Picture the setup. You've bought a ticket to a 161-minute movie you could probably recite, the house lights come up, and the man who made it says he can either talk about his next one or just show you the first 17 minutes. I'm a little jealous of everyone who was in that room.
The occasion was a special AFI Fest screening of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood at the TCL Chinese Theatre on Friday, Oct. 23. Variety says the Q&A afterward was moderated by Rotten Tomatoes' Jacqueline Coley, and IndieWire puts the crowd at around 900 Tarantino fans. You can guess which option they picked.
The footage came from The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, the Netflix movie Tarantino wrote and David Fincher directed, with Brad Pitt back as Cliff. Fair warning: nobody outside that theater has seen those minutes as far as I know, so everything below is built from the accounts of Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, TheWrap, IndieWire and Complex. Where they disagree, I'll show you. Where I'm giving my opinion, I'll say so.
This covers the opening scenes of the movie as reporters described them. If you want to walk into IMAX on Nov. 25 completely blind, save it for after the movie.
The night on one ticket stub
I like to pin down the boring facts first, because they're the part most headlines get fuzzy. Here's the night in the shape of a movie ticket.
The 17 minutes, cue by cue
Projectionists call the little marks in the corner of a film reel “cues.” It seemed like the right word for a scene-by-scene log of a movie whose hero is, apparently, a projectionist. One honest note: nobody published timestamps, so I'm giving you the order the reports describe, not minute marks.
- The title card
Opening titles set the story in June 1977, eight years after the first film, and Cliff seems to have left stunt work behind, according to TheWrap.
TheWrap - The booth
Cliff works at the New Beverly Cinema, the Los Angeles revival house Tarantino owns. The movie playing there is Soul Brothers Die Hard, starting with a strip-club scene featuring Yahya Abdul-Mateen II as Roderick “Hot Rod” Harrison. Cliff recites lines along with the movie from the booth and refills RC Cola canisters for the theater.
TheWrap THR - The phone call
Cliff phones his father, a pawnshop owner played by Peter Weller, to say he dedicated a song to him on a Los Angeles AM station. TheWrap reads the AM dial as a wink to the 2019 film, where AM radio is constantly playing.
TheWrap - The visitors
Two men (Karren Karagulian and Corey Fogelmanis) watch the theater from outside until Cliff signals them in. One says he feels like he's seen Cliff before. Cliff's answer is five words: “I get that a lot.”
TheWrap - The payment
Cliff pays the pair for stolen goods, and TheWrap says one of the items is an Academy Award for Best Director. That's a trophy neither Tarantino nor Fincher has won, though TheWrap notes each has three nominations. Only TheWrap mentions the statuette, so I'd file it as one reporter's account until a second outlet matches it.
TheWrap - The turn
From there it gets “Tarantino-like,” in TheWrap's telling, with gangsters, blackmail and movies on the menu. The Hollywood Reporter describes Cliff handling “unsavory business” on the side of the projection job, and IndieWire says Cliff's real work seems to be as a shady fixer, though 17 minutes didn't reveal where the plot goes.
TheWrap THR IndieWire
TheWrap sums up the stretch as alternately talky and explosive, which is exactly the shape I'd want from a Tarantino opening: a long hang, and then the room tilts.
Where the reports don't match
When five outlets cover one screening, the small contradictions are the interesting part. I found three worth flagging. None of them is a scandal, but if you're sharing this story with friends, they're the details most likely to get mangled.
My read: It's a small, single-screen revival house, so one person doing both wouldn't surprise me. That's my guess, not a report.
My read: Both are right. Wikipedia says he bought the property in December 2007 to save it from redevelopment, then took over programming in September 2014.
My read: Trust the specific version. The Hollywood Reporter also says IMAX, so don't assume your local multiplex gets it.
“Not a hangout movie”? My asterisk
This is the part where I put my own flag in the ground. Three days before AFI Fest, TheWrap published highlights from Empire's first-ever joint interview with Tarantino and Fincher. In it, Tarantino said he doesn't think of this one as a “hangout movie at all.” The 2019 film was one, he explained, but you knew you were headed to Cielo Drive, and that pull meant he didn't need much plot. This script, he said, has the flavor of an Elmore Leonard crime paperback.
Tarantino separates the two films: the first is a hangout movie, this one is a crime story with a paperback feel. Fincher calls it a bonfire story about people colliding in the back alleys of 1977 Hollywood.
On stage, Tarantino praised the loose, plot-light feel of the 2019 film and says it's the one of his he most wants to rewatch. Meanwhile, TheWrap says the opening of the new footage captures that same hangout vibe before the crime kicks in.
Is that a contradiction? I don't think so, and here's my asterisk. In the 2019 film, the hang is the point. You spend an afternoon with Rick on the set of Lancer because the hanging out is the pleasure. In the footage as described, the hang is a setup. Cliff recites lines in a booth, refills soda canisters and chats with his dad, and by my reading it all doubles as cover for a transaction with two men who've been watching the door.
So my reading is that “not a hangout movie” doesn't mean “no hanging out.” It means the hanging out now has a pulse. That's a good trade, and it fits Fincher's “bonfire” idea: the first few minutes are the circle of people, and then somebody throws a match.
One more number, because I can't resist it. Fincher told Empire the first draft he read was 230 pages, “essentially two movies,” and that about 60 pages were cut. If that's accurate, the movie has already survived a serious edit on paper. I won't guess a runtime from that. I haven't seen an official one in any of the coverage I reviewed.
