Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Read online

  But something about Yojimbo, beyond Mifune, beyond the story, spoke to Cliff. And he thought that extra element might be Kurosawa. His third Kurosawa film proved the first two weren’t a fluke. Throne of Blood knocked his socks off. He was a little concerned when he heard it was based on Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Cliff never responded to Shakespeare (though he wished he did). Now, Cliff was usually a little bored when he watched a movie. If he wanted excitement, he’d drive laps at a track or he’d run a dirt bike through a motocross course. But with Throne of Blood, he was fully absorbed. Once he saw the image of Mifune, filmed in charcoal black and white, in full military armor, covered in a hundred arrows, it was official: Cliff Booth was an Akira Kurosawa fan.

  After the violence the world was subjected to during the forties, the fifties were all about emotional melodrama. Tennessee Williams, Marlon Brando, Elia Kazan, the Actors Studio, Playhouse 90. And in every way, Akira Kurosawa was a perfect director for the turgid fifties, the era his most renowned string of films appeared in. American film critics embalmed Kurosawa in praise early, elevating his melodramas into high art, partly because they didn’t understand them. Cliff felt that after fighting the Japanese as long as he did, and being their captive during a time of war, he understood Kurosawa’s films far better than any critic he ever read. Cliff felt Kurosawa had an innate gift for staging drama, melodrama, and pulp, as well as a comic-book illustrator’s talent (Cliff was a big Marvel comics fan) for framing and composition. As far as Cliff was concerned, no director he’d ever seen had composed shots with more dynamic wit than “the Old Man” (what Cliff called the filmmaker). But Cliff felt where the American critics got it wrong was referring to the director as a “fine artist.” Kurosawa didn’t start out as a fine artist. Originally, he worked for a living. He was a working man, who made movies for other working men. He wasn’t a fine artist, but he had a sensational talent for staging drama and pulp artistically.

  But even the Old Man was susceptible to falling for his own notices. By the mid-sixties, with Red Beard, the Old Man would change from Kurosawa the movie director to Kurosawa the Russian novelist.

  Cliff didn’t walk out of Red Beard, out of respect for his once-favorite movie director. But later, when he learned that it was how darn ponderous the Old Man became on Red Beard that prompted Toshiro Mifune to vow to stop working with Kurosawa, Cliff took Mifune’s side.

  CLIFF’S TOP KUROSAWA FILMS

  (tie) Seven Samurai and Ikiru

  Yojimbo

  Throne of Blood

  Stray Dog

  The Bad Sleep Well (for the opening scene alone)

  Cliff’s connection and devotion (though he would never call it that) to Japanese cinema wasn’t limited to just Kurosawa and Mifune.

  While he didn’t know the names of other directors, he really liked Three Outlaw Samurai, The Sword of Doom, Hara-Kiri, and Goyokin. And later, in the seventies, he adored Shintaro Katsu’s Blind Swordsman character, Zatoichi. So much so that, for a while, Katsu replaced Mifune as Cliff’s favorite actor. And Cliff went fucking gaga over Katsu’s brother’s film series Baby Cart from Hell, especially the second one, Baby Cart at the River Styx. In the seventies, he also saw that wild, sexy Japanese movie where the chick cuts the guy’s dick off, In the Realm of the Senses (he took a couple of different dates to that movie). He also dug the first of Sonny Chiba’s Street Fighter movies (the one where he rips the black guy’s cock off). But when he went to the Vista to see Mifune’s Samurai Trilogy (all three on one Sunday afternoon), he was so bored that he didn’t see another Japanese film for two years.

  But there were a lot of foreign filmmaking heavyweights of the fifties and sixties Cliff wasn’t enamored with. He tried Bergman but wasn’t interested (too boring). He tried Fellini and really responded at first. He could have done without all his wife’s Chaplin bullshit. In fact, he could have done without his wife altogether. But he liked the early black-and-white films a lot. But once Fellini decided life was a circus, Cliff said arrivederci.

