![]() ![]() The scene in which the ticket-taker (Kate Berlant) fails to recognize Tate, then asks her to pose for a picture next to the movie poster so that people will know who she is, speaks to the fact that her star had not yet fully risen. In Once Upon a Time, Tate goes to see The Wrecking Crew (1968), a Dean Martin action film that was one of the last movies she acted in. ![]() Tate was best known for her role in the film Valley of the Dolls (1967), while Polanski was fresh off the success of the now-classic Rosemary’s Baby (1968). Like in the movie, Tate was renting a house at 10050 Cielo Drive in Los Angeles during the summer of 1969 with her husband, filmmaker Roman Polanski. ![]() Though in real life there was no Rick Dalton living next door, much of the rest of the film’s depiction of Tate is generally accurate. ![]() Tate is at the start of a promising career, while Dalton faces stagnation in his own, facilitated by his alcoholism. In Once Upon a Time, Margot Robbie plays Sharon Tate, an actor who lives next door to DiCaprio’s Rick Dalton. Those ludicrous beliefs, along with Manson’s near-total control over his group of followers, would lead to the group committing a series of grisly murders in 1969, which over the years have become immortalized in America’s popular imagination. Having developed substantial ability in manipulating young, vulnerable girls on the fringes of the California youth movement, Manson, an unhinged racist, preached to them about an apocalyptic race war that he dubbed “Helter Skelter,” named after the Beatles White Album song of the same name. The Beach Boys even ended up recording one of Manson’s songs, “Cease to Exist,” which was eventually released, substantially altered, as “Never Learn Not to Love” in 1968.īut Manson was not a harmless music industry hanger-on. Manson had harbored dreams of music stardom and befriended many in the industry, including Beach Boys drummer Dennis Wilson, who in 1968 let the cult leader and his followers stay at Wilson’s Los Angeles house and helped Manson to record an album. Members of the Manson Family included those who would go on to commit the Tate murders, as well as others like Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme (Dakota Fanning) who in 1975 was sentenced to life in prison after attempting to assassinate President Gerald Ford. Surrounded by acolytes, Manson set himself up as something between a religious leader and a pimp, ordering his followers to sleep with the blind and feeble George Spahn (played by Bruce Dern), so the Family could stay for free at the ranch Spahn owned - where many TV shows like the ones Rick Dalton starred in had once been filmed. In real life, Manson lived in the Los Angeles area in the late ’60s, drawing vulnerable young women into his orbit with pseudo-religious teachings and old-fashioned manipulation techniques. In Once Upon a Time, Dalton and Booth come into contact with the Manson Family, a cult-like group of young women and girls under the sway of a charismatic ex-con, Charles Manson (played by Damon Herriman). (When compared to his filmography up to this point, including blood-spattered films like The Hateful Eight, Django Unchained and Inglorious Basterds, Once Upon a Time is, until its final scenes, practically a gentle breeze.) In the director’s newest meta-epic, DiCaprio’s Dalton, who had achieved stardom in ’50s Western serials, runs square into the real-life historical changes that took place half a century ago, as he grapples with directors who want his hair and his costumes to be more hip and hippie-fied and audiences with a diminishing taste for the stiff theatrics of his earlier work.īettmann-Bettmann Archive/Getty Images Who were Charles Manson and the Manson Family? Tarantino, whose first feature was released in 1992, has certainly benefited from more liberal attitudes toward showing violence in film. The new Hollywood, as TIME wrote in 1967, enjoyed “a heady new freedom from formula, convention and censorship.” Many of those movies upended long-held ideas of what could be depicted onscreen, including increasing levels of violence, as in 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, and greater freedom with regard to sexuality, as in the same year’s The Graduate. “Those younger directors and actors are starting to make films, and a lot of their films are really popular - much to the irritation of the more traditional Hollywood,” explains Christine Lamberson, a historian at Angelo State University in Texas. The movie industry was undergoing a transformation as the authority of old-fashioned studio executives began to be challenged by younger artists. As the counterculture movement took hold, bringing with it drugs, free love, psychedelic rock and a new attitude toward American life, norms were also changing in Hollywood. ![]()
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