The one band Quentin Tarantino wanted for ‘Once Upon a Time in Hollywood’
Quentin Tarantino has been celebrated as much for his carefully curated soundtracks as for the films they accompany. His 1994 magnum opus Pulp Fiction, for example, has one of the most famous soundtracks of all time, darting between the father of rock and roll, Chuck Berry, and the 1970s funk of Kool & the Gang.
But Tarantino’s penchant for soundtracks doesn’t stop there, and the Kill Bill series has musical moments that are almost as iconic as Mia and Vincent’s twist-off at Jack Rabbit Slim’s. The opening titles of the first Kill Bill instalment are accompanied by Nancy Sinatra’s ‘Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)’, while the Bride and O-Ren Ishii’s tense final duel is soundtracked by Santa Esmeralda’s playful ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’.
In fact, since his debut, Tarantino has been preoccupied with the task of pairing the perfect song with each scene. Or, more often than not, an imperfect song, one that is notably at odds with the scene’s events, making the scene all the more affecting. His first movie, Reservoir Dogs, provides an example of his masterful juxtaposition of music and action, given that the director accompanied a brutal torture scene with Stealers Wheel’s country rock track, ‘Stuck In The Middle With You’. The scene became iconic, gaining a new audience for the track and for Tarantino.
Tarantino’s distinctive scores have become as much a part of his auteurship as his stylised violence or his excessive expletives. At the Grammy Museum in 2019, the director himself stated, “I’m almost as proud of my discography as I am of my filmography. And I think part of that is making hard choices, and it’s always about how this song goes into that song.”
One film in which he was forced to make a hard choice was his 2019 dramedy Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie. The film features around 60 different pieces of music, curated by Tarantino and music supervisor Mary Ramos from hours of 1969 KHJ-AM shows. He was set on using music from the time period, featuring the likes of Neil Diamond, Simon & Garfunkel, and excerpts of DJ Don Steele’s voice.
But Tarantino made the difficult decision not to include one of his initial musical ideas for the film. He recalls: “I thought it would be neat to take the band from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, the Carrie Nations, and actually male it as if they’re real”. The band he is referring to is a fictional girl group from Russ Meyer’s 1970 melodrama Beyond the Valley of the Dolls.
The filmmaker continued: “And there’s even kind of a connection between the Manson family and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls anyway with Z-Man and with Phil Spector, for many reasons. So I actually thought it would be kind of cool to hear like ‘In the Long Run’ or ‘Look On Up at the Bottom’ coming out the radio and hear the disc jockey say, ‘Oh, it’s the newest hit from the Carrie Nations.'”
Tarantino’s idea was to use the band to hint at the fairytale, alternative reality nature of the world Once Upon a Time in Hollywood takes place in: “And that would be the first clue that maybe this doesn’t exactly take place in the world that you remember to a hundredth degree.”
In the end, Tarantino chose realism over fairytales and stuck to real bands for the soundtrack. The decision served him well, as critics praised the film’s use of music, and it obtained a nomination for ‘Best Compilation Soundtrack’ at the Grammys.
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