I was reminded of the Robert Wagner/Natalie Wood situation - Cliff’s wife apparently died while they were out on a boat, and there are rumors in the industry that it may not have been accidental. I guess only Cliff knows what happened, but the rumors are enough to keep some people from working with him.
Yeah - I guess I remembered that. But the damn movie was so long and full, I musta gotten the layers all tangled up. Didn’t think the actor looked like Dakota Fanning. And IRL, it shoulda been Krenwinkel.
No, that’s not what he said. He recognized her from the ranch, not as being the woman with George.
I don’t think that was Dakota Fanning in the car. Remember also, Cliff was tripping his brains out. He recognized someone from the ranch, but it probably wasn’t Squeaky.
There was also a throwaway line about Cliff’s wife’s sister being named Natalie.
A thought just occurred to me: with Yesterday and ***Once Upon a Time in Hollywood ***, we’ve had two movies this summer where the Manson murders never occurred.
The point is that the incident with his wife is referenced at all only during the fantasy sequence. So it’s possible that he was never suspected of murder, or that his wife even died on a boat.
Well, based on the comments made by the Kurt Russell character and his wife, there are some people who believe Cliff killed his wife. Leo’s character clearly doesn’t believe the rumor, but the rumor obviously exists. (And was all this mentioned in a fantasy sequence, or a flashback? I thought it was the latter.)
We only ever see them say that in the fantasy sequence.
I’m pretty sure it’s not a flashback. There is a flashback to his wife but I think it’s in the daydream too.
I guess I got the chronology all messed up.
First, Cliff drives Rick to the set of the western, where Rick tells Cliff he has no chance of being cast, because of some guy from Green Hornet is in charge of the casting, so Cliff goes home to fix the antenna.
-Cliff parkours up to the roof and removes his shirt, making women swoon in theaters worldwide.
-Cliff starts to daydream about being on the set of the Green Hornet. But this can’t all be Cliff’s daydream, because some of it is from Rick’s POV, which Cliff couldn’t know, right? Isn’t there a scene where Rick is persuading the guy to let Cliff wardrobe up, when the guy refers to his wife thinking Cliff is a wife murderer?
-Then we see Cliff and Bruce fight, and Cliff gets thrown off the set.
But for some reason, I thought scenes from Rick on the Western set were interspersed in there, before we saw Cliff back on the roof again. Did it go right from Rick persuading the guy to let Cliff dress, to showing Bruce Lee mouthing off backstage with Cliff sitting on a trailer drinking a 1/2 pint of milk? I thought Rick’s scenes with the 8-yr-old method actOR was right in there…
I tend not to like to watch movies over and over in order to pick up whatever twist and reference there might be. So I pretty much just let this one wash over me - and enjoyed it in that manner.
The sequence is a “memory” in Cliff’s head. I love how it’s framed.
Cliff is on the roof, fixing Rick’s antenna. He’s recalling that Rick had said that he can’t even ask if Cliff can do stunt work. You imagine that Cliff should be pissed off…
Then we cut to this meandering sequence of events which entail Cliff getting into a fight with Bruce Lee, wrecking that female producer (? Kurt Russel’s wife)’s car. This was after she had already told her husband that she didn’t want to work with him because “everybody knows” he killed his wife - at this point, we get yet another cutaway to Cliff on the boat, with the harpoon, although we simply aren’t shown what that means. The scene ends with Cliff being kicked off the set of the show (Green Hornet - note that he kept referring to Lee as “Kato”).
Cut back to Cliff on the roof, and he sort of shrugs and goes yeah, I understand why he wasn’t going to even ask Kurt Russel if I could do stunt work. The sequence is a flashback in his mind of the last time Cliff had worked with Russel. Hence, why Rick wasn’t even going to ask this time.
Cliff can daydream about a conversation that he’s not present for. I do that all the time.
It can’t be a memory because we know he didn’t get costumed, and he didn’t fight Bruce Lee. That means there was never a conversation between Rick and Randy (Kurt Russell) in which Randy agreed to let Cliff her costumes.
And Cliff can’t have a memory of a conversation he wasn’t witness to, but he can have a daydream about it.
Sorry for multiple posts - I’m on my phone.
I thought this, too, but casting seems to confirm that it’s played by somebody else. Dakota Fanning was Squeaky. Madison Beaty and Mikey Madison played the girls who were at the house.
