‘Once Upon A Time In Hollywood’ Tarantino's Next

Not my logic. I was born in the sixties but I am more than fuzzily aware of Elvis, WW2, Napoleon, crop rotation, Aristotle and Hammurabi. I think most educated twenty-somethings are the same way.

 

I was 8 years old in '69 and don't recall hearing anything about the murders. I was probably too busy playing with my Hot Wheels in the back yard. My knowledge came in '74 when the book Helter Skelter was first published. My older siblings and their friends would talk about it and I learned about the events then. Was not aware of the Helter Skelter mini-series.

 

The soundtrack really got me excited for this film, i knew all the
radio ads and songs by Tuesday when i watched the film.
It was a great thrill to see them play out in the movie .

I was getting chills leading up to THE SCENE.. and was getting
anxious not knowing how it would play out..
anyone feel that too?

 

Hang on, forget about not knowing any recent history, your guy sounds like he can’t follow a simple narrative. I don’t think there’s any worthwhile analysis to be done based off someone like him. You must love spending working days with these folks (just kidding, I’m sure they have many redeeming qualities and are probably good company most of the time heh)

 

I hate to be a cranky boomer, but most people who have grown up in and only ever known the Internet and cell phone era know everything about nothing. Everything is at their fingertips all the time, but most lack the basic timeline of World War II -> Korean War -> Vietnam -> Gulf War that you mention and that we take for granted. Not saying that knowing dates of wars is the only knowledge that matters, but that other sort of basic “these events happened in A, B, C order” seems to be lacking. When you get into micro details of the past such as Sharon Tate and the Manson family, forget it.

 

He’s one person I work with. Others are smarter. Even the smart ones lack the basic timeline of events knowledge that we 20th century kids largely took for granted.

 

Exactly. You have to actively engage in this time period to understand it. There might not be many time-periods in history where that is necessarily true, but the late 60's is absolutely one of them. Too many societal shifts with too many calamitous events occurred on top of each other to be dismissed as something normal or merely noteworthy. And because it is that way, our minds take detailed notes of events, timelines and repercussions ….. even those of us who were too young to be cognizant of those events, but wanted to learn about them in retrospect.

 

I'm 37. my girlfriend is 37. we loved the movie

 

Dennis Wilson never lived in that house. But he was how Manson met Melcher.

 

37 and you either own or know about every band and/or album under the sun. Impressive!

 

Had a young co-worker once who was the boss’s nephew. He lived in a detached bungalow on his Uncle’s property, and we liked to rag on him and call him “Kato” after the OJ Simpson hanger-on Kato Caitlen. Kid is only about maybe ten years younger than me at most (I was born in 1979), and he just did not understand the reference. Which we also ragged on him about.

I’m far from an expert on history, but have a general cultural knowledge of what came before me by ten, twenty, maybe twenty-five years. This was the first time I realized certain kids of younger generations seem to have little cultural literacy outside of what’s floating around today.

 

I own about 3,000 cd's plus have probably old or traded another 500

 

It can be really strange. I'm working with a 25-year-old kid in my office right now (born 1994). He's big into sports, but has no idea who Dennis Rodman is. I'm like … what?!?

 

Seems like we’re kind of patting ourselves on our collective backs for being old in this thread. Yeah, we know stuff young people don’t. Young people know stuff we don’t. Funny how that works.

 

Well, I have more than you do!

 

My wife is 38 & I'm 57. However she was aware of Manson, Tate, etc, if not as knowledgeable about it as I am.

She also prefers 70s music to whatever's popular now to an extent, as well as to what she grew up with.

She's seen the Black Crowes, Dave Mason, the Doobie Brothers, Journey, George Clinton/P-Funk & Chris Stapleton with me, & in a few weeks we're going to see Buddy Guy & Kenny Wayne Shepard in concert.

