David Fincher cut 60 pages from Tarantino’s Cliff Booth script. Here’s why
Fincher says the first draft ran to 230 pages and felt like two movies. He and Quentin Tarantino have described how they focused the Brad Pitt follow-up.
David Fincher cut 60 pages from Quentin Tarantino’s script for The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth, Deadline reported on October 21. The change brings fresh detail to the upcoming Brad Pitt film: Fincher says the first draft he read ran to 230 pages and felt like ‘essentially two movies.’
‘Somewhere in there was the Venn diagram of what Brad wanted to do, what I want to do, what Quentin wanted to do,’ Fincher told Empire in a joint interview with Tarantino, according to NME and Deadline. He clarified that he meant the areas the three wanted to focus on, rather than everything each wanted to do.
What changed in the Cliff Booth script
Fincher directed the follow-up to Tarantino’s 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, with Pitt returning as Cliff Booth. Tarantino wrote the new screenplay, while Fincher took the director’s chair. Deadline reports that the film runs around two hours and 20 minutes after the cuts. Neither report details which scenes were removed.
Fincher told Empire that the story was less about plot than about how its characters collided in the back alleys of Hollywood in 1977, NME reported. That is eight years after the events of the original film. The new setting gives Booth a different role: an official logline quoted by NME calls him a fixer handling problems for people in Hollywood.
The logline says those problems involve murder, blackmail, theft and extortion. It also says Booth earns his keep bartending or working as a projectionist when he is not acting as a fixer. Those details sketch the kind of story Fincher and Tarantino were describing, without identifying the material cut from the draft.
How Tarantino describes the new film
Tarantino drew a distinction between the two Cliff Booth stories in the Empire interview. He called Once Upon a Time in Hollywood a ‘hangout movie’ whose audience knows it is heading toward Cielo Drive. The new script, he said, was ‘very different’; NME reported that he likened it to a ‘crime-story paperback.’
Pitt is joined by Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Carla Gugino and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, according to both reports. NME identifies Debicki’s character as talent agent Karen Crosby, Caan’s as television star Charlie Peters and Gugino’s as his wife Toni. Abdul-Mateen plays Roderick ‘Hot Rod’ Harrison, a former professional football player turned screen star.
When the Cliff Booth film is scheduled for release
The Further Mis-Adventures of Cliff Booth is scheduled to begin a two-week global IMAX run on November 25, followed by a Netflix release on December 23, NME reported. Those dates put the theatrical run ahead of streaming for Pitt’s return to the character.
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Sources and context
- Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Cliff Booth’ script required serious cuts to make filmableNME
- David Fincher Cut 60 Pages Of Tarantino's 'Cliff Booth' Script: "It Was Essentially Two Movies"Deadline
AI-assisted article checked against the listed sources. NewsJaws did not conduct interviews or attend the reported events.