Bukowski and Barfly (The Movie) (1 Viewer)

I remember coming home late one night many years ago blind drunk while trying to eat my Mac and cheese stumbled on Barfly about 10 minutes in. Being very drunk and not knowing that Buk wrote it it scared the shit out of me. Almost made me quit the sauce.

I came to my senses in the morning.

I found it again later in the week and just howled with laughter! "Just Dumb Luck!" " Yeah, but that counts too!" Fucking priceless! Still one of my all time favs. Just love Mickey's Popeye walk.
 
Excerpt from a review of Bukowski: Born Into This (July 16, 2004)

From ROGER EBERT website:

He drank with dedication and abandon for most of his adult years, slowed only by illness toward the end. And he chain-smoked little cigarettes named Mangalore Ganeesh Beedies. "You can get them in any Indian or Pakistani store," he told me in 1987. "They're what the poor, poor people smoke in India. I like them because they contain no chemicals and no nicotine, and they go very well with red wine."

Linda Lee Bukowski, it must be said, possessed extraordinary patience to put up with him, but then she understood him, and his life was often as simple as that: A plea for understanding. I sense from his work and from a long day spent with him that even when he was drunk and angry, obscene and hurtful, he was not the aggressor; he was fighting back.

The Hollywood book was inspired by his experiences when his Barfly was adapted into a movie starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway. He didn't like the movie much -- he thought Rourke was a "showoff." I thought it was a good movie and wondered if part of his dislike was because he was played by a handsome man who had never suffered the agonies of being Charles Bukowski. It is probably also true that in his barfly days he was rarely fortunate enough to be the lover of a woman who looked like Faye Dunaway.

On the set one day, Dunaway turned up to question him, doing research on the character she would play.

"This woman," she asked him "What would she put under her pillow?"

"A rosary."

"What sort of perfume did she wear?"

He looked at her incredulously.

"Perfume?"

I can testify to the way his life became his fiction, because the day I spent on the set of the movie became part Hollywood, and the movie critic in the book is a fair enough portrait of me. Central to his fiction and poetry was his lifelong love-hate relationship with women; by the time his fame began to attract groupies, he complains, "it was too late."

The movie is valuable because it provides a face and a voice to go with the work. Ten years have passed since Bukowski's death, and he seems likely to last, if not forever, then longer than many of his contemporaries. He outsells Kerouac and Kesey, and his poems, it almost goes with saying, outsell any other modern poet on the shelf.

How much was legend, how much was pose, how much was real? I think it was all real, and the documentary suggests as much. There were no shields separating the real Bukowski, the public Bukowski and the autobiographical hero of his work. They were all the same man. Maybe that's why his work remains so immediate and affecting: The wounded man is the man who writes, and the wounds he writes about are his own.
 
""I get letters from women who want to show their naked bodies. 'I'm 19 years old and I want to be your secretary. I'll keep your house and I won't bother you at all. I just want to be around.' I get some strange letters. I trash them.""

LMAO. heyy. whats wrong with that? i would have loved to just visit bukowski at his house one day and have a few drinks and chat (although he probably would hate that)
 
Bukowski really liked Mickey Rourke

i read that he didnt like rourke's performance in BARFLY. but he was very impressed by rourke in the novel HOLLYWOOD. rourke was the character jack bledsoe. and bukowski used to drink in rourke's trailer. rourke and sean penn had a huge rivalry going on back then.
 

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