Which would be accurate - Squeaky did not participate in the murders and did not go to prison, which is why she was able to attempt to kill President Ford in the 1970s.
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Other thoughts a day later:
While the ending is radically different from reality, the movie does include some things that were true, like Tate going to dinner that night at that restaurant.
Also, there’s a scene where Manson stops by the house and and asks to speak with Terry; he mentions knowing Dennis Wilson. I believe Jay Sebring, in the movie, tells him that this is the Polanski residence. You can hear him tell him to take alley in the back.
This happened, although the person who confronted him was not Sebring. But Tate did see Manson and asked who he was. The reference to Terry was to Terry Melcher, a record producer who had given Manson some faint praise and then blew him off. The guy who went Manson away did tell him to take the back alley - but he was directing him to the caretaker house. It was later theorized that Manson had been insulted by the encounter, which is why he targeted the house.
And George Spahn really did own Spahn ranch, an old movie lot that made money by offering trail rides. The family resided there for a while, which George allowed for free because he got to have sex with the girls (apparently not just Squeaky - they weren’t a monogamous sort of group). He was also pretty much blind. Incidentally, Squeaky got her nickname because of the squeal she made when George would pinch her. He also nicknamed Tex for his drawl (I thought that part was bad casting).
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The movie definitely presumes that a viewer already knows the story and era. It’s certainly an homage. I felt like he went to great pains to recreate streets, logos, and sounds of southern California in the late 1960’s. (My mom was 18 and lived 20 miles from where the killings happened. She recalls going to the drive-in that Cliff lives behind). Many shots seemed to linger over streets as if reminiscing.
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I like that we would occasionally see that Cliff had stuntman skills. He bounced from a fence to the roof when he was fixing the antenna. And he did a cool spin when he started driving his car away from Rick’s house.
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I’m glad that I’ve read that Brad Pitt and Leo Decaprio got along and liked working together. They are both great actors. But I feel like this movie showed a stark difference: Decaprio decides how to perform the role (a country drawl, a halting, almost stuttering speech that reflects the character’s increasing angst), whereas Pitt just inhabits his character. Brad Pitt wasn’t playing Cliff the stuntman, he was Cliff the stuntman. Needless to say, I’m a fan of his acting, and I thought he just exuded charm.
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I’m happy to note that the actress playing Pussycat (Margaret Qualley) is 24, because she was quite sexy with her flirtatious hitchhiking. It’s also Andie MacDowell’s daughter!
In the movie, this happened, but long before the day we are watching. It’s the reason that Cliff can’t work with Kurt Russel.
You are right in correcting me that it’s not a memory in the strict sense. It’s Tarantino’s way if telling us the reason why Cliff is persona non grata. It’s framed, however, by Cliff being on the roof fixing the antenna.
It starts starts with Cliff on the roof and remembering Rick’s rejection (paraphrasing, “I won’t even ask if you can do this job”) and - after this long cutaway - comes back to Cliff on the roof and going, paraphrasing, “yeah, I see Rick’s point.”
It’s an “aside”, if you will. But - in the movie universe - it did happen. Cliff got kicked off the set of Green Hornet for fucking up Kurt Russel’s wife’s car by messing around with Bruce Lee.
I think the key that this is not a linear scene is that Rick is not doing Green Hornet when Cliff asked him about asking for work. It was some western. So Cliff - a stunt double - wouldn’t have been in a tuxedo when he confronted Bruce Lee. That’s how you know it was previous work (which had been mentioned earlier in the movie - Rick had done a bunch of guest appearances as a bad guy on TV shows).
Correct. It’s a memory, as Moriarity puts it. Nitpick: Cliff says, “Fair enough.” on the cutback to the roof scene. That solidifies it.
It’s definitely Cliff remembering why Randy would never hire him again. “Fair enough.”
It’s definitely not Squeaky Fromme at the end. Cliff recognizes the other redhead from the ranch.
Also, did Roman Polanski really have a dog named “Saperstein?”
He’s been cast as Elvis in the upcoming movie with Tom Hanks as Colonel Parker.
You might be interested in these three recent videos about this movie:
Everything is connected to everything else.I saw it tonight with my 22-year-old son who was familiar with the Tate-Lobianco killings and we both liked it a lot, both because of and somewhat in spite of the ending. I was expecting something even more over the top because of the Chekov’s Bruce Lee, something involving the whole Manson family being there and Bruce Lee showing up and having a huge kung fu fight.