‘The Adventures of Cliff Booth’ Super Bowl Teaser: David Fincher Takes on Tarantino
Film bros the world over were tossed a hail mary in their breadbasket Sunday night, with a surprise teaser for David Fincher‘s The Adventures of Cliff Booth—an unconventional continuation of Quentin Tarantino’s 2019 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, which we’ve all been speculating and salivating over since it was officially announced with Fincher attached to direct in April of last year—that droppped in the midst of the Seattle Seahawks’ delightful smothering of the New England Patriots in the 60th Super Bowl.
The minute-long teaser is obviously light on plot but knows its audience will be freeze-framing and hashing out particulars on Reddit between now and whenever the next preview drops ahead of the movie’s still undated release sometime this year. Fincher, who doesn’t necessarily cut his own trailers but has had some of the greatest of this century attached to his films, appears to have upheld the standard of photoreal, immersive production design Tarantino set with the original installment. The director of Mank and son of a screenwriter might be one of the few geniuses in the industry capable of meeting Tarantino’s slavish dedication to Hollywood history in exacting detail.
At the outset, Cliff Booth is back, introduced with the question, “So you helped Rick subdue those hippie intruders huh?” and we see him living with those consequences, in a walk-in fridge, icing his thigh with frozen peas, presumably where it was stabbed by the Manson family during the climatic showdown of his last film. Brad Pitt has his old Hawaiian spotlit wardrobe but we’re 8-ish years on from 1969, where Once Upon A Time In Hollywood left off.
An 8-track plays Emerson, Lake and Palmer’s cover of “Peter Gunn”, and the trailer contains multiple other references to the late 70s, with ads for the 1977 films Searching for Mr. Goodbar and Black Sunday on the side of the Paramount lot, and a brief shot of Lucy’s El Adobe Cafe across the street (the industry hang where where Jerry Brown met Linda Ronstadt), as well as Cliff parking a busted as fuck 1968 Pontiac GTO outside of a Big Kahuna Burger (further tying the world of OUATIH to the greater Tarantino Cinematic Universe).
The soundtrack, the design touches (beginning with the opening title card that tells us “This special preview has been approved for all audiences by the bureau of content compliance” and the smoking, drinking, and physical vulgarity censored on “the film stock” with scribbles that look like a Tyler Durden prank), the visceral action in each ghost of a shot, and the overall vibes point to an energy that echoes Death Proof, Tarantino’s most overt tribute to grindhouse exploitation.
There’s a split-second shot of somebody, presumably Cliff, handling a Academy Award, a reminder that this is Brad Pitt returning to the role that’s already won him one Oscar. But the trailer also teases a film-nerd-all-star cast, from Karren Karagulian (the long-suffering godfather from Sean Baker’s Anora) to Mad Men’s John Slattery to what I’m going to really irresponsibly guess is Scott Caan playing his father.
Throughout his career Fincher’s had few writing credits and most of his best works have involved him taking on the voice and vibe of others—assimilating Willimon or Sorkin’s dialogue, Palahniuk or Flynn or Larsson’s blockbuster novels—and applying his own dramatic lighting and tone, often finding the joke in these stories their own authors may not have necessarily understood. It looks like it’s Tarantino’s turn, and I can’t wait to see the master technician and cynical satirist’s approach to the master stylist.
