Fans who showed up to AFI Fest on Friday night expecting a big-screen revival of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” got a lot more than they bargained for. At the end of his Q&A at the TCL Chinese Theatre, Quentin Tarantino offered the crowd a choice that was really no choice at all, and then screened the first 17 minutes of “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth,” the long-awaited follow-up to his 2019 film.
It was the first public look at the movie, according to Deadline, and it arrives just a month before the film hits theaters.
“Or I could show you the first 17 minutes”
The evening was billed as a screening of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” followed by a conversation with Tarantino, moderated by Rotten Tomatoes’ Jacqueline Coley, as Variety reported. When he was asked about the sequel near the end of the session, Tarantino replied: “Well, I could talk a little bit about ‘The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth,’ or I could show you the first 17 minutes.”
He stood up as the audience figured out what was about to happen. David Fincher, who directed the new film, was also in attendance.
A Tarantino script, a Fincher film
The project is an unusual collaboration. Tarantino wrote the screenplay, while Fincher directed. Brad Pitt returns as Cliff Booth, the stuntman and loyal sidekick to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton, a role that won Pitt an Oscar for the original film.
The story jumps from the 1969 setting of “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” to 1977. The official logline says Los Angeles “no longer needs a hippie-slaying stuntman the way it did,” but Hollywood will always have problems that only someone with Cliff’s “unique (occasionally extralegal) abilities” can solve. When he is not working as a bartender or a projectionist, Cliff is a fixer for the industry’s great and not-so-good.
According to Variety, the plot kicks off when talent agent Karen Crosby (Elizabeth Debicki) calls on behalf of her client, TV megastar Charlie Peters (Scott Caan), who is known for doing his own stunts. Cliff also crosses paths with Charlie’s wife Toni (Carla Gugino), pro football champion turned screen star Roderick “Hot Rod” Harrison (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II), and the Verdusco brothers (Matt Groove and JB Tadena), a pair of gangsters causing mayhem around the city. Peter Weller is also in the cast.
Variety’s Jazz Tangcay wrote that the opening sequence carries Tarantino’s distinctive style of writing, while Fincher’s 1977 Hollywood looks gritty and dark.
Why Tarantino came back to Cliff
During the Q&A, Tarantino explained why he wanted to revisit the character. He said one review line about the original film stuck with him, describing it as the first world he had created that he would like to live in. “I loved the Cliff Booth character,” he said. “I loved the way that Brad played him, and there was this aspect of him as sort of like a paperback hero.” He said he could picture a series of paperbacks with Cliff getting involved in one adventure after another.
Fincher has also been talking about the film. Deadline noted that he told Empire earlier this week that the first draft of Tarantino’s script he read ran 230 pages and was “essentially two movies,” and that he had to cut 60 pages. The final cut runs about two and a half hours.
A Burt Reynolds footnote
The Q&A also produced a poignant bit of film history. Tarantino said he had spoken with Burt Reynolds about playing George Spahn in “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” Reynolds agreed and took part in rehearsals and a script reading before he died, a role that ultimately went to Bruce Dern. “The last performance Burt Reynolds ever gave was as George Spahn in the script reading,” Tarantino said.
Next up: the West End
Tarantino also touched on his first stage play, “The Popinjay Cavalier,” which stars Sacha Baron Cohen and is headed to London’s West End. Deadline reports that previews begin February 23 at the Phoenix Theatre, with an opening on March 18. Tarantino kept details to a minimum, saying rehearsals start in November. “I’m just a writer and that’s just kind of what I do,” he said. “I’m always writing.”
When you can see it
Netflix will open “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth” in IMAX theaters on November 25, before it begins streaming on Netflix on December 23. For everyone who was not in the room on Friday, the wait for that opening sequence is now just a few weeks long. For the lucky AFI crowd, as one Deadline commenter joked, it means they can arrive 17 minutes late.
Image: Vintage cinema projector via Rawpixel, CC0 1.0
