Tag: once upon a time in hollywood

The following is excerpted from The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, (Insight Editions, out October 28).

“Rick, how are you doing with getting Hollywood Boulevard for me?” Quentin asked his location manager, Rick Schuler. “I’m doing well,” Schuler replied.

Quentin looked at his first assistant director, Bill Clark, and looked at Schuler. “Doing well” was not going to cut it. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was a Los Angeles story, a Hollywood story, and it needed to be filmed in Los Angeles. It needed Hollywood as a backdrop. He wanted to convert Los Angeles back to 1969 — “You know, literally street by street, block by block.”

Schuler had been in discussion with the California Film Commission for weeks. Under Quentin’s gaze, he admitted, “Well, I think I’m 80 percent there.”

“Rick, if there’s anything I can do to help you out, I’ll be willing to do that,” Quentin replied.

Production designer Barbara Ling was also anxious to know what it was she was going to be working with. Schuler had been asking the Hollywood powers that be, responsible for the economic success of their city, to shut down eight blocks.

“They had been, like, ‘Eight blocks? No way!’ and had said no a hundred times,” Ling recalls. “I also remember, eight blocks was freaking out the producers budget-wise.”

Schuler had an idea how he could utilize the filmmaker’s extraordinary enthusiasm and will to best use. He had an idea he wanted to run by Bill Clark: Schuler had a meeting with the Hollywood neighborhood council. Would Quentin be willing to address them — just talk about the project? Talk about the movie, what Hollywood meant to him? It could help get things over the line.

The day of the meeting, Schuler sprung it on Quentin and Clark that he wanted to make the filmmaker the surprise star act of his pitch and have him come in at the end. Nobody on the council would know he was there beforehand.

“For whatever reason, Rick thought it would be best if he kept Quentin a surprise to the council members,” Clark says.

But what was Schuler to do with Quentin in the meantime? Of course, you hide a two-time Oscar-winning writer-director in a windowless broom closet with his trusted first A.D. It is going to be only for a few minutes, right?

Quentin took one seat, Clark the other. “I tried to keep QT entertained as best I could so he wouldn’t become irritated by sitting in this little room for so long,” Clark recalls. In the main hall, Schuler was trying to work out when he would be seen.

When his turn on the agenda finally arrived, after he’d had a chance to warm up the panel and explain the needs of the production, Schuler said there was somebody else who wished to say a few words. “When Quentin walked in, their jaws just went straight to the floor,” Schuler recalled. “He had been hiding in the closet for nearly an hour, and I had no idea if he was going to be pissed at me! But he looked at me and I nodded, and he started talking. Without notes, he explained to them that he was brought up in Hollywood. He now owned a theater in the neighborhood. He is doing a movie about Hollywood and celebrating Hollywood and needed their backing and support.”

The 15-strong panel’s mouths were still agape as Quentin took his leave, followed by Clark and Schuler. Summoned back later in the day, Schuler received the news he had been hoping for: unanimous approval to shut down Hollywood Boulevard. Quentin’s petition had won the day.

Barbara Ling and her production design team could now go about transforming Hollywood back to how it was in 1969. During their early exploratory chats, a line from Quentin resonated with her: “Imagine an 8-year-old boy lying in the back of his parents’ car. Well, the movie is his point of view.” It was this line, sparse in creative detail but evocative, that spurred her on to bring Quentin’s vision to the screen. The race was on.

To re-create the Hollywood Boulevard of his youth, Quentin wanted realism as far as the eye could see. Movie star Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and his stunt double, Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt), had to drive a length and take the viewer back to ’69. Eight blocks would see them fine. However, for eight blocks, a discussion was needed.

At all times, Quentin wanted for his partners — those who have financed the movie — to make back their investment. It is a matter of pride that he brings his movies in on time and on budget. And so, when producer David Heyman broached the idea of cutting back from eight blocks to a financially manageable three, he was expecting pushback from an auteur director who would stop at nothing to have his vision brought to the screen unimpeded.

“But, do you know what?” Heyman says. “He was dreamy, just dreamy. There were challenging moments — some bits were not easy — but he was like a teddy bear. I wish all directors were like Quentin.”

