Quentin Tarantino Wrote a Biography For ONCE UPON A TIME IN HOLLYWOOD's Rick Dalton

While we all wait to see what director Quentin Tarantino is going to do for his next film project, he’s been keeping himself busy building on the story of his film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Over the past year or so, he’s been working on a Once Upon a Time in Hollywood stage play, and it also turns out that he’s been working on a full biography for the character Rick Dalton, who was played by Leonardo DiCaprio.

Tarantino recently talked about the project while a guest on the Empire Film Podcast where he explained that this is a fictional biography firmly set in Tarantino's fictional world, and it builds on the alternative history of Hollywood that he’s created.

The filmmaker explains that he created an elaborate premise that even involves Tarantino meeting the elderly actor Rick Dalton in 1998 at a Hawaiian film festival. It’s that encounter that he imagined that led to him sitting down with the fictional Rick to write his biography. 

Tarantino said that Dalton has “a genuinely interesting career,” and the actor had a "major success" in the last act of his career. Tarantino doesn't reveal what that "major success" is because he doesn’t want to spoil the book. He also reveals that he even included an in-depth Q&A between himself and Rick.

The book will be titled Rick Dalton: The Man Who Would Be McQueen. We don’t know when the book will be released, but Tarantino says that his publisher has already agreed to release it.

As of right now, Tarantino is currently focused on finishing up his other book project Cinema Speculation, which will be a "deep dive into the movies of the 1970s” and it will include “a rich mix of essays, reviews, personal writing, and tantalizing 'what if's,' from one of cinema's most celebrated filmmakers, and its most devoted fan."

Would you be interested in reading a Rick Dalton biography written by Tarantino?