So, just how did they write out Leonardo DiCaprio from the sequel to Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?
Very simply. “Rick got too fat for me to double for him anymore,” Cliff replied when asked why he had shifted careers in the latest trailer for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth.
DiCaprio, who was looking quite svelte during the most recent awards season, is not in this follow-up to Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 film in which he was the lead.
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Instead, it’s centred on the dude whose name is in the title: Brad Pitt’s stuntman turned Hollywood fixer, and trouble magnet.
The story is set eight years after Once Upon, which places it in the alternate Hollywood history of 1977. No longer Rick’s shadow, Cliff holds bartending and projectionist jobs but his sideline is as the guy you call when you have a problem that needs an extra-legal touch.
The story kicks off when Cliff gets a call from a Hollywood agent on behalf of her client, a TV star named Charlie Peters, and Charlie brings a crew with a lot of baggage, including his wife, a former football pro and a pair of gangster brothers.
It’s violence and chaos, dreams and nightmares, mud-wrestling and fast cars, guns and a bag of cash, lies and more lies.
Just as an aside, here’s hoping the film will explain why it’s spelt misadventures, an actual word in the dictionary, as “mis-adventures”. The hyphen is not, grammatically speaking, necessary, so there better be some style or thematic reason for it.
Tarantino wrote the script for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth but handed directing duties over to David Fincher. Tarantino said he was only going to make 10 movies across his career (Once Upon was his ninth) and he didn’t want his final film to be something he felt he had already done.
Fincher, of course, has worked with Pitt before starting with Seven in 1995 and then again on Fight Club and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. These are two guys who speak each other’s filmmaking shorthand.
Other than Pitt, Timothy Olyphant appears to be the only Once Upon cast member reprising their role.
The newcomers include Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Holt McCallany, Carla Gugino and Peter Weller.
The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth. Credit: Netflix
Once Upon was a commercial and critical success when it was released seven years ago, earning almost $US400 million at the box office and netting a slate of awards including 10 Oscar nominations including a win for Pitt in the supporting actor category.
Tarantino’s film blended Hollywood history and fiction to tell a story about an ageing actor known for roles in Westerns, Rick Dalton (DiCaprio), and his stunt double, Cliff, whose paths cross with the Manson family.
The film changes the historical record by having Rick and Cliff intervene at the moment when, in real life, Manson’s acolytes violently murdered a pregnant Sharon Tate and her friends in the Hollywood Hills home she shared with husband Roman Polanski.
The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth will have an exclusive IMAX release on November 23 before it hits Netflix on December 23.
Fincher has a close relationship with Netflix dating back to House of Cards, one of Netflix’s first original projects, on which he was the set-up director and an executive producer. He also made his past two films (Mank and The Killer) as well as the acclaimed crime series Mindhunter with the streamer.
Australia has 10 IMAX screens including two standalone theatres, one in Sydney and one in Melbourne.