Taking over city blocks, whether three or eight of them, comes at a cost, and liaising with the various business owners did not come cheap. “There was a feeling that if you mentioned Quentin’s name, then everybody would open up, give you access,” Schuler says. “But these locations see Quentin’s name and Sony as the studio, and then you have Leo and Brad driving down Hollywood Boulevard, and their thinking is there is money in the pot. It always comes down to money. That caused friction with the budget.”

“It was a location-heavy show, I know, but the money leaving the production offices was huge,” production manager Georgia Kacandes adds. “The fees had to be negotiated down.”

Like Quentin, Barbara Ling was a child of the city. She got it. Ling was older than Quentin. She had used fake IDs to enter many of the clubs and bars Quentin had written about. She had hitchhiked along the winding streets of L.A. She was an Angeleno. Her excitement matched that of Quentin, who could not wait to get going. He wanted to smell the Hollywood of 1969. From the get-go, Ling knew that Quentin wanted to replicate 1969 for real — none of this fake digital nonsense, it had to be all in camera. If Rick, Cliff and Sharon were there, you’d best believe that they were really there. “I don’t ever want to be standing in front of a greenscreen or a bluescreen ever, Barbara!”

“Good!”

This chimed with Ling, who had come from a world of theater. You had to be able to touch it. Yes, she got it.

“But the sad thing with Los Angeles is that they just can’t stop ripping things down!” she laments. “L.A.’s just a very nonpreservation town, unfortunately. But the exciting thing with Quentin is, he wanted the locations practical. Look, he had no problem with using visual effects to erase something that was not in keeping with the era. CGI helps you create downward: You can make a street go longer, but when it comes to close-up, I just think it fails.”

“Ultimately, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood was so well-received, and a lot of that was due to everything being practical,” Ling says. “Careers were dumbed down a bit by CGI — particularly, CGI in foreground. You can just tell you can’t touch that building. You can walk by it, but you can’t touch it.”

Leonardo DiCaprio was transported back in time. “I have driven up and down Sunset Boulevard my whole life,” he says. “To go to school, my mom would drive me, and I saw the changing of Los Angeles. During the late ’70s, I would deliver comic books with my dad on Sunset. We’d go to head shops — bong shops — and this kind of thing. People were wearing tie-dye.

“Well, what Quentin did was so spectacular,” the actor adds, marveling. “He redressed those blocks. I mean, that was a monumental moment and a great historic cinematic memory for me. No CGI — every fucking storefront was transformed. It was like I was a kid again.”

DiCaprio, knowing that his dad would get a kick out of seeing Hollywood transformed, invited him and his wife down for the day. “My dad has long white-gray hair and is still a hippie, right?” he says. “So I told him and his Sikh wife to come down: ‘Just wear your normal clothes — you’ll fit right in.’ “

Pulling onto Sunset, Rick’s mood is not lifted at the sight of the town he calls home being overrun by swarms of “fucking hippies!” Pitt, driving, brought the car to a stop at the junction.

“That’s my dad right there — my dad and my stepmom,” DiCaprio told him. Pitt laughed, and they waited to get the nod to pull out onto Hollywood Boulevard. DiCaprio looked at a smiling Pitt and said, “No, no, that is my dad.”

“Ha-ha! Yeah, right,” his disbelieving co-star replied.

“Brad, I’m not joking! It’s my dad. He’s right there. I invited him down because he fits right into 1969.”

“Wait — you’re fucking serious?”

“Yes, that is my father right there. Hey, Dad!”

“Hey, Leo!”

A giggling DiCaprio turned to his disbelieving driver.

“Ha! See, I told you!”

Sharon Tate (Margot Robbie) is running errands across Hollywood, including picking up a first-edition copy of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles for Roman Polanski from the Larry Edmunds Bookshop. This is Quentin paying homage to a real-life event, having learned that Sharon gifted a copy of the book to Roman shortly before her death.

“Oh my goodness, Quentin had every shop redesigned, and that really was a bookshop I walked into, and then I got to touch the Maltese Falcon statuette,” Robbie says, marveling. Seen in a bookshop reminiscent of the one Humphrey Bogart’s character visits in another John Huston classic, The Big Sleep, the statuette was designed by Fred Sexton for The Maltese Falcon. Its owner? Leonardo DiCaprio, who bought it at auction in 2010.

