I mostly enjoyed Once Upon A Time In Hollywood: I've got a thing I'm writing about it that I'll probably post on here at some point, but there's a smaller bit I wanted to mention.
Everything I've read about the movie indicates that the relationship between Leonardo DiCaprio's Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt's Cliff Booth is based on the one between Burt Reynolds and Hal Needham, the director of Smokey And The Bandit, who was at one time Reynolds' stunt double. That seems true enough to me, but while the movie relationship mirrors the Reynolds/Needham dynamic, I don't feel as if the Dalton character reflects Reynolds that much; Dalton is a semi-has-been TV actor who pays the bills doing character work on episodic TV who eventually makes a name for himself in the world of cheap Italian westerns. That aspect--the Spaghetti Western one--feels, obviously, based on Clint Eastwood, but the other part, the fallen star making his way playing the villain of the week on various throwaway TV shows, that seems to me to point to a much different actor: Clu Gulager.
Gulager had some success in the early 60s playing Billy The Kid on a mostly forgotten show called The Tall Man, and he appeared for a season on The Virginian. In 1964 he was in Don Siegel's first movie, The Killers, alongside Lee Marvin, John Cassevetes, and Ronald Reagan, and in 1971 he appeared in The Last Picture Show, but in terms of prestige, that was about it for his film career: mostly he appeared as a character actor well into the 90s on TV shows like Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Cannon; Bonanza and The Mod Squad and FBI (a show that Rick Dalton appears on in Once Upon A Time In Hollywood); San Francisco International Airport and The Streets of San Francisco; Magnum PI and Airwolf and Night Rider. Apart from his TV work he continued to work in movies as well, but apart from the two I mentioned, they were all pretty low-rent productions--enough that he became a reference on Mystery Science Theater 3000.
I met him once, maybe a decade ago: his son, John Gulager, is a movie director who first gained notoriety appearing on the docuseries Project Greenlight, directing a horror movie called Feast, which was apparently successful enough to spawn two sequels, which were both filmed together, locally, in the little town of Plain Dealing, Louisiana, a place that sounds made up but is not. Gulager was in all three Feast movies, which are honestly pretty terrible, but in a silly, self-aware sort of way. A friend of mine was working on the movie, and one morning when we were having breakfast at this little diner, he recognized Gulager eating at the counter and we went over and spoke with him briefly. I don't remember much of the substance of the conversation--I seem to recall him talking about Sylvester Stallone for some reason--but he was a nice enough guy, and we went our separate ways.
In one of those weird coincidences life throws you sometimes, it was less than two weeks later that I watched David Gordon Green's George Washington, which includes on the DVD special features the 1969 short film A Day With The Boys, directed by Clu Gulager. Very strange.
All of this was just a long way of me saying that it's not terribly hard to imagine Rick Dalton, if he hadn't decided to go to Italy and make movies like Nebraska Jim and Kill Me Quick, Ringo, Said The Gringo, would have spent the next few decades appearing on TV shows like Hawaii Five-O and Simon and Simon and terrible B-grade horror movies, maybe even making a small cameo appearance in a movie like Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, as--bringing us full circle here--Clu Gulager himself does, a symbol of both what was and what might have been.
