Source : @Variety
LOS ANGELES — Quentin Tarantino handed fans at AFI Fest an unexpected first look at “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth” on Friday night, screening the opening 17 minutes of the David Fincher-directed follow-up to “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” in front of a packed house, Variety reported on Saturday (Oct 24).
The surprise came at Hollywood’s TCL Chinese Theatre, where Tarantino had appeared for a screening of his 2019 film and a question-and-answer session moderated by Rotten Tomatoes’ Jacqueline Coley. As the conversation drew to a close, he offered the audience a choice: a few words about the new film, or its first 17 minutes. The crowd got the footage, which The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline both described as the first public look at the project.
Brad Pitt returns as Cliff Booth, the stuntman role that earned him an Oscar in the original film. Tarantino wrote the screenplay, but this time the directing duties went to Fincher, who was also in the theatre on Friday. The story jumps forward from the 1969 setting of the first film to 1977.
A fixer in 1970s Hollywood
According to the official synopsis, Los Angeles no longer needs Booth as the stuntman he once was. He now earns a living tending bar and working as a projectionist, while quietly solving problems for the film industry’s powerful players, some of them more respectable than others. The plot is set in motion when talent agent Karen Crosby, played by Elizabeth Debicki, calls him on behalf of her client Charlie Peters (Scott Caan), a television megastar known for performing his own stunts.
The cast also includes Carla Gugino as Charlie’s wife Toni, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as football champion turned screen star Roderick “Hot Rod” Harrison, and Matt Groove and JB Tadena as the Verdusco brothers, a pair of gangsters causing trouble across the city. Peter Weller also appears.
Explaining why he wanted to return to the character, Tarantino said he usually remembers bad reviews rather than good ones, but one line had stayed with him: a critic’s observation that “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood” seemed to be the first world he had created that he would actually like to live in. He said he loved Booth and the way Pitt played him, and saw the character as “sort of like a paperback hero” who could carry a whole series of adventures.
Variety said the opening sequence carried Tarantino’s unmistakable writing style, while Fincher’s vision of 1977 Hollywood looked gritty and dark. The Hollywood Reporter noted that the footage showed Booth at work as a cinema projectionist while handling less savoury business on the side.
Reynolds, Dern and a West End play
During the session, Tarantino also recalled that the late Burt Reynolds had agreed to play ranch owner George Spahn in the original film and took part in rehearsals and a script reading before his death in 2018. Tarantino said that reading turned out to be the actor’s last performance. The role eventually went to Bruce Dern. The filmmaker also touched briefly on his play “The Popinjay Cavalier”, starring Sacha Baron Cohen, which is headed for London’s West End next year, with rehearsals due to begin in November and previews in February.
Deadline reported that Fincher recently told Empire he trimmed about 60 pages from Tarantino’s first draft, which ran to 230 pages, and that the finished film runs roughly two and a half hours. Netflix will open “The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth” exclusively in Imax cinemas on Nov 25, before it begins streaming on the platform on Dec 23.
The original Variety post can be viewed on X: https://x.com/Variety/status/2114005966249177527.
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