Quentin Tarantino is moving out of his usual comfort zone of over the top action films into a more modest medium: books. The auteur director has recently signed a deal with publisher HarperCollins to produce two new books. One will be Cinema Speculation, a non-fiction deep dive into the movies of the 70's, and the other will be an official novelization of his film Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. The novel is set to go further into the lives of the characters played by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, the two protagonists of the film set in the golden age of Hollywood.
For those unfamiliar, Once Upon A Time in Hollywood follows Rick Dalton and his stunt double Cliff Booth as they navigate what seems to be the tail end of their careers. Dalton in particular is having a great deal of trouble breaking out of the typecast roles he receives as a longtime actor in TV Westerns. Booth is close friends with Dalton, but also struggles to find work partially due to Dalton's decline, and partially due to dark rumors surrounding the disappearance of his ex-wife. Along the way the two of them happen to cross paths with the Manson family before they became famous for killing Sharon Tate, and to say anymore would be to spoil the rest of the film.
The novelization is currently set to dive deeper into the lives of Dalton and Booth and provide some more precise detail on how they ended up where we see them in the film. For example, an early sample of the book contains more details about Dalton's film work in Italy, and why certain projects didn't go so well for him. This novelization will reportedly continue to use Once Upon A Time In Hollywood's unique blend of real figures and fictionalized events to maintain the film's signature voice.
Vice President and Executive Editor Noah Eaker of HarperCollins had high praise for the book. In praise for Tarantino he said of the novel: “Quentin Tarantino’s literary talents have been in plain sight since his first scripts, but to see how skillfully he endows his characters with life on the page and how he constantly takes a reader by surprise, even one who knows the movie by heart, is to see a master storyteller trying on a new form and making it his own.”
Source: Deadline