Everything We Learned From the Latest Cliff Booth Trailer

Although they’re very different directors stylistically, Fincher and Tarantino share an affinity for old-Hollywood lore, something Tarantino showcased in the first installment of this series, a movie obsessed with recreating the context of its moment, from its LA streetscapes painstakingly dressed with period-accurate movie billboards from the summer of ‘69 to the crackling diegetic music, ads, and DJ shpiel floating out of cars and radios into the air. “Alfonso Cuaron had Roma and Mexico City, 1970,” Tarantino said at the time. “I had LA and 1969.”

The spark for the story began with the character of Cliff Booth, a character inspired in part by the close friendship Tarantino observed between Kurt Russell and his longtime stunt double on the set of Death Proof 20 years ago. In long bull sessions, Russell—who shares Tarantino’s intimate knowledge of and love for Hollywood history—would regale the director with stories about drunken, shady, seemingly indestructible stuntmen who worked alongside his dad, the Bonanza actor Bing Russell. This inspired Tarantino, who began sketching short stories about an actor and his stuntman buddy and tinkering with them between other projects, dutifully returning to the story again and again over the course of 15 years before finally making the film and releasing it in 2019.

OUATIH was a personal film for Tarantino, tinged with the romance of a kid sitting in front of a black-and-white TV, wondering what goes on behind the scenes of his favorite after-school Western. Judging by the look and feel of the teaser trailer, with its glimpses of billboards for Looking for Mr. Goodbar and Black Sunday, this one is tapping into the energy of late ‘70s Los Angeles. This is confirmed in the press release. “What was once a fairytale is now a crime story,” the copy reads, promising the franchise is giving way to a grittier, uglier look at Hollywood’s underbelly, with Fincher’s dramatic lighting providing a literal stark contrast to Tarantino’s sun-dappled vision of an idyllic 1969 in SoCal.

In the new trailer, The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth sees Cliff washed out of the film industry. His slamming of Bruce Lee into a car door has passed into legend and he’s stuck jobbing as a bartender at a dive with a mud pit, and as a projectionist at Tarantino’s New Beverly- presumably to save Netflix on production budget. But he also picks up work as “a fixer” and is drawn into a plot, after being enlisted by Elizabeth Debicki and Scott Caan, that pulls him into the smutty underworld of L.A.’s Carter-era entertainment industry, populated exclusively by beautiful women and shady characters perfectly cast for a classic Hollywood noir.

With the global IMAX run rapidly approaching, we’ll continue to monitor the situation and update this post as more news leaks out. In the meantime, here’s a rundown of the announced The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth cast, with some semi-educated guesses at who’s playing who via press release and context clues.