Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Trailer: Will Quentin Tarantino Try to Rewrite History Again?
The first official trailer for Once Upon a Time in Hollywood offers a few sparse clues.
The initial poster of Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, featuring Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt playing a has-been Western movie star and his Hollywood stunt double, respectively, left a little to be desired. But the first official trailer for the film set in the late 1960s, from the shoot-em-up Western movie sets DiCaprio and Pitt’s characters frequent to the groovy backdrop of a Hollywood pool party, is giving fans of the highly anticipated ninth film from the bad-boy director more to chew on.
Tinseltown’s golden age wasn’t always so shiny—in 1969, film actress Sharon Tate was murdered in her own home by Charles Manson and his followers. Tarantino’s film is a reimagination of that summer, but focused on Tate’s fictional neighbor Rick Dalton (played by DiCaprio). While Once Upon a Time in Hollywood‘s first trailer doesn’t reveal too much about the plot of the film, and hardly even reveals its stacked cast of characters besides those played by DiCaprio as Rick Dalton, Pitt as Cliff Booth, and Margot Robbie as Sharon Tate, the teaser does introduce Mike Moh as the martial artist turned movie star Bruce Lee, who squares off against Pitt’s stunt double character. It also features a GIF-able moment of DiCaprio’s character attempting to do the twist on what appears to be Hullabaloo, a short-lived musical variety show that ran for two seasons in the mid-1960s.
“Experience a version of 1969 that could only happen #OnceUponATimeInHollywood – the 9th film from Quentin Tarantino,” DiCaprio tweeted, along with a link to the trailer. The actor’s insistence that Once Upon a Time in Hollywood proposes a “version of 1969” that could only happen within the world of the film built by its director might be a hint that Tarantino may try to author his own version of the year that Sharon Tate was murdered by the Manson family. In Tarantino’s 2009 film Inglourious Basterds, he rewrote history by including a scene in which Adolf Hitler is killed by American soldiers, and in the 2012 film Django Unchained, an American slave successfully enacts revenge on his white slaveowners, so it would not be out of the realm of possibility for the director to pull a similar trick with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood when it is released in theaters this July.
