Though he insisted on having a sit-down with both of the interested parties, the author eventually stayed with Schroeder, and the role of Chinaski went to Mickey Rourke. That’ll be my salary.” But the catch was that Penn wanted Hopper to direct, while Bukowski wanted to remain loyal to the man who had invested so much money and time into the project: Schroeder. Bukowski recounted Penn saying, “I’ll act in it for a dollar. Schroeder sent the script around to various producers in Hollywood until, finally, Dennis Hopper took an interest in it and showed it to his good friend Sean Penn. Sean Penn offered to star in Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical film Barfly for $1.īukowski first wrote the script for the film Barfly, which depicted the life of his alter ego Henry Chinaski, at the request of filmmaker Barbet Schroeder in 1979, but nothing immediately came of it. Post Office, published in 1971, was a semi-fictitious tale about alcoholic, womanizing postal worker Henry Chinaski-Bukowski’s alter ego who had first appeared in the short story Confessions of a Man Insane Enough to Live With Beasts-who would ultimately reappear in five of Bukowski’s novels, a number of his short stories, and the films Barfly and Factotum. When Martin asked how it was possible he had written a novel so quickly, Bukowski replied, “Fear can accomplish a lot.” Martin mentioned to Bukowski that it was easier for him to market and sell a novel than a collection of poetry, and a month later, Bukowski called him to say he had finished his first novel, Post Office. Publisher John Martin had offered Bukowski $100 a month (around $965 in today’s money) to come work with him at Black Sparrow Press on the condition that he quit his day job at the post office. He didn’t publish his first novel until he was 50.Īlthough he had been writing and publishing poetry and short stories for years in smaller publications, Bukowski’s first novel wasn’t published until he was 50 years old. It doesn’t seem like they managed to get much dirt on him, though: Apart from the Open City column, Bukowski’s file consists of his arrest records, bland interviews that agents conducted with his neighbors, and a list of previous addresses and jobs. Postal Service-his employer at the time-were offended by some of his writings and began to delve into his background. In the 1960s, thanks in part to his ongoing “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” column for the Los Angeles underground newspaper Open City, Bukowski managed to catch the eye of the feds. “Why hadn’t someone told me?” Many years after that first drink, he would say that he didn’t “think ever written a poem when was completely sober.” 3. “It was magic,” Bukowski later recounted. His friend William “Baldy” Mullinax-fictionalized as Eli LaCrosse in Bukowski’s semiautobiographic novel Ham on Rye-was the first to introduce him to alcohol. Though hardly rare among some of our culture’s most famous writers, Bukowski had a lifelong relationship with alcohol that began as a young teen. In other words, you have all the pretense beat out of you.” 2. “This was very good literary training for me,” he said, adding that the abuse taught him how to type: “The link is, when you get the sh*t kicked out of you long enough … you have a tendency to say what you really mean. Bukowski referred to his childhood as a horror story with a “capital H.” When asked why in a 1981 interview for Italian TV, Bukowski shared that he had been “beaten with a razor strop three times a week from the age of 6 until 11” by his father.
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