Margot Robbie walking on the streets of Hollywood was proving quite the draw, but no matter who the star is in a Quentin Tarantino movie, the director is the biggest draw. Crowds were forming. When permission to film in Hollywood was granted, a prerequisite with such a high-profile production on the city’s streets was safety. Clark and Schuler set about hiring a collection of production assistants — essentially, people with charisma who knew how to engage with others and make sure they were paying attention. Bicycle barricades were put in place, and when Clark called, “Switch sides,” a hundred people effortlessly shifted from one side of the road to the other. It helped that the PAs had a secret weapon in Quentin Tarantino.

“It worked like a charm,” Clark says, laughing. “Quentin is amazing because he turned to the crowd and spoke with them just back and forth a little bit,” Schuler says, marveling. “It came naturally to Quentin. He loves making movies, and to him it was evident that the crowds that had turned up to watch him work loved movies, too. After speaking with them and signing a few autographs, he simply said, “I’ve got to go back to work — I’d really appreciate if you were quiet.” Silence prevailed.

Hey, Mark, would you ever be interested in my filming here sometime?”

“Hey, Quentin, of course— whatever you need. Just let me know.” Quentin was at the counter bar at Musso & Frank Grill, one of his favorite watering holes since he was a young kid. This particular evening, he was enjoying a martini with Christoph Waltz.

A few years later, Mark Echeverria, Musso & Frank’s COO, received an email from location manager Rick Schuler explaining that he was working on a project with Quentin that involved taking Hollywood back to 1969, and that Quentin wished to shoot a portion of the movie in Musso & Frank. Schuler explained further that, of course, there would be no need for any alterations to the restaurant. It would remain the same.

“That’s the beauty of Musso & Frank,” Echeverria says. “Our restaurant has not changed, and hardly anything had to be done to revert our restaurant to 1969.” Ling concedes from a production design perspective there wasn’t a lot to do. “Oh, they’re pretty iconic interiors,” says Barbara. “I mean, we had to change the cash registers and things like that. Tina Charad came in and reproduced all the menus from 1969.”

“Ultimately, I made my recommendation, and that was we should support Quentin,” Echeverria recalls. “I explained how the movie was on brand and of the respect Quentin and Rick had showed us by coming so far in advance. It was, for me, a no-brainer.

“Most of our bartenders and employees have a personal relationship with Quentin, as he has been such a regular, and it was more of shooting something with a friend — but, yes, ultimately, we all knew the magnitude of what was going on.”

Three years after Frank Toulet opened the doors to his restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard in 1919, Joseph Musso joined the operation, and the now-famous grill, with its red leather booths, mahogany bar and first public phone booth, quickly became the go-to place for celebrity Angelenos — a real home away from home for the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Clark Gable, Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra and Elizabeth Taylor, who mixed cheek-by-jowl with such literary giants as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker and John Steinbeck. The same year Toulet and Musso joined forces, Buster Keaton used the restaurant as a location for his film Cops. It would quickly become a favorite location for filmmakers, and Quentin knew he wanted his name associated with its illustrious past.

After Rick’s meeting at Musso & Frank with his agent (Al Pacino), Cliff drives the actor back home to his house on Cielo Drive. Rick sets about fixing himself a drink or eight, and his neighbors, Roman and Sharon, leave for a night of fun with the fun people of Hollywood.

Cliff is in his Volkswagen Karmann Ghia, heading home. His smooth, almost sensual, and yet authoritative gear changes see the stuntman treat the bend in the road as though it is a tight turn on a racecourse to be navigated. Accelerating out of Cielo Drive, the small car propels down the road, leaving behind the acrid stench of burnt rubber in the night air.

A decorated war veteran, Cliff understands risks, and what would be for some a ponderous journey home from work takes him no time at all — all befitting a stuntman who knows how to handle a car at speed. Quentin, as ever, wanted to see his actor’s face in the shot.

“There was no way Brad was going to let somebody else behind the wheel,” cinematographer Bob Richardson insists. “That was never a question from Brad. I’m betting he was doing 50 — he was just flying down there. We had a camera mounted behind him, and the camera car was struggling to keep up with him. Look, Brad was fully in control, but he was fast.”