  He tried Truffaut twice, but he didn’t respond to him. Not because the films were boring (they were), but that wasn’t the only reason Cliff didn’t respond. The two films he watched (in a Truffaut double feature) just didn’t grab him. The first film, The 400 Blows, left him cold. He really didn’t understand why that little boy did half the shit he did. Now, Cliff never spoke to anybody about it, but if he did, his first case in point would be when the kid prays to Balzac. Is that something French kids do? Is the point that that’s normal or is the point he’s a little weirdo? Yes, he knows it could be meant to be the same as an American kid putting a picture of Willie Mays on his wall. But he doesn’t think it’s supposed to be that simple. Also, it seems absurd. A ten-year-old little boy loves Balzac that much? No, he doesn’t. Since the little boy is supposed to be Truffaut, it’s Truffaut telling us how impressive he is. And frankly, the kid on-screen wasn’t impressive in the slightest. And he definitely didn’t deserve a movie made about him.

  And he thought the mopey dopes in Jules and Jim were a fucking drag. Cliff didn’t dig Jules and Jim, because he didn’t dig the chick. And it’s the kind of movie, if you don’t dig the chick, you ain’t gonna dig the flick. Cliff thought the movie would have been better all the way around if they just let that bitch drown.

  Since Cliff was a big fan of provocation, he dug I Am Curious (Yellow), and not just the sex shit. Once he got used to it, he liked the political discourse as well. He loved the film’s black-and-white photography. Breathless looked as artful as combat footage. But this was so monochromatic and luminous that Cliff wanted to lick the screen, especially whenever the girl Lena was on it. The (sorta) story of I Am Curious (Yellow) is about a twenty-two-year-old college student named Lena, played by twenty-two-year-old actress Lena Nyman, who is dating a forty-four-year-old filmmaker named Vilgot, played by the film’s forty-four-year-old director, Vilgot Sjöman.

  Both Lena’s (the real Lena and the screen Lena) are starring in Vilgot’s new movie. At first, the movie goes back and forth between Lena and Vilgot and footage of the pseudo-political provocation documentary that they’re making together. Miss Himmelsteen was a little confused by that at first, and so was Cliff. But pretty soon he got the hang of it, and Cliff found it challenging in a way that made him feel clever for getting on the film’s wavelength. Cliff assumed the filmmaker was using his randy college-student girlfriend as his on-screen pretty face and puppet. Yet right off the bat, Vilgot tosses her in the middle of some very stimulating political discussions and debates. Early footage of Vilgot’s movie consists of Lena, armed with a microphone and a handheld camera, practically assaulting Swedish bourgeois citizens on the street with her accusatory questions (“What are you personally doing to end the class system in Sweden?”). Cliff thought some of it was monotonous, and some of it went over his head, but overall he found the film engaging.

  He especially got involved with a discussion about the role and the necessity of the Swedish military in today’s society. The debate is conducted on the street, with a group of young Swedish military cadets and a group of other young Swedish people, who feel all Swedish citizens should refuse military service and work a mandatory four-year service for peace. Cliff thought both sides made good points and was glad to see neither side get mad at the other.

  Also, because the debate was allowed to grow, it led to more pertinent and practical questions. Like exactly what would the military do if Sweden was occupied by a foreign adversary? And what should they do?

  Cliff never wondered what Americans would do if the Russians, or the Nazis, or the Japanese, or the Mexicans, or the Vikings, or Alexander the Great ever occupied America by force. He knew what Americans would do. They’d shit their pants and call the fucking cops. And when they realized the police not only couldn’t help them but were working on behalf of the occupation, after a brief period of despair, they’d fall in line.

  But the more the film unspooled, the more confusing it became. Cliff c
ould see a lot of that was on purpose and some of it was just that it’s a weird movie.

  But the more he watched it, the more intrigued he was by the film’s gamesmanship. What is the real Lena story and what is Vilgot’s film?

  At one point, he wondered why the movie is getting so damn melodramatic. Then he realized, it’s Vilgot’s movie that’s getting melodramatic. The movie Vilgot isn’t as good a filmmaker as the real Vilgot.

