LaBianca murders alongside Susan Atkins (Mikey Madison), Linda Kasabian (Maya Hawke), and Patricia Krenwinkel (Madisen Beaty). Tex really did tell his victims, “I’m the devil, and I’m here to do the devil’s work,” but now he is a fervent Christian and very online minister, who frequently blogs his preachings to his e-congregation from prison.
‘Squeaky’ Fromme
Dakota Fanning as “Squeaky” Fromme (left) versus the real “Squeaky” Fromme (right). Photo: Columbia Pictures and Getty Images
Dakota Fanning plays creepy, stringy-haired Manson devotee Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, who did reportedly sleep with and tend to George Spahn (Bruce Dern). She remained a Manson devotee for life. After decades in prison, she now lives in a skull-adorned house in upstate New York with her husband, another Manson acolyte.
Gypsy
Lena Dunham as Gypsy (left) versus the real Gypsy. Photo: Columbia Pictures and Getty Images
Manson family member Gypsy, played by Lena Dunham in OUATIH,did not directly participate in any of the murders, although she was charged along with Squeaky for attempted murder in 1971. Unlike Squeaky, however, Gypsy began distancing herself from and speaking out against the Manson cult after she was released from prison in the 1970s. She had a son with Manson family member “Clem” Grogan, who you’ll know as the character Cliff punches out on the ranch in the film.
George Spahn
Bruce Dern plays the old, incapacitated owner of Spahn ranch, who in reality really did rent it out to the Manson family in exchange for sexual favors with the women. Spahn, not Manson, is the one who gave the women their nicknames. Furthering the film’s connection to the story of stuntman Hal Needham, Burt Reynolds was originally meant to play Spahn in OUATIH before passing away in 2018.
Terry Melcher and Candice Bergen
In the movie, when Manson first scouts out the Cielo Drive house, he’s told that “Terry and Candi” don’t live there anymore. Terry Melcher, a record producer and Doris Day’s son, had previously passed on recording Manson’s music. He went on to win a Golden Globe for writing “Kokomo.” The “Candi” in question was his then-girlfriend Candice Bergen, who has never spoken about the murders. In addition to starring in Book Club and the recently canceled Murphy Brown reboot, Bergen has a very delightful hobby and side-hustle: painting portraits of people’s dogs on their Louis Vuittons.
Husband and Wife Stunt Team Randy and Janet
If Zoë Bell’s stunt-coordinator character is based on anyone, it’s probably herself. While there’s no record of a female stunt coordinator on the original Green Hornet TV series, Bell has worked as a stunt double in Tarantino’s films since Kill Bill: Vol. 1,and was the stunt coordinator on OUATIH.Meanwhile, Kurt Russell’s stunt-coordinator character does not appear to line up with any one Hollywood figure in particular, but Tarantino notesthat Kurt Russell helped him keep the Lancer scenes period-authentic, as the son of a Western character actor (Bing Russell) who himself starred in the 1963 TV Western The Travels of Jaimie McPheeters.
Marvin Schwarzs
Al Pacino’s Marvin Schwarz (right). Photo: Andrew Cooper/Columbia Pictures
Al Pacino’s colorful Hollywood-agent character doesn’t have an immediately identifiable real-life counterpart, although real-life producer Marvin Schwarz, who worked on shoot-em-ups with Kirk Douglas, Burt Reynolds, and Rock Hudson in the ’60s and ’70s, may have given Tarantino the idea for the name.
Francesca Cappucci
Claudia Cardinale. Photo: Getty Images
Chilean actress Lorenza Izzo says that she based her portrayal of Rick Dalton’s wife on actresses like Sophia Loren, Claudia Cardinale, and Virna Lisi, all of whom became well-known Stateside in the 1960s. IMDb also lists an actress named Francesca Cappucci, who seems to exclusively play reporters.
On the Troubling Subtext of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
By Jen Chaney@chaneyj
Rick Dalton to the … rescue? Photo: Andrew Cooper/Columbia Pictures
As critics have said, ad nauseam at this point, there is a lot to love in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s grand, meandering flashback to the final months of the 1960s. It’s got outstanding performances from an exceptional cast; production design that plunges its audience into a distinct time and place that is — and this is an enormous added bonus — different from the same damned portrait of the ’60s we’ve seen a jillion times before; a fantastic, idiosyncratic soundtrack (a Tarantino specialty); and camerawork that is stylistic and dynamic without coming across as too showy. I fully enjoyed all of these elements and, for the most part, the entire movie.
But I was also disturbed by it in a way that I have not been able to shake. It took some processing and deeper consideration of the film’s context, within 1969 culture as well as the culture of today, to finally determine that what bothers me is what it tells us about men frustrated by cultural shifts, the ways we define and glorify old-school heroism, and how unwilling the movie is to dig more deeply into what it’s ultimately trying to say about both things. (If you haven’t seen Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, heads up: I’m about to spoil large portions of the movie, including the ending, for you.)
Most of the film focuses on the fading career of Western movie and TV star Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) and his relationship with stunt double and personal assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Rick is a man frightened of the changing tides around him, specifically in terms of his career. As Marvin Schwarz, the agent played by Al Pacino, tells Rick in an early scene, he’s now officially transitioned from playing the perpetual hero to playing the heavy who’s always going to be beaten by the hero. (Fun side note: Pacino made his film debut in 1969, in a movie called Me, Natalie.) Rick is coming to grips with the fact that he’s been relegated to cameo roles instead of leads, a situation that probably isn’t going to change. Rick doesn’t like that. He doesn’t like what that portends for his show-business future, and, as a man aging farther away from his prime, he doesn’t like what that suggests about his future in a broader sense, either.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood lets us know all this early on, and also lets us know that Rick happens to live on Cielo Drive, in a house located right next door to the one being rented by Roman Polanski and his actress wife, Sharon Tate, played by Margot Robbie. The specter of what will eventually happen in that house in August of 1969 — the place where followers of Charles Manson famously killed a pregnant Tate and four others — hangs over the entire story until the fateful date of the murders finally arrives. On the night of August 8, 1969, which eventually bleeds into the early morning hours of August 9, 1969, a car filled with members of the Manson family putters its way up into the Hollywood Hills. But in Tarantino’s version, it goes to … the wrong address.
Rick Dalton — already drunk, drinking more alcohol out of a margarita pitcher, and wearing a weirdly emasculating robe — storms out of his house screaming at “the hippies,” whose muffler-deprived car is in his driveway and making a major racket. He tells them to leave and never come back, turning fully into an old man yelling “get off my lawn” at some young’uns. The so-called hippies do as he says, but then — after realizing he’s the Rick Dalton who starred in the TV Western Bounty Law — they decide to return. Three of them — Tex Watson (Austin Butler), Susan “Sadie” Atkins (Mikey Madison of Better Things), and Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel (Madisen Beaty, formerly of The Fosters) — burst into Dalton’s house with the intention of murdering everyone present. But that plan, as well as history as we know it, gets upended in gruesome, darkly comic fashion when first Cliff, then Rick, violently kill the murderers before they can murder.
Rick’s hippie tirade is ridiculous — the robe helps in that department — but it also comes from a place of sincere scorn. His drunken shouting at the Manson crew is not the first time in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that he expresses disdain for so-called longhairs. Earlier in the movie, he uses the term “hippie” as a pejorative. When he says that word, it’s caked in the resentment of someone who’s bitter that all these young, peace-signing kids are taking over his Los Angeles, both its streets and its primary industry. (Just in case this point might be missed, he even refers to Tex as “Easy Rider.”) What Rick Dalton is really mad at, of course, is time and the fact that it continues to move forward against his will, making him less and less relevant. But like most middle-aged or older folks who are really mad at time, he projects those feelings onto people who have more time than he does: the hippies, a.k.a. the young people rattling the status quo circa 1969.
