When establishment dinosaur Cliff Booth has an ominous run-in with various members of the Manson family at Spahn Ranch, Tarantino dramatises the idea of old Hollywood colliding with a new youth culture about which it understood very little. Watching the following films can hopefully help to deepen the movie’s collage effect, and, without giving too much away, problematise its provocative conclusion. However, just as striking is its thorny evocation of some of these key collisions and contradictions in the Hollywood of the late 1960s and a turbulent American social landscape. Much has been made of Tarantino’s new film, in particular its playful creation of alternative realities, historical and proto-cinematic. The latter is something Rick and Cliff find abhorrent and which, for better or worse, is ultimately embodied by the film’s own vision of the Manson Family. Capturing a pervasive sense of youthful rebellion, these films often referenced a burgeoning American counterculture and hippie lifestyle. Simultaneously, a wave of independent films emerged imagining alternatives in a spirit of optimism and formal experimentation. Certain studio films of the late 1960s retained an old-fashioned vision of classical genres like the musical, the war film or the western, a sensibility aligned with Once upon a Time… in Hollywood’s leads, troubled TV and movie star Rick Dalton ( Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stuntman Cliff Booth ( Brad Pitt).
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