Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

When did Tarantino decided to have Cliff Booth and Rick Dalton be Sharon Tate's neighbors?

Tarantino first created Cliff Booth, giving him a massive backstory. Then, the actor Booth was the stunt double for Rick Dalton. Tarantino decided to have them be Sharon Tate's next-door neighbors in 1969. The first plot point he developed was the ending, then moved backwards from there, this being the first time Tarantino had worked this way. He thought of doing an Elmore Leonard-type story, but realized he was confident enough in his characters to let them drive the film and let it be a day in the life of Booth, Dalton, and Tate. He would use sequences from Dalton's films for the action, inspired by Richard Rush's The Stunt Man, which used the scenes from the WWI movie they were making within the film as the action. Further, to get his mind into the Dalton character, Tarantino wrote out five hypothetical episodes of the fictional television show Bounty Law, in which Dalton had starred, having become fascinated with the amount of story crammed into half-hour episodes of 1950s western shows. Tarantino has expressed interest in turning these five scripts, as well as ideas for three more, into an actual Bounty Law television series in the future. He is hoping to cast DiCaprio as Jake Cahill.


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  • In February 1969, veteran Hollywood actor Rick Dalton, star of 1950s Western television series Bounty Law, fears his career is fading. Casting agent Marvin Schwarz recommends he make Spaghetti Westerns in Italy, which Dalton feels are beneath him. Dalton's best friend and stunt double, Cliff Booth—a war veteran skilled in hand-to-hand combat who lives in a tiny trailer with his pit bull, Brandy—drives Dalton around Los Angeles because Dalton's driver's license has been suspended due to his DUI arrests. Booth struggles to find stunt work in Hollywood because of rumors he murdered his wife. Actress Sharon Tate and her husband, director Roman Polanski, have moved next door to Dalton, who dreams of befriending them to revive his declining acting career. That night, Tate and Polanski attend a celebrity-filled party at the Playboy Mansion.

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