Charles Manson and the brainwashed members of the Manson family technically were not hippies. They were killer sheep in hippie clothing. Actual hippies were not murderers. They were Vietnam War protesters and left-leaning peace advocates; pot smokers and acid droppers; free-love proponents who wore flowers in their hair and danced naked in the mud at Woodstock — which, for the record, took place a mere week after the Manson murders.
They also were the rejecters of mainstream society who questioned the rules under which it operated. As one unidentified hippie said in a 1969 New YorkTimes piece about the impact of the Manson murders on the hippie movement: “Most Americans are always looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The hippie thinks the important thing is the rainbow. It doesn’t matter too much whether there is a pot of gold at the end. And there probably isn’t.”
Yes, some of them could be disruptive in their activism, and yes, some hippies got arrested. But generally speaking, most hippies did not represent a dangerous threat to anyone except those who were afraid of the societal change they represented. People like Rick Dalton.
Cliff Booth, on the other hand, is not initially threatened by them. As Rick’s best buddy, Cliff has at least one moccasined foot firmly planted in Rick’s world. But in many ways, Cliff is just a hippie in a Hawaiian shirt, something Tarantino makes a point of conveying. He lives in a trailer parked behind a drive-in theater, which isn’t that many steps up from the abandoned cottages the Manson family occupies on Spahn Ranch. Cliff’s job, when you get right down to it, is just hanging out. His ultra-zen attitude toward everything is pretty hippielike, too. At one point he makes a speech about how he’s never had much ambition and finds joy in the day-to-day. Which, to me, sounds a lot like thinking the important thing is the rainbow.
The first time he sees Pussycat (Margaret Qualley), the Manson follower who eventually guides him to Spahn Ranch, he’s drawn to her, and even flashes a peace sign in her direction. He also has no qualms about buying an acid-laced cigarette from a hippie. The only time he gets suspicious of these young radicals is when he starts to (rightfully) feel sinister vibes coming off of Squeaky Fromme (a barely recognizable Dakota Fanning) and the rest of the Manson group at the ranch. His cowboy wiring gets triggered, and he kicks the crap out of one of them pretty badly.
When members of that group show up at Rick’s house on that night in August, Cliff, who finally smoked that acid-laced cigarette and is under its trippy influence, recognizes them immediately. His cowboy wiring gets triggered again, and he fends them off in the most brutal ways imaginable, ways that involve face-stomping, dog attacks, knife fights, and beatings via rotary phone. As our Nate Jones noted in his discussion of the movie’s ending, the violence in this scene is played for laughs. But it’s also shocking in its lack of mercy. Even when it’s clear that one or two head-slammings into a hard surface have pretty much gotten the job done, Cliff keeps on slamming. The fact that he’s on hard drugs at the time suggests that he has something in common with the Manson group, who, in reality, were also on something when they killed everyone at the house up the road.
Meanwhile, Rick Dalton is blissfully unaware that any of this is happening. He’s floating in his backyard swimming pool with his headphones on, inebriated and listening to “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron,” a song about imagined World War I glories. He’s jarred out of his one-man Royal Guardsmen singalong when Sadie comes flying out of the house and straight into the pool, screaming like her skin is on fire because, actually, it is. Rick’s response is to grab the same flamethrower he used to incinerate Nazis in the movie The 14 Fists of McCluskey and use it to further incinerate Sadie. She’s already been mauled and nearly burned to a crisp, but sure: Fire up some more fire. The implication of this moment: He’s Rick fucking Dalton. And this crazy screaming hippie isn’t going to forget it.
At first, all of these outcomes strike a satisfying note. The real-life murderers get their comeuppance. The cowboys, Cliff and Rick, emerge as the heroes who defended themselves and their property. The life of the literal girl next door, Sharon Tate, is saved, along with the lives of everyone staying in the house with her. This feels good. Actually, indulging the fantasy that innocent people were prevented from being senselessly killed by the Manson family feels more than good. It feels like justice.
But in a world where justice is served — one that is helter-skelter-free, if you will — we shouldn’t wish what Watson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel did on anyone. The problem is the movie is still wishing that on someone, then amping up the fulfillment of that wish by several depraved degrees. I know, I know: That’s what Tarantino does. But there is something deeply discomfiting about watching this unfold, especially when much of the violence is being perpetrated against women in the name of sparing a more famous, pregnant one.
In a recent piece for the Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan suggests that Tarantino is aware of the optics of having Cliff fight off the Manson killers and does so to confirm that Cliff is the movie’s real hero, the guy who possesses all the qualities we admire in strong men. She also characterizes this approach as transgressive at this particular moment in America. “We can’t have a movie like this,” she writes. “It affirms things the culture wants killed.”
The problem is that the person who truly gets the happy ending in the movie is not Cliff or Sharon. It’s Rick Dalton. Unlike Cliff, he emerges unscathed from the encounter with the Manson crew, while Cliff is last seen in an ambulance, recovering from a vicious stab wound. Unlike Sharon, who doesn’t know she just dodged an attack, Rick experiences the profound joy of having thwarted death. The conclusion of the film becomes the realization of what may be Rick’s ultimate dream at this stage in his life: He gets to be the hero once again, but in real life. He helps fight off a bunch of dirty, young hippies, and, via a conversation with Tate and her friend and former lover, Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch), he wins the respect of another, more glamorous group of young people with great connections. Rick Dalton is vindicated, even though — as sympathetic as DiCaprio makes him — it’s not clear he deserves to be.
Maybe Tarantino means this as one last dark joke: Of course Rick, who did only a fraction of the work Cliff did to fend off the intruders, gets to be the hero. That’s how it works in Hollywood. Meanwhile, the stuntman is pushed offscreen with a semi-serious injury and completely forgotten. But given the nostalgia in which so much of the movie is bathed, it’s difficult not to view the ending as a reward for a fading old cowboy and a celebration of an era in which “men were men.”
Rick has even less of a frame of reference than Cliff does about who these home invaders are and why they showed up thirsty for blood. Unlike Cliff, he does not know these people are from the Spahn Ranch. He definitely doesn’t know anything about Charles Manson or how he ordered Watson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel to journey to Cielo Drive. Rick explains what happened to him through his particular view of the events: A pack of wild hippies entered his house, tried to kill him, Cliff, and Rick’s new wife, and he fought them off. Rick’s preconceived notions about hippies are confirmed by what happened on that August night, as is his contention that he is superior to them.
To be clear: I’m not accusing Tarantino of unfairly demonizing the Manson family. Those people earned demonization. But the fact that the movie enables Rick to triumph — and to feel justified in his assumptions about young progressive types — taps into real, dangerous assumptions that existed at the time.
In that previously mentioned 1969 Times article, published in December of that year, members of the hippie community expressed concern that, since the murders, they were starting to be lumped in with the Manson clan and becoming targets of hate and fear. “They,” says one unidentified female hippie in the article, referring to the killers who came to Cielo Drive, “just confirm what everyone wants to believe.”
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood never addresses the loaded nature of Rick’s use of the word “hippie.” In fact, it’s an extremely apolitical film. Richard Nixon’s name is never mentioned, as best as I recall. The war in Vietnam comes up, but only briefly. The movie exists largely in a vacuum where none of that matters. But of course, that stuff always matters.
Now, I know that Quentin Tarantino did not intend to comment on the Trump era when he was writing this movie. I am aware that, as he toldEsquire, he was working on it in novel form for five years before he even molded it into a screenplay, which makes it virtually impossible for contemporary politics to have entered into his thought process when he was shaping the story.
But every piece of art — whether it’s a film or an album or a TV show or a book — is evaluated and considered through the lens of the time in which it arrives.
You can’t see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in 2019 and not notice the threads that tie it to what’s happening now. At least I couldn’t. When I caught the movie a few weeks ago at a press screening outside Washington, D.C., President Trump was speaking a few miles away at Turning Point USA’s Teen Student Action Summit. During that speech, as he had been doing for days prior, he once again criticized “the Squad,” the group of progressive woman elected to the House of Representatives during the last midterm election.
