Photo: Mirisch/United Artists/Kobal/Shutterstock
Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, opens this week after its controversial Cannes premiere back in May. The film takes place over two weekends in February and August of 1969, and it’s filled with references to the era in film and television, some of which are woven into the plot and some of which clearly inspired Tarantino and cinematographer Robert Richardson in their design of the film. Tarantino himself has also mentioned several films to see in advance of his new one, even programming some of them at the Beverly last weekend, and the great Lindsey Romain has put together a piece detailing exactly where to watch the rest of them.
Below is a blend of all of the above — movies referenced in the text, by the filmmakers, and movies that clearly inspired this semi-fictional journey into Hollywood’s past. There are literally dozens of films directly mentioned or built into the fabric of the movie — just consider this a starting point. (Light spoilers follow.)
The Wrecking Crew (1968)
Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate in Tarantino’s film, neighbor to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton, the aging TV star who’s buddies with his stuntman, Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth. While the film centers on Dalton and Booth, Tate exists on the edges, sort of as Tarantino’s vision of classic Hollywood beauty. Her most delightful scene in the film takes place when she notices that Phil Karlson’s 1968 flick, The Wrecking Crew, is playing at a theater she passes. The Dean Martin caper was one of Tate’s last screen roles in the real world, and the fictional version very sweetly tells the ticket-seller that she’s actually in the movie they’re about to play (also noting that she’s the girl from Valley of the Dolls). The employees of the theater let her in, and Tarantino shows several segments of the film, choosing not to digitally replace the actual Tate with Robbie. The result adds to the dreamlike nature of Tarantino’s film as we see an actress watching what her character perceives as herself, played by the actual person the actress is playing. As for the movie, it’s the fourth and final film in the Dean Martin series of Matt Helm swinging-spy comedies after The Silencers, Murderers’ Row, and The Ambushers, and contains action scenes choreographed by Bruce Lee, who also appears as a character in Tarantino’s movie, both in a great scene with Pitt’s stuntman and briefly in flashbacks training Tate.
The Great Escape (1963)
At one point, Dalton reveals that he was on the shortlist to play the breakout Steve McQueen part in this 1963 classic with the “three Georges” — Peppard, Maharis, and Chakiris — and the film cuts to an imaginary version of what it would have been like to watch Dalton in the movie. Again, Tarantino is playing “what if” in his playful storytelling, revealing how close his fictional characters are to real ones like McQueen (who also happens to briefly be in the film, played by Damian Lewis). Interestingly, this funny interlude wasn’t included in the version that played at Cannes, but has been reinserted for the theatrical release. It fits perfectly as it connects McQueen, Dalton, and the kinds of movies that both were making at the time while also revealing how the hero has fallen just short of the stardom he’s sought. As for the John Sturges classic adaptation of the Paul Brickhill book, it’s one of the best films of its era, a wonderful slice of (sorry) escapist entertainment that holds up today. Rick Dalton wouldn’t have worked in it.
Spaghetti Westerns
The subgenre of Westerns made overseas by Italian directors, often starring American actors, is woven throughout Tarantino’s film, from the way its title references the Sergio Leone masterpiece, Once Upon a Time in the West, to the actual plot of the film, which sees Dalton going overseas to make movies like Nebraska Jim, which is a nod to multiple films, including one called Savage Gringo, which was called Nebraska Jim in some countries. For Dalton’s journey into the spaghetti Western, Tarantino blends together numerous films from the genre, so it’s hard to pick just one as an influence you should seek out. See the Leone films, for sure, but also try and track down the films of Sergio Corbucci, who has influenced Tarantino before with films like 1968’s The Great Silence and a little movie called Django. Also seek out Enzo Castellari’s Any Gun Can Play, a movie that Tarantino has mentioned and that stars George Hilton and Gilbert Roland.
Lancer (1968-70) & The F.B.I. (1965-74)
A large portion of Once Upon a Time takes place on the set of Lancer, in which Dalton plays a villain in the show that starred James Stacy, played in the film by Timothy Olyphant (the late Luke Perry plays co-star Wayne Maunder). The generic Western ran for only two seasons on CBS and NBC, and was basically a riff on the incredibly popular Bonanza, complete with a family dynamic within its two leads. Sam Wanamaker directed the series premiere, and is played in the film by Nicholas Hammond (who you probably won’t recognize as the grown-up Friedrich from The Sound of Music).
