Fans of filmmaker Quentin Tarantino got an excellent treat last year when he released his prose novel adaptation of his Once Upon A Time in Hollywood screenplay. Doubling down on his “alternate history of Hollywood,” the book went into even more detail about the lives of characters Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Cliff Booth (Academy Award winner Brad Pitt), expanding beyond the ending of the movie and even bringing Tarantino himself into the mix (the book makes note of a film the Oscar winner never made as having starred Trudi Frazer, the young actress that appears in Lancer with DiCaprio’s character). Know Quentin may get even more meta.
Speaking in an interview with Empire, Tarantino revealed that he’s already written another Once Upon A Time in Hollywood adjacent book with a “The Films Of Rick Dalton” book. Tarantino not only wrote the book himself but is also the author of it in the context of the world of Once Upon A Time in Hollywood. He tells the outlet: “It gives you a little quickie biography of his life. And then it starts going through the career: ‘…and then there’s this episodic television show, and then this other television show, and then this movie, and that movie’, and starts with the small parts he has in this one, and it builds, with little reviews of each thing, little synopses of each of them. And it goes through the entire career until he retires in 1988.”
Tarantino continued, revealing that the book “”is written by me, by Quentin Tarantino, in 1999,” and features a “huge Q&A that (he) had with Rick at that time” as the preface. “It’s all written. It exists!” he notes.
Will you get to see it though? Unfortunately, probably not. Tarantino said that the book probably has “a limited audience.” He added, “But everybody who likes Rick, and cares about Rick, and is interested in the trajectory of Rick and has now become invested in my alternative history of Hollywood… well, this takes the alternative history of Hollywood all the way to the bitter end.”
Once Upon A Time in Hollywood was Tarantino’s ninth film as a director and he reportedly remains committed to officially retiring after his upcoming tenth movie, details for which do not exist (perhaps because he has not decided what it will be).
“No I don’t have a clue (what the new movie will be),” Tarantino sad to CBS Sunday Morning last year. “If I had to guess, I would think Once Upon A Time in Hollywood is sort of the epic at the end of the career. If I had to guess I would think the tenth film would be more epilogue-y….It’s just not an epic, you’ve told the big story and then there’s the little thing at the end.”