Episode Details

Warning! This post and episode contain huge spoilers.

Dr G and Dr Rad always enjoy a trip to the movies, as you tell from our past forays in classics like Spartacus, Gladiator, and the contemporary farce Hail, Caesar! We are planning to record more special episodes when we see a historical flick or television series that sparks our interest. This week we saw Tarantino’s latest offering, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019).

Did we mention the spoilers? They are coming…

The two main
characters in this film (Rick Dalton, played by Leonardo DiCaprio,
and Cliff Booth, played by Brad Pitt) are fictional, but the backdrop
to their story is historical. Whilst occasionally flashing back to
earlier points, the majority of the film takes place in Hollywood,
1969. 2019 marks the fifty-year anniversary, so the release is
timely. This was a pivotal year for America in many ways. The protest
movement against the Vietnam War reached new heights in the wake of
the Tet Offensive in 1968, not only in terms of the numbers who
attended protests such as Vietnam Moratorium Day, but also with the
trial of the Chicago Eight for demonstrations during the August 1968
Democratic National Convention. This was also the year that the
assassin of Martin Luther King Jr was captured and tried, and the
Black Panthers were named as enemies of the state by the FBI for
being a communist organisation. These are not the events that
Tarantino focuses on.

What is Hollywood Anyway?

Dalton is an actor trying to keep his career afloat and Booth is his stuntman, BFF and all-round handyman. The Hollywood that they used to know is disappearing. For decades, the film industry had been controlled by the major studios (such as MGM, Paramount, Warner Bros) and each movie was subject to strict censorship rules. By 1969, the studios were no longer as domin