After Dalton is done filming Lancer, he goes home to watch his guest role on ABC’s The F.B.I., a massive hit that ran for over 240 episodes in the ’60s and ’70s and a show that’s also referenced by Dakota Fanning’s “Squeaky” Fromme late in the film. So many actors of that era appeared on the show that it makes sense that Dalton would be a part of that crew. In fact, one of the actors who appeared on both The F.B.I. and Lancer has a small part in Tarantino’s film: Bruce Dern.
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
When Rick Dalton notices that Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate have just moved in next door to them, he marvels at the fact that the director of this 1968 Oscar winner is living within reach. The use of the film in Tarantino’s world is multilayered. On the one hand, it’s a very practical reference in that it came out in the summer of 1968 and was huge — surely a movie that would be referenced when people spotted Roman Polanski in February of 1969. It’s also a representation of where Dalton wants to be. He dreams of that chance Hollywood encounter — like living next to the director of a movie as important as Rosemary’s Baby — that could shape a career. Finally, there’s the tragic fact that Rosemary’s Baby is about true evil driven by a cult existence, which is an element of what happened in the Hollywood Hills in August of 1969, both in reality and in Tarantino’s warped version of it.
Arizona Raiders (1965)
This ‘60s Western isn’t directly textually referenced in the film but has been cited by Tarantino himself as an influence, likely for a number of reasons. The production values of it seem to influence the aesthetic of life on the set of Lancer, which would have tried to replicate Hollywood Westerns on a smaller budget the way it does in Tarantino’s film. But there’s also the fact that Arizona Raiders stars Audie Murphy, the kind of square-jawed star of ’50s and ’60s action movies on which Rick Dalton’s career appears to be modeled. The Dalton hit film in Tarantino’s world, The 14 Fists of McCluskey, feels very much like a project that would have attracted the war hero Murphy, star of movies like To Hell and Back. In fact, Murphy was cited as an influence on Inglourious Basterds, which also played with history the way Once Upon a Time does. Just as the spaghetti Western connects Django Unchained with Once, Audie Murphy connects Basterds with Once in fascinating ways.
Easy Rider (1969)
This is another one that Tarantino and Richardson have mentioned, and it comes up briefly in the film itself. Again, it’s a movie that was a part of the pop-culture firmament to such a degree that it makes sense that it would be referenced in a movie about Hollywood in 1969, but there’s more to it than just the film’s popularity. Easy Rider is a movie about counterculture, and the hippies who took over Spahn Ranch and became acolytes of Charles Manson are a part of Tarantino’s vision, too. In a very different way, both films are about changing times. They’re also both, to a certain degree, buddy movies. The dynamic between Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper has a similar energy to the one between Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, although Rick Dalton and Cliff Booth would hate to read that.
Three in the Attic (1968)
This swinging 1968 comedy comes up a few times on one of the dozens of marquees we see throughout the city and in posters and commercials. When a film is name-dropped several times by a writer-director as detail-oriented as Quentin Tarantino, it’s not by accident. Richard Wilson’s comedy stars Christopher Jones as a philandering student whose girlfriends all learn that they have the same beau and conspire against him. It was pretty critically derided, so why include it? It’s one of those swinging ’60s comedies that helps define the freewheeling era, not unlike the dance scene Tarantino stages at the Playboy Mansion. While the dark undercurrent of the Manson murders lingers in the background of Tarantino’s film, he’s careful to also present the fun, freewheeling nature of the era through references like this one.
Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice (1969)
This 1969 Oscar winner from Paul Mazursky wouldn’t come out until after the action of Once Upon a Time, but Tarantino and Richardson have mentioned it as an influence, and that influence feels largely visual. While it came out in September of 1969, it would have been filmed in the era that the filmmakers here are trying to capture, and Mazursky and cinematographer Charles Lang’s choices likely influenced the design of this film given how both are set in Los Angeles and feature beautiful people struggling to figure out what’s next in their lives. Lang’s work was nominated for Best Cinematography, and Richardson’s deserves to be, too.
Hammerhead (1968)
While it feels like most of the influences on Once Upon a Time are American or Italian, Tarantino unexpectedly dropped this British thriller as one to watch before seeing his film. Again, this movie feels like one Rick Dalton would have made, and it likely influenced at least one of the films within the film, which involves a car jumping across a bridge. It’s also probably not coincidentally produced by Irving Allen, who produced The Wrecking Crew. And it all comes full circle.
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