The deleted footage extends Charles Manson’s visit to Cielo Drive. His conversation partner is Paul Barabuta, played by Danny Strong, and the scene changes the amount of time we spend watching Damon Herriman’s character.
Paul Barabuta, not Paul Revere
The deleted Once Upon a Time in Hollywood conversation brings Damon Herriman’s Charles Manson together with Paul Barabuta, played by Danny Strong. This is not a meeting with Paul Revere, the musician from Paul Revere & The Raiders. The shared name and the band’s presence in the film may encourage confusion, but the interlocutor serves a different role within the scene: he is the owner Manson addresses while searching for Terry Melcher.
The material extends a visit that does appear briefly in the released cut. Manson arrives at Cielo Drive and asks for people who no longer live there. The extended version follows him to the guest house and lets us hear a longer conversation. The sequence ends by visually connecting him with Cliff Booth, who is working on the roof of Rick’s house. That spatial continuity belongs to the fiction built by Tarantino.
The filmed dialogue should not be presented as a historical transcript of an attested conversation. The scene uses names and places tied to real events, but it organizes them within a story that includes Rick and Cliff, two invented characters. Recognizing that distinction makes it possible to analyze the performance without using it as documentary evidence for Manson’s exact words during a real visit.
What Herriman’s performance gains
Damon Herriman explained in a 2026 interview that the guest house scene had been used for his audition and later appeared among the bonus materials. He also distinguished its tone from the imprisoned Manson he played in Mindhunter. That comment helps explain that Tarantino’s version has moments of awkward comedy, as well as the threat the viewer associates with the character’s name.
The conversation lets us observe an ordinary frustration: Manson is looking for someone and does not get the answer he wants. The rejection interrupts the image of authority he can project over his followers. Outside that circle, he has to ask, wait, and accept limits imposed by other people. The scene uses that reduced scale to show an irritating presence rather than an omnipotent figure capable of dominating any space he enters.
Manson’s brief presence in the theatrical cut creates a different effect. By giving him less time, the film lets much of the threatening weight come from the audience’s prior knowledge. The deleted material adds behavior, voice, and a specific interaction. The two options distribute attention differently: one keeps the appearance as an abrupt intrusion; the other lets us examine how the character tries to handle a social situation.
A bonus that changes the balance of the visit
The visual encounter with Cliff links the historical visitor with one of the invented leads. It does not prove that the two share a prior relationship, nor does it by itself show that Cliff understands the importance of the person in front of him. The look creates a closeness that the viewer can load with meaning because of what they know. That difference between audience knowledge and character knowledge is one of the sequence’s tools.
Watching the material separately makes it easier to appreciate the performance without assuming that its absence from the cut means it was not good. A scene can work on its own and still change a character’s weight too much within an ensemble. Here, extending the visit gives Manson attention that the theatrical release had distributed differently. The effect can be analyzed, though a precise reason for the cut should not be attributed to the director without a statement confirming it.
The scene also is not the same as the expanded sections of theOnce Upon a Time in Hollywood novel. The extra preserves an audiovisual performance; the book works through written narration. Comparing them requires respecting their versions and avoiding the idea that they all belong to a single secret film already assembled. What can be verified is more concrete: there is a filmed extension of the visit, its interlocutor is Barabuta, and the encounter lets us see a side of Herriman that the original cut left out.
More context in theOnce Upon a Time in Hollywood guide.