Ciné Blues #02 : Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

For this second episode of Ciné Blues, we head to Los Angeles in the late 1960s. A city still bathed in sunshine and promises, yet already marked by the end of a golden age. Through Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino offers a melancholic and offbeat look at this pivotal period, drawing on a central element of his cinema: music.

Released in 2019, the film is both a love letter to classic Hollywood and a meticulous reconstruction of its soundscape. We talk about it in Ciné Blues.

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The film

Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is set in 1969, at a time when Hollywood is undergoing major change. Television westerns are fading, spaghetti westerns are gaining ground, and a new generation of filmmakers is about to shake up established codes.

Rick Dalton, a former star of hit TV series, sees his career losing momentum. At his side is Cliff Booth, his stunt double, a discreet and ambiguous character. The two men, portrayed by Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, move through a Los Angeles in constant transformation.

Their path crosses that of Sharon Tate, played by Margot Robbie, a luminous figure of a still carefree Hollywood. Quentin Tarantino films her daily life, suspended just before History shifts in the summer of 1969. The film draws loosely on real events to better capture the end of an era, leading to a deliberately offbeat conclusion.

The soundtrack

The soundtrack of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood is built on a simple, rigorous principle: no original music was composed for the film. All tracks come from existing recordings and, above all, are almost exclusively heard within the world of the film itself.

Car radios, transistors, public spaces: this is diegetic music, heard by both the characters and the audience. This choice allows for total sonic immersion in the year 1969.

Blues, though less present in the charts at the time, still strongly feeds into soul, rhythm and blues, and rock. The soundtrack reflects this transitional period. It features American folk and pop with José Feliciano and Simon & Garfunkel, British rock with Deep Purple, as well as a curiosity with Maurice Jarre, heard not through a film score but via a track broadcast on the radio.

The anecdote

Contrary to what their name suggests, The Buchanan Brothers are not brothers. The duo consists of Terry Buchanan and Cy Buchanan, with no family ties and no connection to guitarist Roy Buchanan. The name choice reflects a marketing strategy common in the late 1960s, designed to evoke a family pop or country act.

An often overlooked aspect of the film lies in its sound design. Like American Graffiti by George Lucas, Quentin Tarantino constructs his film as a long radio listening experience. He goes even further by relying on actual program schedules from KHJ, one of Los Angeles’s most popular radio stations in 1969.

The soundtrack therefore integrates jingles, commercials, DJ voices, and period weather reports. Some tracks are broadcast in fragments, sometimes cut off, just like on real FM airwaves. The film becomes an extremely precise sonic archive of what a Californian listener might have heard in the late 1960s.

The film notably opens with Treat Her Right by Roy Head & The Traits, a 1965 rhythm and blues hit driven by an immediately recognizable harmonica riff. Broadcast on the radio in the opening minutes, the track instantly sets the tone and sums up the musical standards upheld by Quentin Tarantino.

📻 Ciné Blues dedicated to the film is available on Blues Actu Radio and on all podcast platforms: Spotify | Deezer | Amazon Music | Apple Podcast | Podcast Addict. The show can also be heard on FM on RVM, Radio Couleurs, Radio Zig Zag Franche Comté, and Mix Altitude.
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