We've also spent the week on Beale Street in Memphis listening to great blues & soul, took a side trip to Clarksdale & the blues places there, & had a private tour of the Stax Museum of American American Soul Music with the late Wayne Jackson of the Memphis Horns/Mar-Keys & his lovely wife, along with drinks at their condo & a look at his 50+ years of musical memorabilia from his career.

 

Oh I was doing that too! It just that as an avid reader since age 4 I've always kept up with things even without realizing I was.

 

I don't know of anyone whose knowledge of history is linear-- even if they lived through the period in question. I think we all have things we focus on or capture in our brains, and stuff we ignore or miss. I know I do-- which is why learning is so much fun. Who knew Hedy Lamarr invented a frequency hopping technology back in the day? Sometimes, knowledge is only acquired when needed, no? I mean, I lived through stuff I didn't necessarily understand when it happened. Time and distance helps, as does a reason to know. I guess some things-- rising to the level of "major events" e.g. 9-11, are gonna stick with you. But, as we age out, how much attention is still paid to things like Pearl Harbor, which I think had a lot more meaning when I was younger.
*Non-political disclaimer here.

 

I think it also depends on what personal interests a person has, too, which will tend (just guessing) to lead a person to research the origins of whatever those interests are.

Rock and Roll is easy since it just puts you no further back than the mid-1950s! A good place to start, certainly in the 1970s when I was a kid - there was only twenty years of the stuff to catch up on (much of it badly out of print and unavailable anyways)! Movies? Not a hard basic history to follow in a timeline, but takes a long time to watch everything, and you used to have to hunt stuff down and have a projector or a tape source; only recently is so much available via streaming on demand; you used to more often be able to read about an old film than see it. Luckily, every kid seems to go through a Dinosaurs phase, so at least there's the 'millions of years ago' consciousness that we all have. Ah, first world problems - like whether the concept of 'history' means a damn anymore!

(Yes, reportedly they co-existed - but were they, in reality, 'friends'?)

 

Someone 38 is technically at the very end of the 'Generation X' generation. They remember a time well before the internet and cellphones. They may have even gotten to ride in the car for a few years without seatbelt laws going into effect!

 

Part of the “problem,” if it is one, is that most people on this board take it for granted that Richard Nixon, Charles Manson, Neil Armstrong, William Calley, John Lennon, Kathleen Cleaver, Woodstock, Altamont, & Chappaquiddick, etc. are significant people and events associated with 1969, and that everyone naturally knows about them. I was two years old in 1969, and, as others have noted, picked up all of that by osmosis in the 70s, and learned more about the era when I got older, because I was really interested in it.

What really hit me listening to twenty-something and thirty-something people discuss this movie today is that, for better or for worse, they don’t care about the 1960s, they don’t see them as a pivotal moment in our history, and they lack basic knowledge of the era that most of us take for granted. One of the young women I work with who was particularly confused by the movie is in law school. That doesn’t make her a genius, but it reflects some level of academic achievement, and, by her comments, she clearly understood next to nothing about the context and background of this movie.

 

When I was a kid in the 70s, Pearl Harbor and World War II were still a big deal and a living memory for many adults in my life. I was interested in World War II because my dad had lived through World War II. Now that collective memory is fading. What hit me today listening to young adults discuss Once Upon A Time In Hollywood is just how fast the 1960s are becoming ancient history to people under 40 today.

 

She tells the theater folks why she goes to the movies. The movie tells and shows us why.

 

There was even a David Duchovney network TV series a year or two ago about Manson and the times.

 

This thread is getting way off topic. Let's get a couple of things straight: you don't have to be a history buff to enjoy this movie, or know anything much at all about the Manson family. Most young people today are perfectly capable of understanding and appreciating a film or play that is set in an era before they were born. Those that aren't, either through inability or lack of interest, well they are lucky to live in an era when there is a multitude of alternative diversions for them anyhow. Do we really need to rehash the "oh those millennials" topic yet again? It's as perennial as the d*mn Beatles in this place.