“The radical left,” he said, per the official White House website, “has nothing but contempt for America’s heritage … They see our history as a source of shame.”
The “radical left” is one term that Trump and other Republicans use to describe members of the Democratic Party. So is “socialists.” In the 1960s, both of those words were often used by men (and women) to describe — guess who? — hippies.
In an interview with Harper’s Magazine in 2016, a few months before the presidential election that put Trump in office, Nixon’s domestic adviser John Ehrlichman made it abundantly clear how much the president in that era disliked hippies. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people,” Ehrlichman said. “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
This Republican playbook, it seems, is still being widely circulated.
As I said before, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood does not get into any of that late-1960s history.It merely asks us to go back in time to a few dates at the end of that tumultuous decade and imagine them a little differently. Not with less violence — which, let’s be honest, would be the real righteous approach — just with redirected violence. The movie is so focused on getting to the moment of redemption for its principal protagonists — Sharon, Cliff, and Rick — that it doesn’t grapple with the ramifications of that redemption, nor does it explicitly wonder whether it’s a good or bad thing for Rick to be deemed a hero. The audience leaves the theater feeling happy that the Manson killers are dead, and high on the filmmaking buzz that Tarantino always elicits. But it isn’t until later, when the buzz wears off, that you realize how misleading it is to glorify a time period without providing a broader context for it or to consider its context through the prism of the present. You realize that Quentin Tarantino has just made his first movie since the downfall of Harvey Weinstein — the man who launched Tarantino’s career and became a symbol of poisonous male-dominated Hollywood — and made that movie a celebration of old-school, masculine Hollywood. That realization makes the final note it strikes, intentionally or not, feel even more stubborn in its vindication of old-school macho men.
With Once Upon a Time being (allegedly) Tarantino’s penultimate film, a lot of career-retrospective pieces have been published since it came out. Those got me thinking about Pulp Fiction and, specifically, its ending: the sequence in which Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) have a philosophical conversation over breakfast at a diner, where they cross paths with Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, who are planning to commit a robbery there. We know about the robbery plans. Vincent and Jules do not. Even back then, the buddies in the Tarantino movie didn’t have all the info.
Jules tells Vincent that he’s planning to give up the whole hitman thing and just “walk the Earth.” Vincent can’t even wrap his head around what that means. “You decided to be a bum,” Vincent declares, “just like all those pieces of shit out there who beg for change, sleep in garbage bins, eat what I throw away. They got a name for that, Jules. It’s called a ‘bum.’”
You know what other name they used to have for bums? “Hippies.”
After their conversation, while Vincent is indisposed in the men’s room — not in a backyard swimming pool, but you know, close — gun-toting Pumpkin and Honey Bunny enter the scene, threatening to shoot everyone in the restaurant if they don’t hand over their valuables. Jules, the lone holdout, refuses to give them the mysterious case that he and Vincent went to such great pains to acquire. But instead of firing a gun at both of them, Jules diffuses the situation with a conversation.
He discusses the Ezekiel 25:17 passage that he normally recites just before he assassinates another victim, the one that says, in part, “Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.” He wrestles with its meaning, which is to say, Tarantino wrestles with its meaning, too.
“The truth is, you’re the weak,” Jules tells Pumpkin, “and I’m the tyranny of evil men. But I’m trying, Ringo. I’m trying real hard to be the shepherd.”
I think that’s what really bothered me about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I was waiting for the Tarantino who transparently wrestles with what he is trying to say to show up and finish his job in this movie. And at this particular moment, 50 years after the Manson murders, I was hoping Rick and Cliff would turn out to be the kind of men who would not only save Sharon Tate, but who might also try a little harder to be the shepherds.
By Jen Chaney@chaneyj
Rick Dalton to the … rescue? Photo: Andrew Cooper/Columbia Pictures
As critics have said, ad nauseam at this point, there is a lot to love in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino’s grand, meandering flashback to the final months of the 1960s. It’s got outstanding performances from an exceptional cast; production design that plunges its audience into a distinct time and place that is — and this is an enormous added bonus — different from the same damned portrait of the ’60s we’ve seen a jillion times before; a fantastic, idiosyncratic soundtrack (a Tarantino specialty); and camerawork that is stylistic and dynamic without coming across as too showy. I fully enjoyed all of these elements and, for the most part, the entire movie.
But I was also disturbed by it in a way that I have not been able to shake. It took some processing and deeper consideration of the film’s context, within 1969 culture as well as the culture of today, to finally determine that what bothers me is what it tells us about men frustrated by cultural shifts, the ways we define and glorify old-school heroism, and how unwilling the movie is to dig more deeply into what it’s ultimately trying to say about both things. (If you haven’t seen Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, heads up: I’m about to spoil large portions of the movie, including the ending, for you.)
Most of the film focuses on the fading career of Western movie and TV star Rick Dalton (DiCaprio) and his relationship with stunt double and personal assistant Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt). Rick is a man frightened of the changing tides around him, specifically in terms of his career. As Marvin Schwarz, the agent played by Al Pacino, tells Rick in an early scene, he’s now officially transitioned from playing the perpetual hero to playing the heavy who’s always going to be beaten by the hero. (Fun side note: Pacino made his film debut in 1969, in a movie called Me, Natalie.) Rick is coming to grips with the fact that he’s been relegated to cameo roles instead of leads, a situation that probably isn’t going to change. Rick doesn’t like that. He doesn’t like what that portends for his show-business future, and, as a man aging farther away from his prime, he doesn’t like what that suggests about his future in a broader sense, either.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood lets us know all this early on, and also lets us know that Rick happens to live on Cielo Drive, in a house located right next door to the one being rented by Roman Polanski and his actress wife, Sharon Tate, played by Margot Robbie. The specter of what will eventually happen in that house in August of 1969 — the place where followers of Charles Manson famously killed a pregnant Tate and four others — hangs over the entire story until the fateful date of the murders finally arrives. On the night of August 8, 1969, which eventually bleeds into the early morning hours of August 9, 1969, a car filled with members of the Manson family putters its way up into the Hollywood Hills. But in Tarantino’s version, it goes to … the wrong address.
Rick Dalton — already drunk, drinking more alcohol out of a margarita pitcher, and wearing a weirdly emasculating robe — storms out of his house screaming at “the hippies,” whose muffler-deprived car is in his driveway and making a major racket. He tells them to leave and never come back, turning fully into an old man yelling “get off my lawn” at some young’uns. The so-called hippies do as he says, but then — after realizing he’s the Rick Dalton who starred in the TV Western Bounty Law — they decide to return. Three of them — Tex Watson (Austin Butler), Susan “Sadie” Atkins (Mikey Madison of Better Things), and Patricia “Katie” Krenwinkel (Madisen Beaty, formerly of The Fosters) — burst into Dalton’s house with the intention of murdering everyone present. But that plan, as well as history as we know it, gets upended in gruesome, darkly comic fashion when first Cliff, then Rick, violently kill the murderers before they can murder.
Rick’s hippie tirade is ridiculous — the robe helps in that department — but it also comes from a place of sincere scorn. His drunken shouting at the Manson crew is not the first time in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood that he expresses disdain for so-called longhairs. Earlier in the movie, he uses the term “hippie” as a pejorative. When he says that word, it’s caked in the resentment of someone who’s bitter that all these young, peace-signing kids are taking over his Los Angeles, both its streets and its primary industry. (Just in case this point might be missed, he even refers to Tex as “Easy Rider.”) What Rick Dalton is really mad at, of course, is time and the fact that it continues to move forward against his will, making him less and less relevant. But like most middle-aged or older folks who are really mad at time, he projects those feelings onto people who have more time than he does: the hippies, a.k.a. the young people rattling the status quo circa 1969.