“OK, no problem for Brad to be driving,” Quentin’s longtime stunt coordinator Zoë Bell agrees, “but Brad is one of the leads, and so one of the things that I fought for was that we had at least a square. That is four stunt drivers who flank Brad. They’re moving in and out so if he fucks up or one of the precision drivers does — precision drivers are basically extras who are qualified drivers, but I cannot speak of their skill — if one of those precision drivers fucks up or Brad’s brakes fail, a couple of stunt drivers can come together in a pincer and nudge a car to a stop. They’re always alert. They have those instincts.

“It is hard to place, to justify, the cost on this,” Bell says. “Brad is a lead actor, one of the stars of the movie. You’re obviously thinking of Brad’s safety, but also, if anything happens to him, it will have consequences for Quentin, the production, and blow back on me. No, I wanted everything covered.”

The stunt coordinator may have been looking out for Brad, but his speedy driving in the Karmann Ghia nearly caused a casualty. “I nearly drove over Zoë — thankfully she has calisthenic reflexes,” laughs Pitt.

If Cliff was going to get on the freeway, then Quentin would need a freeway for him to get onto. Schuler had to pull in some favors from his friends at the California Highway Patrol. He had worked closely with them organizing access for the movie CHiPs, and he scooted up to Sacramento for another round of negotiations.

“I told them that we wanted to shut down the Hollywood freeway and the 101 freeway and showed them the two exits,” Schuler recalls. “I explained to them that we needed to have rolling breaks — rolling breaks are the cops holding the traffic — between the hours we needed, slowing things down in both directions, so it was limited.”

Quentin would be asked if the trucks and cars whizzing by Brad Pitt were CGI.

“No, no, fuck no,” he would insist. “Those motherfuckers were all real.”

Brad was just buzzing that he had a once-in-a-lifetime experience “to cruise down Hollywood Boulevard with no traffic or speed limit! And in a cool car. Well, it is a Q.T. film, so it is never gonna be a shit box!”

It is very clear what I said, what I asked for. What is to interpret? So how come we are not doing it?” First A.D. Bill Clark had heard similar refrains from Quentin over the years, but here, he was truly saddened. His director had a shot in mind, and he needed a suitable location to make it a reality — and it was proving elusive.

“Look, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is the only movie I have written where I started with the end,” Quentin explains. “I thought, ‘What if Mr. Indestructible was over at his actor’s house and that actor lived next door to Sharon Tate, and Tex and the girls went to that house instead?’ And then the line came to me: ‘Those hippies sure picked the wrong motherfucking house that night.’ I thought it was a neat idea,” he adds. “But to pull it off, we had to be able to do two things: We had to have the scenes in the front and the gates to the neighboring house to the side. You had to have a sense of the two houses together, and I had to do the shot in the backyard on Rick and his pool, and then the camera goes down into where you see Sharon and Roman drive away, and then I needed that last shot.

“That shot was in my head from the get-go, but we just weren’t finding what I needed, and I am not being shown what I am having in my head,” Quentin recalls. “We had to find two houses whereby we could pull it off. I was trying to make something work from what I was being shown.”

“Quentin got very close to begrudgingly making a compromise,” says Clark, “and I wasn’t happy about that because ultimately, the movie was going to suffer. It is Quentin’s job to be dissatisfied and to push us. He was getting flustered with the places we were seeing — nothing was right.”

Location scouting is a long and arduous trek. You have to put in the hard yards to find the pearls. But the houses the team was viewing were not getting any better — they were getting worse. Clark decided to take matters into his own hands and get back on the road. He gave cinematographer Bob Richardson a call.

“Let’s make it happen, White Devil!”

This attitude typified why Quentin likes Bill by his side. “That’s Bill,” Quentin says. “He says to Bob, ‘We’re not finding what Quentin wants. Well, we know exactly what Quentin wants, so let’s start driving around the Hollywood Hills until we find the fucking houses we need.’ “

Clark resorted to poring over Google Maps and satellite views. He knew that it was going to call for a cold scout, requiring them to just knock on doors. So after another busy wrap on yet another scouting day, he and Richardson, maps on laps, set off.

