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Bukowski's Hollywood

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SOURCE: "Bukowski's Hollywood," in ENclitic, Vol. 11, No. 3, Summer 1985, pp. 89-93.

[In the following essay, Theis explores the connections between Bukowski's novel, Hollywood, his screenplay for the movie Barfly, and the author's life.]

Even for the artist or writer who silently screams refusals to be caught, coopted, by the lures of commercial culture, the dreams of monetary success are hard to fight off. The big bucks for landing a script at a more upscale studio privy to the points where culture and cash separate and merge together, or for a book contract at one of the major publishing houses, have the power to give artists and writers a dose of schizophrenia. Ego and lust tempered by the gnawing desire for creature comforts batters the artistic temperament with a reckoning force, especially in Hollywood town where movies are the art form, where art and cash might be more incestuously connected. And this might be changing the status of the struggling culture-producer who batters away on the fringe of substantial reward in pursuit of lofty goals and untainted absolutes. With such dismal prospects for survival in a time when Gentry and working class heroes look at each other across a wider rift than ever (the lofty can't be sketched out in downtown LA lofts affordable now only by the upwardly mobile brokers of this and that commodity), the notion of the struggling artist may becoming a vanishing species in the old sense we've come to attach to it.

This paradox is what mainly propels Bukowski's latest book, Hollywood. The contradictions of a life style overtaken with the pursuit of success on terms not always of one's own making: this is the major concern throughout. As a successful writer of the type chronicled in these pages, is he obsessed with going back to the days of struggle because that was when the experience of being a writer was more "real," naively oblivious to the system of exchange values that engulf the lives of all writers, something that seemed so abstractly removed? Do the lures of fame mitigate against true success? Bukowski has been heaped with it in the past few years to the point of warding off all publicity comers. Can good writing/art be produced under conditions of sated security? Isn't this why the scripting arts of the film world won't allow the entry of the controversial and subversive, that by the time a subject gets framed by the studios, it ceases to be one? Or is this just a romantic illusion, sentiments expressed by outsiders who couldn't make the grade, survive in the jungle where markets are always the best arbiter of quality?

There is some Romanticism in Bukowski's book, but we can't mistake most of what he's doing for a serious investigation of the life of the writer (his in fact, the book's a biographical statement) in a cultural wasteland that demanded his devotion for too many years of his life. His scenario appears to be an attempt to make sense of the road he passed along to get where he is now. His main character, Henry Chinaski, is roughly the same age as Bukowski, and surely harbors similar anxieties about the occupation of writer in the land of celluloid. Chinaski is all too aware of his place in life, at age 65. He feels pressured into becoming that other kind of writer/artist, the one with a desk, agent, assignment, front money: "My fighting days were over. To think I had once weighed 144 pounds on a 6-foot frame: the grand old starving days when I was writing the good stuff." The "good stuff" is created under conditions of maximum deprivation and adversity, the less-than-good produced on the downside of recognition, when mature complacency has fought off any urge to experiment? This sort of evolution doesn't apply to Bukowski's output, but perhaps his earlier writing has the stamp of the vintage angriness we now slot him into (like we do with the raging Burroughs and Ferlinghetti during their heydays).

We already know Chinaski as Bukowski's protagonist through several novels and the film Barfly. Chinaski's struggles have occupied Bukowski for quite some time in working out his designs. He has been the gladiator-man-in-the-street, raging, not so much out of excess emotion, as sheer doggedness grounded in hard-hitting speculation (like his many systems for playing the horses channeled into one simple premise: "… there is only one bet, and that is bet it to win; not to place or show.") He's self-absorbed in his very resistance to floating along with the norm. He possesses a praiseworthy stubbornness that often fuels the most insightful intellectual fervor, romantic or otherwise. In Ham on Rye ('82), about Chinaski's youth, he lays it out:

"I could see the road ahead of me. I was poor and I was going to stay poor. But I didn't particularly want money. I didn't know what I wanted. Yes, I did. I wanted someplace to hide out, someplace where one didn't have to do anything. The thought of being something didn't only appall me, it sickened me. The thought of being a lawyer or a councilman or an engineer, anything like that, seemed impossible to me. To get married, to have children, to get trapped in the family structure. To go someplace to work every day and to return. It was impossible. To do things, simple things, to be part of family picnics, Christmas, the 4th of July, Labor Day, Mother's Day … was a man born just to endure those things and then die? I would rather be a dishwasher, return alone to a tiny room and drink myself to sleep."