Charles Manson and the brainwashed members of the Manson family technically were not hippies. They were killer sheep in hippie clothing. Actual hippies were not murderers. They were Vietnam War protesters and left-leaning peace advocates; pot smokers and acid droppers; free-love proponents who wore flowers in their hair and danced naked in the mud at Woodstock — which, for the record, took place a mere week after the Manson murders.
They also were the rejecters of mainstream society who questioned the rules under which it operated. As one unidentified hippie said in a 1969 New YorkTimes piece about the impact of the Manson murders on the hippie movement: “Most Americans are always looking for the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. The hippie thinks the important thing is the rainbow. It doesn’t matter too much whether there is a pot of gold at the end. And there probably isn’t.”
Yes, some of them could be disruptive in their activism, and yes, some hippies got arrested. But generally speaking, most hippies did not represent a dangerous threat to anyone except those who were afraid of the societal change they represented. People like Rick Dalton.
Cliff Booth, on the other hand, is not initially threatened by them. As Rick’s best buddy, Cliff has at least one moccasined foot firmly planted in Rick’s world. But in many ways, Cliff is just a hippie in a Hawaiian shirt, something Tarantino makes a point of conveying. He lives in a trailer parked behind a drive-in theater, which isn’t that many steps up from the abandoned cottages the Manson family occupies on Spahn Ranch. Cliff’s job, when you get right down to it, is just hanging out. His ultra-zen attitude toward everything is pretty hippielike, too. At one point he makes a speech about how he’s never had much ambition and finds joy in the day-to-day. Which, to me, sounds a lot like thinking the important thing is the rainbow.
The first time he sees Pussycat (Margaret Qualley), the Manson follower who eventually guides him to Spahn Ranch, he’s drawn to her, and even flashes a peace sign in her direction. He also has no qualms about buying an acid-laced cigarette from a hippie. The only time he gets suspicious of these young radicals is when he starts to (rightfully) feel sinister vibes coming off of Squeaky Fromme (a barely recognizable Dakota Fanning) and the rest of the Manson group at the ranch. His cowboy wiring gets triggered, and he kicks the crap out of one of them pretty badly.
When members of that group show up at Rick’s house on that night in August, Cliff, who finally smoked that acid-laced cigarette and is under its trippy influence, recognizes them immediately. His cowboy wiring gets triggered again, and he fends them off in the most brutal ways imaginable, ways that involve face-stomping, dog attacks, knife fights, and beatings via rotary phone. As our Nate Jones noted in his discussion of the movie’s ending, the violence in this scene is played for laughs. But it’s also shocking in its lack of mercy. Even when it’s clear that one or two head-slammings into a hard surface have pretty much gotten the job done, Cliff keeps on slamming. The fact that he’s on hard drugs at the time suggests that he has something in common with the Manson group, who, in reality, were also on something when they killed everyone at the house up the road.
Meanwhile, Rick Dalton is blissfully unaware that any of this is happening. He’s floating in his backyard swimming pool with his headphones on, inebriated and listening to “Snoopy vs. the Red Baron,” a song about imagined World War I glories. He’s jarred out of his one-man Royal Guardsmen singalong when Sadie comes flying out of the house and straight into the pool, screaming like her skin is on fire because, actually, it is. Rick’s response is to grab the same flamethrower he used to incinerate Nazis in the movie The 14 Fists of McCluskey and use it to further incinerate Sadie. She’s already been mauled and nearly burned to a crisp, but sure: Fire up some more fire. The implication of this moment: He’s Rick fucking Dalton. And this crazy screaming hippie isn’t going to forget it.
At first, all of these outcomes strike a satisfying note. The real-life murderers get their comeuppance. The cowboys, Cliff and Rick, emerge as the heroes who defended themselves and their property. The life of the literal girl next door, Sharon Tate, is saved, along with the lives of everyone staying in the house with her. This feels good. Actually, indulging the fantasy that innocent people were prevented from being senselessly killed by the Manson family feels more than good. It feels like justice.
But in a world where justice is served — one that is helter-skelter-free, if you will — we shouldn’t wish what Watson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel did on anyone. The problem is the movie is still wishing that on someone, then amping up the fulfillment of that wish by several depraved degrees. I know, I know: That’s what Tarantino does. But there is something deeply discomfiting about watching this unfold, especially when much of the violence is being perpetrated against women in the name of sparing a more famous, pregnant one.
In a recent piece for the Atlantic, Caitlin Flanagan suggests that Tarantino is aware of the optics of having Cliff fight off the Manson killers and does so to confirm that Cliff is the movie’s real hero, the guy who possesses all the qualities we admire in strong men. She also characterizes this approach as transgressive at this particular moment in America. “We can’t have a movie like this,” she writes. “It affirms things the culture wants killed.”
The problem is that the person who truly gets the happy ending in the movie is not Cliff or Sharon. It’s Rick Dalton. Unlike Cliff, he emerges unscathed from the encounter with the Manson crew, while Cliff is last seen in an ambulance, recovering from a vicious stab wound. Unlike Sharon, who doesn’t know she just dodged an attack, Rick experiences the profound joy of having thwarted death. The conclusion of the film becomes the realization of what may be Rick’s ultimate dream at this stage in his life: He gets to be the hero once again, but in real life. He helps fight off a bunch of dirty, young hippies, and, via a conversation with Tate and her friend and former lover, Jay Sebring (Emile Hirsch), he wins the respect of another, more glamorous group of young people with great connections. Rick Dalton is vindicated, even though — as sympathetic as DiCaprio makes him — it’s not clear he deserves to be.
Maybe Tarantino means this as one last dark joke: Of course Rick, who did only a fraction of the work Cliff did to fend off the intruders, gets to be the hero. That’s how it works in Hollywood. Meanwhile, the stuntman is pushed offscreen with a semi-serious injury and completely forgotten. But given the nostalgia in which so much of the movie is bathed, it’s difficult not to view the ending as a reward for a fading old cowboy and a celebration of an era in which “men were men.”
Rick has even less of a frame of reference than Cliff does about who these home invaders are and why they showed up thirsty for blood. Unlike Cliff, he does not know these people are from the Spahn Ranch. He definitely doesn’t know anything about Charles Manson or how he ordered Watson, Atkins, and Krenwinkel to journey to Cielo Drive. Rick explains what happened to him through his particular view of the events: A pack of wild hippies entered his house, tried to kill him, Cliff, and Rick’s new wife, and he fought them off. Rick’s preconceived notions about hippies are confirmed by what happened on that August night, as is his contention that he is superior to them.
To be clear: I’m not accusing Tarantino of unfairly demonizing the Manson family. Those people earned demonization. But the fact that the movie enables Rick to triumph — and to feel justified in his assumptions about young progressive types — taps into real, dangerous assumptions that existed at the time.
In that previously mentioned 1969 Times article, published in December of that year, members of the hippie community expressed concern that, since the murders, they were starting to be lumped in with the Manson clan and becoming targets of hate and fear. “They,” says one unidentified female hippie in the article, referring to the killers who came to Cielo Drive, “just confirm what everyone wants to believe.”
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood never addresses the loaded nature of Rick’s use of the word “hippie.” In fact, it’s an extremely apolitical film. Richard Nixon’s name is never mentioned, as best as I recall. The war in Vietnam comes up, but only briefly. The movie exists largely in a vacuum where none of that matters. But of course, that stuff always matters.
Now, I know that Quentin Tarantino did not intend to comment on the Trump era when he was writing this movie. I am aware that, as he toldEsquire, he was working on it in novel form for five years before he even molded it into a screenplay, which makes it virtually impossible for contemporary politics to have entered into his thought process when he was shaping the story.
But every piece of art — whether it’s a film or an album or a TV show or a book — is evaluated and considered through the lens of the time in which it arrives.