  The implications of what’s real and what’s a movie interested Cliff. Especially when Cliff thought about it later and realized the implications of Lena’s father’s involvement in the movie. Wait a minute, so the whole story of Lena’s father isn’t real? Is he her father, or is he just an actor playing the role of her father? And that’s acknowledging that in real life he is an actor playing her father. But is he the movie Lena’s father, or is he an actor playing her father in Vilgot’s movie?

  All these cinematic questions intrigued Cliff far more than they did Miss Himmelsteen. He felt her leaning back from the screen, while she felt him lean forward. At some point, he heard her say under her breath, “I am bored yellow.”

  That’s cool, he thought. It’s a weird movie.

  Okay, all this cinema verité stuff is all well and good, but what about the movie’s claim to fame, the fucking? That’s why Cliff came to see the movie (not entirely), but he was curious. And it’s most definitely the reason he took Miss Himmelsteen. The man who engages Lena in the sex scenes that originally got the film seized by customs when it was first sent over from Stockholm is not Vilgot (Cliff was glad he didn’t have to see that tub of shit fuck). It’s a shady married guy (played by Börje Ahlstedt) who Lena meets through her father.

  While watching the first real sex scene ever projected in American cinemas, between Lena and Börje in the young woman’s apartment, Cliff had the sensation he was watching something new. Recently, other mainstream films had played patty-cake with these types of scenes. The nipple-suckle lesbian seduction between Susannah York and Coral Browne in The Killing of Sister George. Anne Heywood’s masturbation scene in The Fox. Oliver Reed and Alan Bates’s nude wrestling match by the fireplace in Women in Love (Cliff never saw that flick, but the trailer for it made his jaw drop). But Sjöman’s nude sex scene broke new ground for mainstream theatrical distribution. The film was originally seized by U.S. Customs on the grounds of obscenity. The movie’s American distributor, Grove Press, went to court to fight for it, lost the first battle when a federal district court upheld the customs ban. But that was Grove Press’s strategy. They wanted to appeal and have the judgment overturned. That way, a judgment would be passed down that didn’t just apply to this film but to all films with this type of provocative sexual material. And that’s exactly what happened when the U.S. Court of Appeals reversed the findings of the federal court, turning Vilgot Sjöman’s film I Am Curious (Yellow) into the cause célèbre film of the moment. And ushered in a new wave of sexuality into modern mainstream cinema. It became the first and by far the most profitable of a small wave of artistically minded erotic films that would prosper for a few years, while both the film industry and audiences decided how far down this road they were willing to go—with the pornographers momentarily sidelined, wondering how much ground the mainstream was willing to cede.

  As Cliff and Miss Himmelsteen watched the sex scene in Lena’s apartment, they were both gripped by the exciting sensation of seeing something new for the first time, and they intertwined fingers once the scene got going.

  Cliff thought back to what Richard Schickel wrote in that Life magazine in Marvin Schwarz’s outer office:

  Ten—even five—years ago, this would have been dreadfully shocking aesthetically and culturally, not to mention morally. But we have in every area of thought and art been brought so teasingly close to this level of explicitness that it’s a relief to arrive there and finally be done with it.

  The first sex scene in I Am Curious (Yellow), and for all intents and purposes modern cinema, wasn’t exactly erotic (Cliff didn’t get an erection), but the first flash of explicit nudity was for sure titillating. But what really made it memorable was how witty it was. Director Vilgot Sjöman filmed the first real sex scene to hit these shores like the comedy of errors most quickie trysts turn out to be. Sjöman strives to stress the realistic awkwardness involved in coupling. The couple wants to get it on; we the audience, who have been waiting for this the whole movie, want them to get it on; but the director throws one realistic obstacle after another in the way of their midday quickie. After many attempts, Börje can’t get Lena’s pants unbuttoned, and she slightly bitches him out for his fumbling (“Can’t you do it?”), till she’s forced to stop kissing and take matters in her own hands, removing her pants herself. He tries to fuck her standing up; she stops him (“I can’t do that”), a statement obviously based on past experience. When they have to go to another room to retrieve a mattress, they shuffle like little toy soldiers with their pants binding their ankles together. They practically destroy a room retrieving the mattress, yank it into the living room, then realize Lena’s recording equipment is stacked all over everything (reel-to-reel tape recorders, loose tapes, microphones), so they need to pile all that shit up if they want to lay the mattress on the floor and fuck.