During two days of intense driving, they pulled into a cul-de-sac off Laurel Canyon. There was a frisson of excitement. They saw a gate. They saw a house with a drive. Turning to Richardson, Clark said, “That’s a cool house.” And then the front door opened to reveal a woman bringing out a trash can. They hopped out of their car, and Clark quickly made the introductions.

“Hey!” Bill called out. “Hi! This is Bob, and I’m Bill.”

Explaining who they were and what they were up to, they asked whether she owned the house. “Yes,” she replied. “My renters are moving out, and I’m just clearing things up.” The levels of excitement just went through the roof.

“You’re kidding!”

If she was renting out the house, then they could rent it on behalf of Quentin Tarantino, right? Turning, they spied the gates to the neighboring property. “What’s up with those gates?” “Oh, that guy used to be an actor. They’re really nice people. They’re away on vacation right now.”

Fuck!

Looking though the woman’s door, they spotted a swimming pool. Clark and Richardson looked at each other and asked the silent question: “That’s Rick pool, right?” The pair could not contain themselves, and they obtained an invitation to have a look around the house.

Quentin could see his final shot taking shape. Clark and Richardson wanted to get inside the neighbor’s property. Ling wanted to get inside, and you’d best believe that Quentin wanted to see what was behind those gates and up that drive.

“Look, it is as I often say,” Clark proclaims. “God is a Tarantino fan.”

As they were all thinking about the possibilities of the location, up drove a BMW into the cul-de-sac. Schuler’s years of location scouting told him that this dude was a player in their forthcoming story.

Pulling up alongside the minivan Schuler and Quentin sat in, the owner of the BMW rolled down his window, and Schuler did the same. Now, both participants in the drama could see into each other’s vehicles. BMW Dude, spotting Quentin, of course recognized one of the town’s favorite sons.

Schuler began his spiel: “I’m here with Quentin Tarantino, and I’m interested in your house. Can we talk about the new Quentin Tarantino movie?”

“Sure!”

The automatic gates opened. It was Hollywood — of course they did.

Excerpt text and images © 2025 Insight Editions. Provided courtesy of Insight Editions & The Story Factory, from Jay Glennie’s The Making of Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood (out Oct. 28).

***

The Making of the Making of

How author Jay Glennie earned Tarantino’s approval — and the exclusive right to tell the behind-the-scenes stories of all the director’s films.  

“I was saying to Q last night that these books are written for two people, me and him,” Jay Glennie says over Zoom from his home office in rural England, a cattle shed stacked floor-to-ceiling with movie history books. “My assumption being that if we both got a kick out of it, somebody else will as well.” Q in this instance refers to Quentin Tarantino, with whom Glennie has been toiling away for hundreds of hours on a new coffee table book on the making of 2019’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, from which the adjoining article is excerpted. 

The final product, published by Insight Editions in the U.S. and Titan Books in the U.K., arrives everywhere books are sold on Oct. 28. The 500-page volume is brimming with costumes, props and set photos, new interviews with Tarantino and the cast — established A-listers like Leo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie, as well as future ones like Mikey Madison, Austin Butler and Sydney Sweeney — and behind-the-scenes anecdotes from the production team. 

It’s all woven together with 170,000 words of accompanying text by Glennie, a humble cinephile who has gained an international reputation as the Cecil B. DeMille of “making of” movie books. It was one of those — 2019’s One Shot: The Making of The Deer Hunter — that drew the admiration of Tarantino. “Jay’s book brought back to me the way my dear departed friend Michael Cimino’s picture has — since the day of its release — held a significant place in my heart and memory and has been my barometer for artistic achievement inside the Hollywood studio system and memory,” the director writes in his intro to the new book.

“So we’ve got emails going, and we’re on a Zoom, a few bottles of wine consumed either end, and next thing you know, I’m booking a flight to Los Angeles,” Glennie recalls of his first conversation with the director. “Suddenly we’re doing 10 books together.” 

The Making of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood features a “9” on its spine. Nine more books are planned, one for each of Tarantino’s films — including his still unannounced 10th and (allegedly) final project. The next installment, about the making of Inglourious Basterds, is already nearing completion, while the next three in the series are slated to be Django Unchained, Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction. — SETH ABRAMOVITCH

This story appeared in the Sept. 18 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.