You can’t see Once Upon a Time in Hollywood in 2019 and not notice the threads that tie it to what’s happening now. At least I couldn’t. When I caught the movie a few weeks ago at a press screening outside Washington, D.C., President Trump was speaking a few miles away at Turning Point USA’s Teen Student Action Summit. During that speech, as he had been doing for days prior, he once again criticized “the Squad,” the group of progressive woman elected to the House of Representatives during the last midterm election.
“The radical left,” he said, per the official White House website, “has nothing but contempt for America’s heritage … They see our history as a source of shame.”
The “radical left” is one term that Trump and other Republicans use to describe members of the Democratic Party. So is “socialists.” In the 1960s, both of those words were often used by men (and women) to describe — guess who? — hippies.
In an interview with Harper’s Magazine in 2016, a few months before the presidential election that put Trump in office, Nixon’s domestic adviser John Ehrlichman made it abundantly clear how much the president in that era disliked hippies. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the anti-war left and black people,” Ehrlichman said. “You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
This Republican playbook, it seems, is still being widely circulated.
As I said before, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood does not get into any of that late-1960s history.It merely asks us to go back in time to a few dates at the end of that tumultuous decade and imagine them a little differently. Not with less violence — which, let’s be honest, would be the real righteous approach — just with redirected violence. The movie is so focused on getting to the moment of redemption for its principal protagonists — Sharon, Cliff, and Rick — that it doesn’t grapple with the ramifications of that redemption, nor does it explicitly wonder whether it’s a good or bad thing for Rick to be deemed a hero. The audience leaves the theater feeling happy that the Manson killers are dead, and high on the filmmaking buzz that Tarantino always elicits. But it isn’t until later, when the buzz wears off, that you realize how misleading it is to glorify a time period without providing a broader context for it or to consider its context through the prism of the present. You realize that Quentin Tarantino has just made his first movie since the downfall of Harvey Weinstein — the man who launched Tarantino’s career and became a symbol of poisonous male-dominated Hollywood — and made that movie a celebration of old-school, masculine Hollywood. That realization makes the final note it strikes, intentionally or not, feel even more stubborn in its vindication of old-school macho men.
With Once Upon a Time being (allegedly) Tarantino’s penultimate film, a lot of career-retrospective pieces have been published since it came out. Those got me thinking about Pulp Fiction and, specifically, its ending: the sequence in which Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson) have a philosophical conversation over breakfast at a diner, where they cross paths with Pumpkin and Honey Bunny, who are planning to commit a robbery there. We know about the robbery plans. Vincent and Jules do not. Even back then, the buddies in the Tarantino movie didn’t have all the info.
Jules tells Vincent that he’s planning to give up the whole hitman thing and just “walk the Earth.” Vincent can’t even wrap his head around what that means. “You decided to be a bum,” Vincent declares, “just like all those pieces of shit out there who beg for change, sleep in garbage bins, eat what I throw away. They got a name for that, Jules. It’s called a ‘bum.’”
You know what other name they used to have for bums? “Hippies.”
After their conversation, while Vincent is indisposed in the men’s room — not in a backyard swimming pool, but you know, close — gun-toting Pumpkin and Honey Bunny enter the scene, threatening to shoot everyone in the restaurant if they don’t hand over their valuables. Jules, the lone holdout, refuses to give them the mysterious case that he and Vincent went to such great pains to acquire. But instead of firing a gun at both of them, Jules diffuses the situation with a conversation.
He discusses the Ezekiel 25:17 passage that he normally recites just before he assassinates another victim, the one that says, in part, “Blessed is he who, in the name of charity and good will shepherds the weak through the valley of darkness, for he is truly his brother’s keeper and the finder of lost children. And I will strike down upon thee with great vengeance and furious anger those who attempt to poison and destroy my brothers.” He wrestles with its meaning, which is to say, Tarantino wrestles with its meaning, too.
“The truth is, you’re the weak,” Jules tells Pumpkin, “and I’m the tyranny of evil men. But I’m trying, Ringo. I’m trying real hard to be the shepherd.”
I think that’s what really bothered me about Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I was waiting for the Tarantino who transparently wrestles with what he is trying to say to show up and finish his job in this movie. And at this particular moment, 50 years after the Manson murders, I was hoping Rick and Cliff would turn out to be the kind of men who would not only save Sharon Tate, but who might also try a little harder to be the shepherds.
Quentin Tarantino Responds to Controversy Surrounding ‘Once Upon a Time’s Bruce Lee Scene
BY MATT GOLDBERG AUGUST 13, 2019
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Spoilers ahead for Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.
Like pretty much all Quentin Tarantino movies, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywoodhas invited its fair share of controversies. While the studio probably expected the ending to garner an intense response (hence the desire to crack down on spoilers), there’s also been a lot of talk surrounding the scene involving Bruce Lee (Mike Moh). In the scene, stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) flashes back to when he met Lee and the two fought to a draw, which some saw as insulting to Lee’s legacy—to have him appear arrogant and cocky only to be taken down by some stuntman. Some have argued that this is just Cliff providing a sheen to his own memory, but while doing press for the film in Moscow, Tarantino broke down his depiction of Lee and why he was evenly matched with Cliff.
With regards to his depiction of Lee as cocky and arrogant, Tarantino explains [via Variety]:
Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures
Of course, the issue isn’t with Lee being cocky (a lot of great athletes have that arrogance, and people rarely hold that bravado against them since they have the skills to back up their words). The issue is with Cliff being able to hold his own against a martial arts legend. Tarantino continues:
The purpose of the scene is to make Cliff seem lethal, a payoff that lends credence to the accusation that Cliff killed his wife, but also helps sell the conclusion of the movie when Cliff kills Manson Family members. However, the controversy of the scene doesn’t deal with who would win, but why this comes at the expense of Bruce Lee. For a film that clearly adores Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), a talent that died far too young, Lee is not afforded the same glowing treatment. Instead, he serves to burnish Cliff’s image, and in so doing, is rendered smaller. For fans of Lee, that’s where they take umbrage.
BY MATT GOLDBERG AUGUST 13, 2019
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Spoilers ahead for Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood.
Like pretty much all Quentin Tarantino movies, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywoodhas invited its fair share of controversies. While the studio probably expected the ending to garner an intense response (hence the desire to crack down on spoilers), there’s also been a lot of talk surrounding the scene involving Bruce Lee (Mike Moh). In the scene, stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) flashes back to when he met Lee and the two fought to a draw, which some saw as insulting to Lee’s legacy—to have him appear arrogant and cocky only to be taken down by some stuntman. Some have argued that this is just Cliff providing a sheen to his own memory, but while doing press for the film in Moscow, Tarantino broke down his depiction of Lee and why he was evenly matched with Cliff.
With regards to his depiction of Lee as cocky and arrogant, Tarantino explains [via Variety]:
“The way he was talking, I didn’t just make a lot of that up. I heard him say things like that, to that effect. If people are saying, ‘Well he never said he could beat up Muhammad Ali,’ well yeah, he did. Not only did he say that, but his wife, Linda Lee, said that in her first biography I ever read. She absolutely said that,”
Photo courtesy of Sony Pictures
Of course, the issue isn’t with Lee being cocky (a lot of great athletes have that arrogance, and people rarely hold that bravado against them since they have the skills to back up their words). The issue is with Cliff being able to hold his own against a martial arts legend. Tarantino continues:
“Could Cliff beat up Bruce Lee? Brad [Pitt] would not be able to beat up Bruce Lee, but Cliff maybe could,” said Tarantino. “If you ask me the question, ‘Who would win in a fight: Bruce Lee or Dracula?’ It’s the same question. It’s a fictional character. If I say Cliff can beat Bruce Lee up, he’s a fictional character so he could beat Bruce Lee up. The reality of the situation is this: Cliff is a Green Beret. He has killed many men in WWII in hand-to-hand combat. What Bruce Lee is talking about in the whole thing is that he admires warriors. He admires combat, and boxing is a closer approximation of combat as a sport. Cliff is not part of the sport that is like combat, he is a warrior. He is a combat person.”