  Cliff thought it was one of the best scenes in a movie he’d ever seen. It’s definitely the most realistic. He’s been in apartments like that, fucked a girl like that on a mattress like that on a floor like that. Cliff has quickly stacked up magazines, comic books, paperbacks, and record albums to fuck girls on floors, couches, beds, and the backseats of cars. Cliff has also been known to travel great distances with his pants tight around his ankles with only his fully erect penis to guide the way.

  And Cliff thought the fucking-on-the-bridge scene was even sexier. Cliff loves fucking in public. He loves making out in public, getting his cock sucked in public, and being jerked off in public. After those two scenes, Cliff thinks he’s seen the film’s two big moments. But neither he nor Miss Himmelsteen were prepared for the pubic hair scene. It’s the scene where Lena and Börje lie naked together and talk as they fondle each other, her face right next to his flaccid penis, her fingers moving in and out of his generous bush of pubic hair, planting light kisses on his cock. Sitting in the cinema in Westwood, holding hands with Miss Himmelsteen, watching a scene like that in a real movie, starring a real actress, Cliff felt that he was watching the dawn of a new day in cinema.

  Later, Rick asked Cliff, did he fuck Miss Himmelsteen?

  “Naw,” was Cliff’s reply.

  But he did tell Rick she sucked his cock in his Karmann Ghia on the drive back to her home in Brentwood, but that was their only date.

  By 1972, Janet Himmelsteen would become a full-fledged agent at the William Morris Agency, and by 1975 she would become one of their top talent agents.

  From that point on, she kept her blow jobs above the line.

  Chapter Three

  Cielo Drive

  Rick Dalton’s 1964 Cadillac Coupe de Ville, with his driver Cliff Booth behind the wheel, pulls out of the underground parking lot of the William Morris building onto Charleville, then turns one block down onto Wilshire Boulevard.

  As the vintage Cadillac and the two vintage guys drive down the busy street, the hippie subculture that has invaded the town in a locust-like swarm proceeds to parade down the sidewalk in their blankets and frocks and dirty bare feet. Troubled Rick Dalton, who still hasn’t shared the reason for his anxiety with his buddy Cliff, glances out the car-door window and comments on the hippie passersby with disgust. “Just look at all these fuckin’ weirdos. You know, this town useta be a nice fuckin’ place to live in. Now look at it.” Then he remarks with fascistic disdain, “I swear they oughta line ’em up against a wall and shoot ’em all.”

  They turn off of busy Wilshire and make their way back to Rick’s home on Cielo Drive, taking calmer residential streets. Rick rips a cigarette out of his pack of Capitol W’s, tosses i
t in his mouth, and lights it up with his Zippo, then snaps the silver lid closed in his tough-guy way. As he sucks the smoke a quarter down, he says to his driver, “Well, it’s official, ol’ buddy.” His nose does a loud snot sniffle. “I’m a has-been.”

  Cliff tries to console his boss. “C’mon, partner, what are you talkin’ about? What did that guy tell ya?”

  Rick spits out, “He told me the goddamn truth, that’s what he told me!”

  Cliff asks, “What’s got you so upset?”

  Rick spins his head in his buddy’s direction. “Comin’ face-to-face with how I threw my whole goddamn career in the toilet, that’s what’s got me so fuckin’ upset!”

  “So what happened?” Cliff asks. “That guy in there turn you down?”

  Rick takes another deep drag off his cigarette. “No, he wants to help me get into Italian movies.”

  Quick comeback from Cliff: “Then what’s the problem?”

  Rick screams, “I gotta do fuckin’ Italian movies, that’s the goddamn fuckin’ problem!”

  Cliff decides to keep driving and let Rick blow off steam. The actor sucks down another lungful of smoke while simultaneously feeling sorry for himself. As he exhales, he chronicles, “Five years of ascent. Ten years of treading water. And now a race to the bottom.”

  While negotiating Los Angeles traffic, Cliff offers up some perspective. “Look, I ain’t never had much of a career to speak of, so I can’t rightly say I know how you feel—”