"The Movie on the Marquee Across the Street" in Tarantino's Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
"Pendulum" is now famous for being the movie title on the marquee "across the street"(at the Westwood Village theater near UCLA) in QT's "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood." That marquee faces the marquee at the Westwood Bruin(named for the UCLA Bruin sports teams) in which Sharon Tate(Margot Robbie) goes to see herself in the Dean Martin/Matt Helm spy spoof "The Wrecking Crew."
Turns out that both Pendulum and The Wrecking Crew were released in February of 1969 -- and it is a February day in 1969 that Sharon Tate is specifically said to be seeing her movie(a screen title quotes "February 9, 1969.")
QATIH made me curious to see Pendulum some day; the chance came last week on Amazon Prime. Its an oddball little movie with an oddball little cast:
George Peppard: In 1969, his days as a movie star were about over. Came the 70's, he would be a TV detective on Banacek, and came the 80's, after getting fired from the John Forsythe role in Dynasty, he got his own hit in "The A Team."
But in Pendulum, he's kinda/sort of a movie star -- looking great in longish 1969 hair, tempermental, smooth voice, I guess he COULD have stayed a star(Breakfast at Tiffany's launched him in '61) but it just didn't happen.
Jean Seberg: Blonde, beautiful. Discovered in the 50's by Otto Preminger(St. Joan, Bonjour Tristeste), made famous by Godard in "Breathless" (1960, the year of Psycho with a title almost used for "North by Northwest") and alternating American films with foreign films for her whole career -- which was cut short by suicide age 40(a movie was made called "Seberg" in 2019 starring Kristen Stewart.) Jean Seberg had romantic entanglements and political alliances(like with the Black Panthers) that made her notorious, but her film career was always iffy. Except in a weird one-two punch with Paint Your Wagon in 1969 and Airport right after that in 1970. They were both BIG movies -- Wagon famously flopped and Airport famously hit and ....Seberg faded right away.
Pendulum is right before those two.
Richard Kiley: Kiley has real star presence in Pendulum --a booming voice, manly features, strapping -- but I checked IMDb and he hardly worked in movies at all. He was a Broadway guy("Man of La Mancha.") He played a great Columbo villain -- he was Columbo's police commissioner BOSS. Famously, Michael Crichton wrote Richard Kiley as "the voice of Jurassic Park" in his novel and Spielberg hired Kilely's voice for the movie.
Those are the names on the marquee in OATIH -- Peppard, Seberg, and Kiley -- and now they are forgotten.
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