Tarantino concluded, “If Cliff were fighting Bruce Lee in a martial arts tournament in Madison Square Garden, Bruce would kill him. But if Cliff and Bruce were fighting in the jungles of the Philippines in a hand-to-hand combat fight, Cliff would kill him.”
Tarantino concluded, “If Cliff were fighting Bruce Lee in a martial arts tournament in Madison Square Garden, Bruce would kill him. But if Cliff and Bruce were fighting in the jungles of the Philippines in a hand-to-hand combat fight, Cliff would kill him.”
The purpose of the scene is to make Cliff seem lethal, a payoff that lends credence to the accusation that Cliff killed his wife, but also helps sell the conclusion of the movie when Cliff kills Manson Family members. However, the controversy of the scene doesn’t deal with who would win, but why this comes at the expense of Bruce Lee. For a film that clearly adores Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie), a talent that died far too young, Lee is not afforded the same glowing treatment. Instead, he serves to burnish Cliff’s image, and in so doing, is rendered smaller. For fans of Lee, that’s where they take umbrage.
Him saying that arrogant shit was fucked up and weak as hell.
Just say it was a fictional story and you wanted to show how tough Cliff was and you thought fans would see it that way
but this is the same dude who defends his N word usage and black people give him a pass for it
Just say it was a fictional story and you wanted to show how tough Cliff was and you thought fans would see it that way
but this is the same dude who defends his N word usage and black people give him a pass for it
Man that would be ill but he'd never do that shit
word? I don't even remember no fruit shit
I put the jawn on for background noise while I cleaned up the tilt and happened to stop and look at the Tv walking passed it was some gay rap shit Folk.
China delays release of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Bruce Lee's daughter has reportedly objected to her father's depiction in Quentin Tarantino's film.
By Clark Collis
October 18, 2019 at 02:09 PM EDT
The Chinese release of director Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has been put on hold because of the film’s portrayal of Bruce Lee, according to THR, which first reported the news. In the movie, Lee (Mike Moh) is shown boasting that he could defeat Cassius Clay (a.k.a. Muhammad Ali) in a fight and is subsequently bested in a physical contest by the Brad Pitt-played stuntman, Cliff Booth.
The movie’s release has been “indefinitely put on hold,” according to sources speaking to THR, because Lee’s daughter Shannon filed a complaint to China’s National Film Administration about the onscreen depiction of her late father. Speaking to Variety, one exhibitor source said “As long as Quentin can make some cuts, it will be released as planned.”
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was set for an Oct. 25 debut in Chinese cinemas. The film also stars Leonardo DiCaprio as fictional actor Rick Dalton and Margot Robbie as the real-life actress, Sharon Tate.
WOW...
@ViCiouS @largebillsonlyplease @fonzerrillii
Bruce Lee's daughter has reportedly objected to her father's depiction in Quentin Tarantino's film.
By Clark Collis
October 18, 2019 at 02:09 PM EDT
The Chinese release of director Quentin Tarantino‘s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has been put on hold because of the film’s portrayal of Bruce Lee, according to THR, which first reported the news. In the movie, Lee (Mike Moh) is shown boasting that he could defeat Cassius Clay (a.k.a. Muhammad Ali) in a fight and is subsequently bested in a physical contest by the Brad Pitt-played stuntman, Cliff Booth.
The movie’s release has been “indefinitely put on hold,” according to sources speaking to THR, because Lee’s daughter Shannon filed a complaint to China’s National Film Administration about the onscreen depiction of her late father. Speaking to Variety, one exhibitor source said “As long as Quentin can make some cuts, it will be released as planned.”
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was set for an Oct. 25 debut in Chinese cinemas. The film also stars Leonardo DiCaprio as fictional actor Rick Dalton and Margot Robbie as the real-life actress, Sharon Tate.
WOW...
@ViCiouS @largebillsonlyplease @fonzerrillii
Movie was a bore.
Unless those deleted scenes add more life to the film it won’t matter or help.
Good for Chinese National Film Association.
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood returning to theaters with four new scenes
Quentin Tarantino's blockbuster starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt is getting a rerelease.
By Joey Nolfi
October 23, 2019 at 01:08 PM EDT
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Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
07/26/19
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Quentin Tarantino has written another chapter for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Sony announced Wednesday that, ahead of a likely awards season push, the summer blockbuster will return to over 1,000 theaters in the United States and Canada this Friday, Oct. 25.
The re-released version will contain 10 minutes of new footage stretched across four additional scenes, upping the critically lauded picture’s runtime up to 171 minutes — just under the three-hour mark. The new footage will appear at the beginning and end of the film.
Following its well-received debut at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival in May, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — about a fading TV actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his longtime stunt double (Brad Pitt) who navigate a rapidly diversifying film industry against the backdrop of the Manson murders in 1969 Los Angeles — bagged $41.1 million at the domestic box office over the July 26 weekend, notching the highest opening frame of Tarantino’s career.
The film went on to gross $139.8 million in North America (the only original film of the summer to do so) on top of courting significant Oscar buzz, particularly for the performances of DiCaprio, Pitt, and supporting actress Margot Robbie, who co-stars as ill-fated actress Sharon Tate.
“Audiences have shown tremendous support for this movie,” Sony’s distribution president Adrian Smith said in a press statement. “We look forward to offering them another opportunity to see the film as it’s meant to be seen — in theaters on the big screen — with more sights and sounds of the sixties from Quentin Tarantino as an added treat.”
Quentin Tarantino's blockbuster starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt is getting a rerelease.
By Joey Nolfi
October 23, 2019 at 01:08 PM EDT
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Quentin Tarantino has written another chapter for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
Sony announced Wednesday that, ahead of a likely awards season push, the summer blockbuster will return to over 1,000 theaters in the United States and Canada this Friday, Oct. 25.
The re-released version will contain 10 minutes of new footage stretched across four additional scenes, upping the critically lauded picture’s runtime up to 171 minutes — just under the three-hour mark. The new footage will appear at the beginning and end of the film.
Following its well-received debut at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival in May, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood — about a fading TV actor (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his longtime stunt double (Brad Pitt) who navigate a rapidly diversifying film industry against the backdrop of the Manson murders in 1969 Los Angeles — bagged $41.1 million at the domestic box office over the July 26 weekend, notching the highest opening frame of Tarantino’s career.
The film went on to gross $139.8 million in North America (the only original film of the summer to do so) on top of courting significant Oscar buzz, particularly for the performances of DiCaprio, Pitt, and supporting actress Margot Robbie, who co-stars as ill-fated actress Sharon Tate.
“Audiences have shown tremendous support for this movie,” Sony’s distribution president Adrian Smith said in a press statement. “We look forward to offering them another opportunity to see the film as it’s meant to be seen — in theaters on the big screen — with more sights and sounds of the sixties from Quentin Tarantino as an added treat.”
How can you tell how good Lee was when all he ever did was exhibitions like the vid you posted? Lee was a non-combative martial artist. Would Mayweather or any fighter be as good as they are if they never fought and only put on staged exhibitions?
I had to watch it in two sittings. I just couldn't get through it in one shot. IMO the first 3/4 were slow and boring. I guess he was trying to establish the feel of the time period. The last 20-30 minutes were good tho.
I'm a fan of Leo. I think he's an underrated actor. Brad too really. If he hadn't had that thing with the blond chick and Angela and then Angela and the kids I think he would have gotten some more hardware.
I'm a fan of Leo. I think he's an underrated actor. Brad too really. If he hadn't had that thing with the blond chick and Angela and then Angela and the kids I think he would have gotten some more hardware.
