Quentin Tarantino’s ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD Shouldn’t Be Historically Accurate
By: Brent L. Smith
Tags: Movies, Hollywood, Culture, Features, Film

We know from Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012) that Quentin Tarantino has a penchant for mixing hyper-violence with historical fiction. A movie “based on true events”, that deviates from the facts, may rub some people the wrong way, but, at the end of the day, movies are movies. Even documentaries have their skewed perspectives and dramatic flair. And when it comes to the infamous Tate-LaBianca murders of 1969, there are nothing but slanted angles…

Reportedly, Tarantino’s screenplay centers on Sharon Tate (to be played by Margot Robbie). All the better. Most depictions of these crimes — and their stiff attempts at accuracy — have come up short. They rarely capture the cultural magnitude of the ‘Tate murders’ at the time, and how the media became so fascinated with Charles Manson’s ‘Family’ that their notoriety supplanted that of the prominent victims.

1976's Helter Skelter TV Movie remains the benchmark (adapted from Vincent Bugliosi’s best-selling book), which did nothing short of exalt the true crime genre to what it’s become today. Its success is partly because its swagger was still ‘of the times’ (hard to beat with decades-later recreations), but mainly because Steve Railsback’s portrayal of Manson remains the most hypnotic.

The myth of Manson (a figure who’s joined the annals of American criminality next to Billy the Kid and Bonnie & Clyde), refused to die with the 20th-century… and we’re all complicit.

The past 17 years alone have seen numerous renditions of the seven murders Charles Manson allegedly ordered members of his ‘cult’ to carry out. While Helter Skelter focused on his investigation and trial, recent dramatisations have attempted immersion (however vain) into the cult-y atmosphere of Manson’s ‘Family’.

Helter Skelter (1976) © Lorimar Television

Helter Skelter (2004) © Warner Bros. Television

Manson, My Name is Evil (2009) © New Real Films

House of Manson (2014) © Micro Bay Features

Aquarius (2015) © NBC

Manson’s Lost Girls (2016) © Asylum Entertainment

House of Manson (2014), written and directed by Brandon Slagle, was one of the few takes that surprised me. You can tell it was made by a younger filmmaker not old enough to have been affected by the paranoia that saturated the 1970s. It was a bold attempt in not just a biopic of Manson, but of the Family itself, humanizing the unitary hippie gang as to dispel the myth.

Still, these narratives take plenty of liberties as it is, abridging nuance and facts while claiming to do justice to the actual events.

The result is they become hard to tell apart; clumping together into 1960s-nostalgia panoramas of actors in glorified Halloween costumes. It’s always the same cast of caricatures, with Manson as the unhinged cult leader, and the girls as nothing more than lobotomy-eyed sister wives — which was all the public gleaned during the trial.

You can never see why these upper-middle class, college educated girls would be so drawn to this skulking elf of an ex-con — equal parts cherubic and demonic. Or how the formation of the Family was more of a volatile cocktail of militant minds, rather than some crusading power trip for world domination. (Sounds hokey, don’t it).

Unless we relinquish Manson of the boogieman archetype — and stop giving him so much credit — we’ll never pierce the veil. Maybe that’s why our fascination lives on.

With some retrospect, it seems as though each of these renditions are taking cues from the previous one, like a bad game of Telephone, without mining the weird, long-abandoned corridors of the source material.

It’s hard to imagine a filmmaker like Tarantino succumbing to the same pitfall. Of course his version will stand out from the rest, so long as he doesn’t try to replicate reality.

If he, in true Tarantino fashion, shamelessly took liberties that deviate from official accounts, maybe he’d crack through the mystique, free us of our ideological shackles, and give us something that doesn’t border on the campy and reductive?

Django Unchained faced some critical backlash for its apparent affront to historic accuracy. Tarantino commented on this criticism, saying:

“When slave narratives are done on film, they tend to be historical with a capital H, with an arm’s-length quality to them. I wanted to break that history-under-glass aspect, I wanted to throw a rock through that glass and shatter it for all times, and take you into it.”

The movie’s unflinching violence is often highlighted—which, Tarantino noted, was nowhere near the levels endured during actual slavery — but underneath that is the disturbing subtlety of the characters’ indifference to said violence. (Violence, after all, is as American as cherry pie, as expressed by the late black power activist H. Rap Brown.) In the film, when the German bounty hunter (Christopher Waltz) shows disgust in the mauling of a black slave by dogs, Django (Jamie Foxx) flatly tells slave master Calvin Candie (Leonardo Dicaprio) his friend “ain’t used to America like I am.”

This merely glimpses the bad and bloody weirdness of the pre-Civil War Cotton Kingdom, and the ravenous neurosis that possessed the Jacksonian South over the prospect of social upheaval.

‘Accuracy’ in cinema is inconsequential, what it hopefully does is push people to dig at truth for themselves. Imagine this auteur turning his keen eye back toward Los Angeles, a city he hasn’t revisited onscreen for 20 years! If his Manson project is only half as good as Jackie Brown (1997), it’ll be worth seeing.