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How the Ending Happened In Real Life (SPOILERS)

posted 2 years ago by ecarle (14979)
2 replies | jump to latest

It is certainly exciting and emotionally rewarding to see Brad Pitt kill two Manson family members with his bare hands at the end of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood...leaving the third so beaten up that Leo DiCaprio can finish her off with a flame thrower in his backyard pool.

In typical movie hero tradition, Pitt easily disarms killer "Tex Watson" (a real life man, still alive today) by plucking the pistol out of his hand and then killing the man with his hands and feet.

In real life, there were TWO men in the house with Sharon Tate and her friend Abigail Folger: hair stylist Jay Sebring and Folger's boyfriend Voytek Frykowski.

And an eyewitness to the murders(one of Manson's women, who turned state's evidence) said that Sebring and Voytek fought hard to try to protect their women and save their own lives.

To no avail. Tex Watson DID have that gun, and he DID shoot the men with it, disabling them and allowing the Manson family members(two women and one man) to stab everybody to death.

The moral of the story is: in real life, you can't always beat a man with a gun in his hand.

It was still eminently satisfying to see the Mansons get their assed kicked and their lives ended -- I'd like to hope that the movie was shown to Tex Watson in prison, just to see how mocked Tex is in the movie.

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For those who complain about this "fantasy re-write of history" I'd say: it felt good and the movie in the third act "runs on two tracks": (1) The slow detour into an alternate ending in a different house than Sharon Tate's (all fictional) and (2) a STILL sad and awful "countdown to murder" as we watch a pregnant Sharon Tate and her friends spend the last hours and minutes of what would REALLY end with their horrific gun and knife murders.

I feel that you can watch the third act of OATIH with BOTH dread about the "real" imminent killing of Sharon Tate AND "fantasy satisfaction" in how QT flipped the table on those goons and killed them for posterity in fiction.

But in real life...one man with a gun killed two men without one.

[–] skipper (315) 2 years ago

Steven Parent was killed too 😞

I have wondered, was there anything in OUATIH to indicate that he survived as well? If so, I have never picked up on it.

[–] ecarle (14979) 2 years ago

In the real life story, Steven Parent was perhaps the most tragic victim of all.

He didn't know Sharon Tate or Polanski or any of the people at the house.

Rather he was answering an ad about buying something(I can't remember what, maybe record albums) from a young man who lived on the property in a guest house as a groundskeeper.

Parent drove up to find the groundskeeper and "make the buy" (records, not drugs). The Mansons found him first and shot him.

More dark irony: while all these horrible murders were taking place on the property , the groundskeeper was THERE in the guest house. Maybe playing music, maybe sleeping, I don't know. But he heard nothing and woke up the next morning to find everybody dead and the cops detaining HIM as the first reported suspect in the case.

I expect that Tarantino decided that Steven Parent and the groundskeeper were simply too much "plot baggage" for his story, Keep it to "the Hollywood folk" -- Sharon Tate and Jay Sebring, and their friends.

And of course, also in real life, a few nights later, the Mansons killed a middle-aged couple, the LaBiancas, a few miles from the Tate home. More gory murders -- a knife stuck in the bare stomach of the murdered husband.

Tarantino didn't need to reference the LaBiancas because in HIS story, they don't get killed because the killers are killed.