THE DEEP DIVE
IN OUR NEW REGULAR SERIES, WE EXPLORE A SLICE OF CINEMA LORE
WORDS KEVIN EG PERRY
ILLUSTRATION THE RED DRESS
THIS MONTH: Musso & Frank’s
QUENTIN TARANTINO would leave nothing to chance. While shooting Once Upon A Time In Hollywood, he and his Oscar-winning production team went to great lengths to make Los Angeles in 2018 look just as it had in 1969. Classic Chevys were brought in to cruise along Hollywood Boulevard, past the resurrected façades of the Pussycat Theatre and Peaches Records & Tapes. The premiere of 1968 disaster-drama Krakatoa, East Of Java was restaged in front of the Cinerama Dome. There was one key location, however, that barely required a touch of set dressing: Musso & Frank Grill, Hollywood’s oldest and most storied bar and restaurant.
It’s there that Leonardo DiCaprio’s fading star Rick Dalton and Brad Pitt’s loyal stuntman Cliff Booth go for cocktails (a whiskey sour for Dalton, a Bloody Mary complete with leafy celery stick for Booth) and a lunch meeting with Al Pacino’s wizened casting agent Marvin Schwarz. After Schwarz lays out the actor’s sorry career-prospects and pitches him on the idea of going to Italy to star in Westerns, Dalton and Booth reconvene in the parking lot behind the restaurant. “It’s official, old buddy. I’m a has-been,” murmurs Dalton, with tears in his eyes. “If coming face-to-face with the failure that is your career ain’t worth crying about, then I don’t know what the fuck is.”
But as Dalton contemplates the fleeting nature of fame, a green sign looms behind him that suggests longevity might be possible even here in the ephemeral world of Tinseltown. “Musso & Frank Grill”, it reads. “Since 1919, oldest in Hollywood.” What’s remarkable about the restaurant’s century-long existence is just how little its twin dining rooms have changed in that time. The Old Room, with its squeezed-together scarlet-leather booths, hasn’t been remodelled since 1934. The New Room, where Dalton and Booth prop up the dark mahogany bar, looks just as it has since 1955. All it took for Tarantino to dial the clock back to 1969 was to remove the modern cash registers, dig some old crockery out of storage and switch out the liquor bottles for vintage alternatives.
Musso & Frank’s in 2012
How it all began: Frank’s François Cafe, circa 1920.