Quentin Tarantino might write novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
The director revealed his possible plan on the Pure Cinema podcast.
By Clark Collis
April 01, 2020 at 09:57 AM EDT
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Quentin Tarantino is possibly gearing up to pen a novelization of his most recent movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Tarantino made the announcement on the Pure Cinema podcast after being asked if he had ever thought about writing book versions of his own movies.
"I hadn't thought about that until recently," said the director. "But now I'm thinking a lot about it. I might be writing a novelization to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood."
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has grossed $142 million at the domestic box office and $374 million globally, making it Tarantino's second most successful film after 2012's Django Unchained. The movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio as fictional TV actor Rick Dalton, Brad Pitt as his stuntman-cum-gopher Cliff Booth, and Margot Robbie as the real-life actress Sharon Tate.
Tarantino previously discussed the possibility of directing a TV version of Bounty Law, the western show on which DiCaprio's character appears in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
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“As far as the Bounty Law shows, I want to do that, but it will take me a year and a half," the director told Deadline. "It got an introduction from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but I don’t really consider it part of that movie even though it is. This is not about Rick Dalton playing Jake Cahill. It’s about Jake Cahill. Where all this came from was, I ended up watching a bunch of Wanted, Dead or Alive, and The Rifleman, and Tales of Wells Fargo, these half-hour shows to get in the mindset of Bounty Law, the kind of show Rick was on. I’d liked them before, but I got really into them. The concept of telling a dramatic story in half an hour. You watch and think, wow, there’s a helluva lot of storytelling going on in 22 minutes. I thought, I wonder if I can do that? I ended up writing five half-hour episodes. So I’ll do them, and I will direct all of them.”
The director revealed his possible plan on the Pure Cinema podcast.
By Clark Collis
April 01, 2020 at 09:57 AM EDT
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Quentin Tarantino is possibly gearing up to pen a novelization of his most recent movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Tarantino made the announcement on the Pure Cinema podcast after being asked if he had ever thought about writing book versions of his own movies.
"I hadn't thought about that until recently," said the director. "But now I'm thinking a lot about it. I might be writing a novelization to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood."
Once Upon a Time in Hollywood has grossed $142 million at the domestic box office and $374 million globally, making it Tarantino's second most successful film after 2012's Django Unchained. The movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio as fictional TV actor Rick Dalton, Brad Pitt as his stuntman-cum-gopher Cliff Booth, and Margot Robbie as the real-life actress Sharon Tate.
Tarantino previously discussed the possibility of directing a TV version of Bounty Law, the western show on which DiCaprio's character appears in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
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“As far as the Bounty Law shows, I want to do that, but it will take me a year and a half," the director told Deadline. "It got an introduction from Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but I don’t really consider it part of that movie even though it is. This is not about Rick Dalton playing Jake Cahill. It’s about Jake Cahill. Where all this came from was, I ended up watching a bunch of Wanted, Dead or Alive, and The Rifleman, and Tales of Wells Fargo, these half-hour shows to get in the mindset of Bounty Law, the kind of show Rick was on. I’d liked them before, but I got really into them. The concept of telling a dramatic story in half an hour. You watch and think, wow, there’s a helluva lot of storytelling going on in 22 minutes. I thought, I wonder if I can do that? I ended up writing five half-hour episodes. So I’ll do them, and I will direct all of them.”
Quentin Tarantino tells critics of his Bruce Lee interpretation to 'go suck a d---'
'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood' director Quentin Tarantino defends his interpretation of Bruce Lee on Joe Rogan's podcast, telling critics to 'suck a dick.'
Quentin Tarantino tells critics of his Bruce Lee interpretation to 'go suck a d---'
The director explains a controversial scene featuring a dramatization of the iconic action star from his 2019 Best Picture-nominated movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
By Joey Nolfi
June 30, 2021 at 09:52 AM EDT
Quentin Tarantino isn't dodging blows when it comes to addressing his characterization of iconic action star Bruce Lee in the 2019 movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.
"I can understand his daughter having a problem with it. It's her f—ing father," the Oscar-winning filmmaker said on Tuesday's episode of The Joe Rogan Experience podcast, referencing critics who've called his brief depiction of Lee in a scene from the Best Picture-nominated film as a racist caricature. "Everybody else: go suck a d---."
He continued, explaining that the scene — which sees stuntman Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) visiting Lee (Mike Moh) on the set of the Green Hornet TV show, and subsequently throwing him into a car during a physical matchup played for laughs — is "obvious" in its declaration "that Cliff tricked him. That's how he was able to do it; he tricked him."
Quentin Tarantino defends his Bruce Lee depiction in 'Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.'
| CREDIT: RICK ROWELL VIA GETTY IMAGES; SILVER SCREEN COLLECTION/HULTON ARCHIVE/GETTY IMAGES
Tarantino stressed that the moment is fleshed out more in his new novelization of the film, and that Pitt's character deliberately manipulates Lee in a way that leads to the moment where the latter careens into a stationary car. He also cited Booth's past experience in the military as giving him a killer instinct that allowed him to calculatedly overthrow Lee's martial arts-inspired instincts.
The Pulp Fiction helmer further described Lee's history in entertainment, expressing affection for him and what he calls a "disrespect for [American] stuntmen" working on his projects: "He was always hitting them with his feet, it's called tagging, when you hit a stunt man for real," Tarantino said, likening Lee's approach to the craft to fellow actor Robert Conrad (The Wild Wild West).
However, Lee biographer Matthew Polly previously told Esquire that "Bruce was very famous for being very considerate of the people below him on film sets, particularly the stuntmen," and, with regard to Tarantino's depiction, "that's just not who Bruce Lee was as a person."
After Once Upon a Time in Hollywood's release, Lee's daughter, Shannon Lee, told The Wrap that she was disappointed in the depiction amid other criticisms from the likes of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar,
"I understand they want to make the Brad Pitt character this super badass who could beat up Bruce Lee. But they didn't need to treat him in the way that white Hollywood did when he was alive," she told the publication, remembering the "uncomfortable" feeling of watching the scene in a theater as people laughed at her father.
"He comes across as an arrogant asshole who was full of hot air," she said. "And not someone who had to fight triple as hard as any of those people did to accomplish what was naturally given to so many others."
watched it twice....once on the plane on the way back from barcelona (long ass flight) and again with my wife a over the christmas break since she didnt get a chance to watch it..
I've always gravitated to movies filmed and set in the 70's..just love seeing the time period and feel captured on camera...thought it was cool how they showed the inner workings/politics of hollywood running concurrently with the manson family cult, and backstory of sharon tate.
the revisionist history at the ending was a nice touch
I thought it was solid but could understand why people would hate it...consider it boring etc.
I've always gravitated to movies filmed and set in the 70's..just love seeing the time period and feel captured on camera...thought it was cool how they showed the inner workings/politics of hollywood running concurrently with the manson family cult, and backstory of sharon tate.
the revisionist history at the ending was a nice touch
I thought it was solid but could understand why people would hate it...consider it boring etc.
Who wants to know why charles manson did what he did and who made it happen???
Quentin Tarantino Shit-Talks Movies
The filmmaker’s long-promised book on American cinema can be funny, self-indulgent, and just plain ugly.
www.vulture.com
Quentin Tarantino Shit-Talks Movies
By Chris Stanton
Quentin Tarantino backed himself into a bit of a corner. For years, the filmmaker has suggested he would retire after ten movies, arguing that he’d rather exit the stage with an undeniable mic drop than end up like one of his heroes, Don Siegel, who made two poorly received films after his late-career peak of 1979’s Escape From Alcatraz. Of course, Tarantino could easily change his mind (he wouldn’t be the first filmmaker to unretire), but ever since the release of his ninth and supposedly penultimate movie, 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood …, he’s seemed intent on exploring what a post-filmmaking career might look like. First, he wrote a novelization of OUATIH, which was a fun but low-stakes exercise in pulpy prose writing that expanded the world of the movie. He then launched The Video Archives Podcast, in which he and Pulp Fiction co-writer Roger Avary discuss movies they might’ve recommended to customers back when they worked together at the Video Archives store in Manhattan Beach.
