Documentary About an American Writer
I only knew a little about Los Angeles poet and novelist Charles Bukowski (1920-1994) before seeing the fascinating film Bukowski: Born Into This (2003) on DVD. Having heard so much about his drinking and fighting, I was surprised that in the documentary he comes off as likable.
About 45 books of Bukowski's writings were published in his lifetime. He wrote six novels, two of the best-known being Post Office (1971) and Ham on Rye (1982). He also authored many poems and short stories, collections of which were published under titles that included Love Is a Dog From Hell (1977) and You Get So Alone at Times That It Just Makes Sense (1986). In addition, he wrote a semiautobiographical screenplay for the movie Barfly (1987), in which Mickey Rourke played Bukowski's fictional alter ego Henry Chinaski.
Film Captures Spirit of Bukowski's Life and Work
One of my favorite things about Bukowski: Born Into This are the sequences where he reads his own work. For example, he's shown walking around in his unattractive East Hollywood neighborhood in 1976, and the words "born like this / into this" come up on the screen as we hear his voice reciting them in voice-over. As his publisher says, Bukowski was a "man of the street, writing for the people of the street." Or as musician Tom Waits puts it, Bukowski was the "writer for the dispossessed."
Bukowski worked blue-collar jobs for a quarter of a century, including a dozen years as a postal service employee. Although a lot of his short stories and poems were published in small-circulation magazines, he made little money off his writing. But that all began to change in 1970 when John Martin, sole proprietor of the small Black Sparrow Press, gave Bukowski a stipend of $100 a month, enabling him at age 49 to at last became a full-time writer. Martin is one of the key people appearing in the documentary, and I found him quite interesting. He got out of publishing in 2002, and nowadays Bukowski's books are put out by the Ecco imprint of HarperCollins.
Success, Marriage, San Pedro
The most memorable person in the documentary is Linda Lee Bukowski, the author's widow. She met Bukowski in the 1970s when he was becoming well-known and beginning to generate a comfortable income. In 1978 the two of them moved into a house in San Pedro, the laid-back harbor community a few miles south of downtown L.A. During their years there, Bukowski continued to write and became more and more famous. But eventually he contracted leukemia and died in 1994 at age 73. There's a touching scene in the film showing Linda visiting her late husband's grave in Rancho Palos Verdes. The epitaph on his tombstone is "Don't try."
Excellent Audio Commentary by Director
I enjoyed listening to the DVD's audio commentary track by John Dullaghan, the director and producer of Bukowski: Born Into This. He says in the mid-1990s he was working in an advertising agency doing ads for Apple Computer when he started reading Bukowski. He got the idea of writing a biography of the author and contacted Linda Lee Bukowski, who suggested making a documentary movie about her late husband's life. Dullaghan knew almost nothing about filmmaking, so he kept working in advertising and made the documentary on a part-time basis over a period of years.
But only a small portion of the commentary is about making the movie. Dullaghan has learned an enormous amount about Bukowski, and the commentary mostly gives us additional information about the author that couldn't be fitted into the documentary.
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