Quentin Tarantino‘s scripts can be, like the director himself, a tad loquacious.
Still, discarding more than one fourth of a Tarantino script feels like a pretty bold move.
David Fincher says he did exactly that — cutting 60 pages from Tarantino’s script for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, the Once Upon a Time in Hollywood sequel starring Brad Pitt that’s coming to theaters and Netflix.
“I liked the idea that it’s a story around a bonfire,” the director told Empire magazine. “It wasn’t about the plot as much as it was about how the participants collided with one another in the back alleys of Hollywood in 1977 … The first draft I read was 230 pages. It was essentially two movies. Somewhere in there was the Venn diagram of what Brad wanted to do, what I want to do, what Quentin wanted to do. Not ‘want to do,’ but the areas we would focus on.”
Fincher said he cut 60 pages to make a film that runs two hours and 20 minutes, a bit under Once Upon‘s run time of two hours and 41 minutes.
Interestingly, while Fincher says the movie wasn’t really about the plot, Tarantino suggests the film is very much about the plot. “I don’t think of it as a hangout movie at all,” Tarantino said. “Once Upon A Time In Hollywood was a hangout movie, but you know you’re going to [the site of the Charles Manson murders]. It has this force, thus I didn’t need a lot of plot. This script was very different. To me, it had the flavor of an Elmore Leonard paperback: a crime-story paperback feel.”
Of course, Tarantino previously adapted a Leonard story into the 1997 film Jackie Brown.
It will be interesting to hear Tarantino’s eventual verdict on Fincher’s film. The director famously walked out of Oliver Stone’s 1994 film Natural Born Killers, which was heavily rewritten and aggressively stylized. Yet Tarantino loved Tony Scott’s take on his script for 1993’s True Romance, and once said, “I actually think Tony made a better movie out of it than I would have at the time. True Romance is a case where it all worked out, it all completely worked out” (though he was initially upset about the film being changed to have a happy ending).
The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth gets a two-week exclusive run in Imax theaters globally starting Nov. 25 and then will debut on Netflix on Dec. 23.
Here’s the detailed official description and trailer: “Murder, blackmail, theft, extortion — just another summer in Hollywood. It’s 1977, eight years since Cliff Booth (Pitt) encountered the Manson family in Quentin Tarantino’s parallel history of 1969, Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood. In The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, directed by David Fincher from a new script by Tarantino, the fairytale is over. Los Angeles no longer needs a hippie-slaying stuntman the way it did. But Hollywood will always have problems, problems that can only be solved by someone with Cliff’s unique (occasionally extralegal) abilities. When he’s not earning his keep bartending or as a projectionist, Cliff Booth is a fixer — solving situations for Hollywood’s great and, sometimes, not so good.”
Continued the description: “He’s curious when he gets a call from talent agent Karen Crosby (Elizabeth Debicki), on behalf of her client, TV megastar Charlie Peters (Scott Caan) — a man known for doing his own stunts. And he’s further entertained and intrigued when he meets other characters in Charlie’s world, from his knowing wife Toni (Carla Gugino) to pro football champion turned screen star Roderick ‘Hot Rod’ Harrison (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II). Then there are the Verdusco brothers (Matt Groove and JB Tadena), mysterious gangsters causing mayhem across the city. What was once a fairytale is now a crime story — a cocktail of violence, ambition, and desire that could only happen in L.A.”