Who showed up on screen
Here's the cast as the reports describe it, with one caveat: some names come from the full cast list, not from the footage itself. I've marked which is which.
Back in the role that won him his Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in 2020.
A pawnshop owner on the other end of Cliff's phone call.
The star of Soul Brothers Die Hard, the movie playing in Cliff's theater.
One of the two men who come in to be paid. He's known from Anora, per TheWrap.
The other visitor. TheWrap links him to Girl Meets World.
TheWrap lists them as part of the film. Carla Gugino is also in the cast, per Variety.
What's missing is also interesting. None of the reports I read mention Leonardo DiCaprio's Rick Dalton appearing in these 17 minutes. Our earlier story on the trailer explains the one line of dialogue that handles his absence: Leonardo DiCaprio Isn't in the New Trailer for His Own Sequel.
My quick verdict and excitement meter
I don't think a verdict is fair to hand out on a movie I haven't seen, so call this a mood reading instead. Here's where my head is after reading every account I could find.
The opening as described has a character, a place, a joke and a crime in the first few minutes, and that's more than I expected from 17 minutes of footage.
Oct. 20
Oct. 25
My own scale, 1 to 10, for how much I want to be in the seat on Nov. 25. It isn't a prediction of quality.
Why the extra point? Mostly the Oscar gag, if it's as TheWrap describes it. A Best Director statuette changing hands in a back-room deal, in a movie directed by someone who's never won that award and written by someone who's never won it either, is the kind of Hollywood in-joke I'd happily pay IMAX prices for. I also love that the first thing we learn about Cliff in 1977 is that he works in a movie theater. For a character who used to take punches for actors, that feels like a gentle new life, and a gentle new life is exactly what a Tarantino story likes to wreck.
Why not a 9 or a 10? Because 17 minutes is the best-case sample. Openings are where directors are most in control, and a story like this lives or dies in the middle. IndieWire says the footage wasn't enough to show where the plot goes. Fincher is famously precise and Tarantino is famously loose, and I want to see whether the middle hour feels like a conversation or a heist schedule. That's the part nobody in that theater could judge, and it's what I'm most curious about.
Your 59-day Cliff Booth calendar
Counting from today, Oct. 25, here are the three dates that matter, with the days left and how I'd think about each one.
TheWrap says this is a limited two-week IMAX engagement before Netflix. If an IMAX screen is within reasonable reach, this is my pick, because the whole film seems to be a love letter to theaters.
Complex says Tarantino's novel The Adventures of Cliff Booth arrives this day. If you prefer to read the story first, this is the date, though I'd watch the movie first so the surprises land.
The streaming debut. A perfectly good plan B, and the easiest one for anyone far from an IMAX screen.
Four things to have fresh from 2019
If you're planning a rewatch before Nov. 25, here's my short list of what to focus on. It takes 161 minutes to watch the whole thing, but these are the parts that matter most for Cliff.
Who Cliff is. He's Rick Dalton's stunt double, best friend, personal assistant and driver, a World War II Green Beret who lives in a trailer with a pit bull named Brandy, per Wikipedia.
The Spahn Ranch visit. TheWrap cites it as one of the moments Tarantino loves staying with, and it's Cliff at his quietest.
The Cielo Drive ending. It rewrites the real Tate-LaBianca history, and the sequel is set about eight years after that night. The footage's opening titles put it in June 1977.
The sound of AM radio. The 2019 film is full of it. If TheWrap is right that Cliff dedicates a song to his father on an AM station, it's a small callback worth hearing.
Cliff Booth footage questions people keep searching
Did Tarantino really show footage of Cliff Booth at AFI Fest?
Yes. After the Friday, Oct. 23 screening of Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood at the TCL Chinese Theatre, he showed the first 17 minutes of The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, according to Variety, TheWrap, IndieWire and The Hollywood Reporter.
What happens in the first 17 minutes of Cliff Booth?
Per TheWrap, the story opens in June 1977 and Cliff works at the New Beverly Cinema. He calls his pawnshop-owner father, then pays two visitors for stolen goods before things escalate into gangsters and blackmail. Other outlets confirm the theater job and the shady side business.
Is the Cliff Booth footage online?
None of the reports I read say it has been released publicly. It was shown to the AFI Fest audience, so everything online is a description.
When does The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth come out?
It opens in IMAX theaters on Nov. 25 and hits Netflix on Dec. 23, according to TheWrap, The Hollywood Reporter and Complex.
Is Cliff Booth only in IMAX?
TheWrap says it premieres exclusively in IMAX, in a limited two-week engagement, before the Netflix release. Complex words it more loosely as “theaters,” so go by the IMAX version.
Who directed The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth?
David Fincher directed it. Quentin Tarantino wrote the screenplay but isn't directing it.
Is it a hangout movie like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood?
Tarantino told Empire he doesn't think of it as one, and compared its flavor to an Elmore Leonard crime paperback. TheWrap says the footage's opening has a hangout feel before the crime kicks in.
Is Leonardo DiCaprio in Cliff Booth?
None of the footage reports I read mention him, and the trailer handles his absence with a single line, as covered in our earlier story.
Is there a Cliff Booth novel?
Yes. Complex says Tarantino's novel The Adventures of Cliff Booth comes out Dec. 8.
How long is The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth?
I haven't found an official runtime in the coverage I reviewed. For scale, the 2019 film runs 161 minutes.