Now, he’s made his long-promised pivot to writing about film. Cinema Speculation is a collection of essays organized around American films released between 1968 and 1981, touching on the intersecting movements therein, including the New Hollywood and Blaxploitation. Blending together criticism, historical analysis, and Tarantino’s own origin story, the book is an informative but self-indulgent journey through the past, in which the author makes characteristically idiosyncratic arguments, acts as a hype man for underappreciated movies, and talks a whole lot of shit — some of it funny, and some just plain ugly.
The Shocking, Violent Movies He Loved As a Kid
Tarantino’s video-store days and rise to fame are well documented, but Cinema Speculation goes back even further, detailing how he became an obsessive filmgoer at an early age. In the book’s opening and closing chapters, Tarantino writes a charming ode to the adults who took him as a little kid to see shocking, violent movies that opened up a whole new world to him even if he couldn’t understand exactly what was going on. (In those parts of the book, it’s hard not to imagine a Cinema Paradiso–esque scene of a young Q.T. staring wondrously up at a screen that’s displaying the most disturbing moments of Deliverance.) Throughout the rest of the book, he frequently recounts when, where, and how many times he saw each movie — an exhausting thread that’s mainly interesting for how it illustrates studios’ release strategies in the ’70s. (For example, Warner Bros. kept The Wild Bunch in theaters for years as the lower half of double bills alongside newer releases.)
At times, Tarantino’s self-mythologizing can induce eye rolls, such as when he portrays himself as the only white kid in a theater full of Black patrons cheering along to a Jim Brown movie. Elsewhere, when recalling movies he saw at 7 years old, Tarantino claims to remember exactly which lines the audience laughed at, and how hard they laughed. These anecdotes have a whiff of exaggeration to them, as if a guy at the bar were telling you a story he’s told 1,000 times before, except this one’s about a screening of the 1970 Peter Boyle movie Joe.
His Fucked-Up Taste in Adulthood
If asked to name just a handful of pivotal Hollywood movies from the ’70s, few writers would mention the films of the director John Flynn. In Cinema Speculation, however, Tarantino uses as much ink on two Flynn movies — The Outfit and Rolling Thunder — as he does on more iconic works like Dirty Harry or The Getaway. When the book strays toward these more idiosyncratic corners of his taste, Tarantino’s writing gets almost frantic with excitement — particularly in the Rolling Thunder essay, where he obsesses over each of Flynn’s choices. Tarantino has always been a compelling tastemaker (see his programming at the New Beverly), and in Cinema Speculation, his most vivid writing comes when he’s trying to convince you that some fucked-up-sounding movie is actually the coolest thing you’ll ever see.
Professional Rejection of His Peers (It Was Mutual)
Tarantino writes much like he talks: He’s quippy and pugnacious, and prone to rattling off a few short, staccato sentences when he wants to hammer home a point. From time to time, he also slips into an amusing kind of ’70s groovy-cat talk, throwing around lingo like hip, funky, and right on! It’s a lively writing style, but it can’t quite distract from the question at the heart of this project: What can Tarantino bring to a film-history book that’s unique, apart from some voice-y writing and the novelty of a master filmmaker firing off hot takes on movies? While he notoriously has an encyclopedic knowledge of film, the research here is shallower than what one might find in, say, Pictures at a Revolution (which Tarantino cites as early as page three). Of course, Tarantino shows off his Rolodex, but it’s not as if Mark Harris’s book — which chronicles the birth of the New Hollywood through the lens of five industry-changing movies — is lacking in firsthand interviews.
The nature of Tarantino’s relationships to his subjects, though, is unique. At the end of his essay on writer-director Paul Schrader’s Hardcore, Tarantino includes an exchange he had with Schrader in which he warns him that he’s going to be “very rough” on the film’s second half. Schrader writes back: “I don’t think you could be harsher than I am on the second half of the film.” These kinds of peer-to-peer exchanges are among the highlights of the book, and it’s fun to imagine Tarantino making a quick call to Walter Hill just to ask him one more question about his script for The Getaway. To that end, it’s illuminating, too, when he articulates social dynamics unique to the life of a successful filmmaker. When explaining his relationship to the critic Kenneth Turan, who often panned his films, Tarantino describes their few interactions at social functions as shared moments of “professional mutual rejection that bordered on intimacy.” Tarantino’s insights into Hollywood life often prove more compelling than his rehashing of industry history.
The Shit-Talking
In his OUATIH novelization, Tarantino includes a conspicuous chapter dedicated to describing the moviegoing habits of Cliff Booth, who’s played by Brad Pitt in the movie. Cliff has some hot takes (Antonioni was a fraud, only the early Fellini is good, etc.), and the chapter invites the question of whether Tarantino is simply using him as a mouthpiece for his own opinions. In Cinema Speculation, he dispenses with the smoke screen and lets it rip, lampooning François Truffaut’s “Ed Wood–like amateur bumbling” and calling Schrader a “magnificent screenwriter” who nonetheless “can’t write genre films.” To Tarantino, any director who whines about studio interference is spineless — they should simply walk away the second a project is compromised. (This is presumably relatively easy to say for a filmmaker who wields more clout than most.)
This shoot-from-the-hip approach is fun at times, but Tarantino occasionally unleashes on targets who are more defenseless than revered filmmakers like Truffaut. In a rant about the recently deceased L.A. Times film critic Sheila Benson, Tarantino critiques her “PTA mentality” (as in the Parent-Teacher Association, not the filmmaker) and shares some gossip on how critics like Manohla Dargis and John Powers used to mock her writing at dinner parties. Elsewhere, he refers to the deceased writer James Bacon multiple times as a “fat hack” for writing positive notices of movies that Bacon himself made cameos in. As if to clarify that he means physical size and not perceived level of hackery, Tarantino later refers to Bacon’s “fat ass.”
Apart from being ugly and unclever, these insults have the unintended effect of making one think longingly about Martin Scorsese, another iconic director who occasionally writes about film. In recent years, especially, Scorsese has taken up the mantle of “sweet old man who wants to protect the cinematic art form” whose only enemy is the corporate greed that’s always threatening to destroy it. It’s arguably a more appealing space to occupy in the culture than “dude who kicks corpses for a cheap laugh.”
‘What Did It All Mean?’
Over the course of his last three projects (OUATIH, its novelization, and Cinema Speculation), Tarantino has spent a lot of time mining his adolescent years and the culture he grew up in for further meaning. At multiple points in Cinema Speculation, he asks himself what it all means: What is this project of filmgoing and -making that he’s dedicated his life to? In the book’s most existential moment, he writes about the genre-film scholar and actor Barry Brown, who appeared in a few ’70s films before taking his own life at 27. After praising his performance in Peter Bogdanovich’s Daisy Miller, Tarantino asks, “Who was Barry Brown? What did it all mean? Am I the only one who remembers Barry Brown? Am I enough?” Then, as if to ensure he’s not the only one, Tarantino includes an entire article from 1966 about Bela Lugosi that Brown wrote for the horror-film magazine Castle of Frankenstein.
Earlier in the book, Tarantino writes an appreciation for the “second-string” L.A. Times critic Kevin Thomas, who took exploitation movies seriously at a time when they were mostly disdained, and championed directors like Jonathan Demme early on in their careers. Growing up, Tarantino says he practically considered Thomas “a friend.” For all his brashness, it’s in these gentler moments that Tarantino finds something approaching a thesis: that maybe, in spite of it all, it means something to give someone the appreciation they deserve, even if it’s just for acting in a movie or writing a review of one.