9/17/22
Newsletter100
The Crack of Dawn
Being a writer and a drunk are almost synonymous. Many of the greatest writers were drunks, like: Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, etc. etc. The writer who made being a drunk his constant subject, successfully, was Charles Bukowski. As a teenager Bukowski had a terrible skin disease that covered his face was ugly boils, so that he started drinking at the age of fourteen isn’t surprising. My first encounter with Bukowski’s writing was in the late 1970s when me (and Bruce Campbell) were cab drivers. I was sitting in the cab line in front of a hotel on freezing winter night. Our one and only female cab driver, who was quite attractive and entirely unfriendly, got out of her cab, walked to my cab and knocked on the window. We had never had a conversation. She handed me a slim paperback book and said, “I think you’ll like this,” and walked away. It was a collection of Bukowski’s poetry, and she was right, I did like it and very impressed. Since then I’ve read many of Bukowski’s books.
French filmmaker, Barbet Schroder, became obsessed with getting Bukowski’s only screenplay, Barfly, produced. This is a famous story. After being dicked around by Menachem Golan at Cannon Films for a couple of years, Schroder picked up Bukowski, stopped at a hardware store and bought a hedge trimmer, then went to a meeting with Golan. Schroder plugged in the hedge trimmer, held up his index finger and said, “If you don’t greenlight my film I’ll cut off my finger.” Horrified, Menachem Golan greenlit the film. And Barfly (1987) remains the best Bukowski film, and Mickey Rourke remains the best Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s nom de plume. But others have tried with varying degrees of success. Factotum (2006), directed by the wonderfully named, Bent Hamer, isn’t bad, and has a few really good scenes, but casting Matt Dillon, who is completely committed to the part, was a fatal error. Bukowski was ugly; Matt Dillon is handsome, therefore the internal logic of his character doesn’t make sense. I have never been able to track down the first Bukowski film adaption, Tales of Ordinary Madness (1983), an Italian production with Ben Gazzara, which is supposed to be dreadful. There are at least three good documentaries about him: Bukowski: Born into This (2003), The Charles Bukowski Tapes (1987), and You Never Had it: An Evening With Charles Bukowski (2016).
In one of those documentaries Bukowski complains about Mickey Rourke’s performance in Barfly, and says that he didn’t capture his mannerisms or essence. The filmmaker then puts Bukowski and Mickey Rourke into split-screen, and Rourke is dead nuts on. I won’t go into it here, but I find many lines from Barfly quotable.
Charles Bukowski wrote a terrific book about the making of Barfly called Hollywood. I love the fact that Bukowski made so little effort to change the names. Werner Herzog became Werner Zergog, Francis Ford Coppola (Barfly’s executive producer) became Francis Ford Hoppola, and Golan and Globus became Fishman and Fleischman.
My first apartment in Hollywood, across from Paramount, was a few blocks from where Bukowski lived. His apartment was in a severely ratty complex on Western Ave., which I snooped around.
As far as I know, Bukowski only wrote one screenplay, Barfly, and it’s an exceptionally well-written and properly-structured script. The three acts either begin or end with Henry Chinaski fighting the asshole bartender, well-played by Frank Stallone (Sly’s brother). Chinaski just keeps needling Stallone into a fight. He finally says, “Your mother’s cunt smells like carpet cleaner,” and Stallone says, “That’s it!” Miraculously – because he actually ate food that day – Chinaski wins the fight. The next day Stallone is black and blue, his arm is in a splint, and says to Chinaski, “You were just lucky last night.” Chinaski grins and says, “Yeah, but that counts too.”
Cheers!