Hollywood: A Semi-Autobiographical Novel About Adapting Barfly into a Screenplay and Surviving the Movie Industry - Softcover

Bukowski, Charles

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0876857632 ISBN 13: 9780876857632

Publisher: Ecco, 1989

Synopsis

From iconic tortured artist/everyman Charles Bukowski, Hollywood is the fictionalization of his experience adapting his novel Barfly into a movie by the same name.

Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s alter-ego, is pushed to translate a semi-autobiographical book into a screenplay for John Pinchot.  He reluctantly agrees, and is thrust into the otherworld called Hollywood, with its parade of eccentric and maddening characters: producers, artists, actors and actresses, film executives and journalists.  In this world, the artistry of books and film is lost to the dollar, and Chinaski struggles to keep his footing in the tangle of cons that comprise movie making.

Hollywood is Dirty Old Man Bukowski at his most lucid.  It overflows with curses, sex, and alcohol.  And through it all, or from it all, Bukowski finds flashes of truth about the human condition. 

About this title

About the Author

Charles Bukowski is one of America’s best-known contemporary writers of poetry and prose and, many would claim, its most influential and imitated poet. He was born in 1920 in Andernach, Germany, to an American soldier father and a German mother, and brought to the United States at the age of two. He was raised in Los Angeles and lived there for over fifty years. He died in San Pedro, California, on March 9, 1994, at the age of seventy-three, shortly after completing his last novel, Pulp.

Abel Debritto, a former Fulbright scholar and current Marie Curie fellow, works in the digital humanities. He is the author of Charles Bukowski, King of the Underground, and the editor of the Bukowski collections On Writing, On Cats, and On Love.

From the Back Cover

Hank and his wife, Sarah, agree to write a screenplay, and encounter the strange world of the movie industry.

Reviews

Bukowski ( The Roominghouse Madrigals ) has written over 30 books of poetry and fiction in which he uses the persona of the artistic bum with reasonable success. In this flimsy novel, Henry Chinaski is asked to write a screenplay, and thus Bukowski continues his thinly disguised autobiography (Bukowski himself wrote the screenplay for the recent, self-referential Barfly ). When all the Hollywood types Chinaski encounters--directors, lawyers, producers, actors, actresses--fit the same drunken-outcast-but-artistic-genius mold, Bukowski seems to have exhausted his resourcefulness. His characters lose their individuality and the novel lacks force and perspective. This book deteriorates into juvenile satire in which familiar, real-life figures appear with the letters of their names shifted slightly: the famous director Jon-Luc Modard, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sanrah, Frances Ford Lopalla and an obvious Norman Mailer stand-in called Victor Norman.
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In this hilarious roman a clef, Bukowski draws on his experiences while writing the script for the 1987 film Barfly. Henry Chinaski, the author's alter ego in the film, here returns to write--despite misgivings--a Hollywood screenplay, The Dance of Jim Beam. The film is based on Chinaski's early life as a barfly and brawler, before he became a famous author. As he and his companion Sarah are caught up in the Hollywood whirlwind, Bukowski satirizes a host of well-known movie personalities. While Bukowski fans will welcome the reappearance of Chinaski, with his penchant for booze, women, and horse racing, film buffs should enjoy the novel for its delightful and irreverent portrayal of Hollywood. Highly recommended.
- William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Ecco
• Publication date: 1989
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0876857632
• ISBN 13: 9780876857632
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 248