Bukowski's vision of the right stuff (then at least, early in the maturing writerly ego) couldn't be further from what we imagine to be the filmmaking world's version of floating along with the norm. Romantic visionaries who cling nostalgically to an existence of enforced deprivation, of self-fulfillment through lack, of living on the seedy margins where pain and adversity catalyze the persistent flow of creative life, aren't easily tamed into Hollywood industrial slots. These diehards hang out at Al's Bar in downtown LA (at least the vintage version back in the days when Bukowski himself straddled the makeshift bar as a culture fly seeding his reputation as an anti-hero), nurturing energies for use in an appropriate moment of escape. The rest seek out the avenues of successful script placement at City Cafe (and its many pastiches throughout LA), averse to the dirt and din of seedy life that violates the respectability of the entertainment arts.

But Bukowski's Hollywood is also a sophisticated take on all this. That is, the novel is really about the making of the film Barfly ('87), a movie that perhaps can be seen as his answer, through the art of film, to questions plaguing him for so long. This may explain why, in certain ways, it doesn't really come off as a novel. It seems at times like notes toward the writing of a script, a kind of script, however, that doesn't jive with the Hollywood product. The force, of the book is not so much in a story line that pulls or drags the reader along (like a Hollywood narrative?), as it is in sheer emotional overkill nearly dumbfounding because of the accessibility of the prose. The words are sort of doled out, flowing like the conversation between pulls on a bottle of red passed around without glasses in an alley behind the local drugstore. The reader feels the back and darkside of Hollywood, the part we know is there but can never really intuit through the mask of glamor. The several cancellations of the film in progress, and bilking of the cast and crew by the producers, sheds some light on what goes on beneath the glitz, the behind-the-scenes give and take, that tells us what we already know but in a way that suggests we really might not.

Hollywood is a book about the making of a film which brings to bear all the ambivalences a creative person might have in negotiating for a slice of security in an alien culture. It's hardly a predictable genre. It is too reflective of itself, too multi-layered to fall into generic slots. The all-too-predictable slotting into the Hollywood machine is the occasion for most of the drama, but Chinaski's relationship to the world of filmmaking, the grit of the novel, stages a bit more than this. Chinaski has mostly disdain for the film scene, but perhaps like the author himself, immersion in the celluloid arts may indeed be another stage in the evolution of a career, a necessity which every aspiring creative person in the shadows of the studios must accept as fact. Perhaps Chinaski truly wants to invigorate the scene, change it in some way, with his ideas cultivated on the fringes, in adversity and deprivation. Because he is clearly not what they are. He's formula breaker, a category dissolver, everything we would expect to find in the makeup of the raging writer who might experiment from time to time with other life styles and media. So a big part of the work is Chinaski breaking barriers: from writing to film, from moderate to upper class living, toward drinking less and eating some "health foods." (For example, after the first day of filming, "having seen the movie made that afternoon we were now somehow different, we would never think or talk quite the same. We now knew something more but what it was seemed very vague and even perhaps a bit disagreeable.")

Chinaski is rooted in suspicion, of a type not usually found among the sort who automatically apply the precepts of good Hollywood filmmaking. He's, not quite sure what to make of the bogus glamor and parade of false artists he comes into contact with because, for one thing, they are survivors like himself, and therefore can't be so easily and totally written off to oblivion. He finds a particular type of representative from this world, the kind who are surely not the pure machine-honed cipher, but carry a certain symptomatic disdain with them into the filmmaking trenches (and who are also victims of crossing boundaries). An identification with these types might maintain Chinaski's sanity. They, like him, are hooked on the film world, and not all that sure why. From actors to extras, financiers, producers, directors, writers, the book is a cavalcade of idiosyncracy, what we expect in Bukowski's world. One character after another sort of sneaks up on the reader and at times almost makes the drinking, brawling Chinaski look like an oasis of sanity. Francois Racine, friend and sometimes roommate of director Jon Pinchot, is "a great actor but now and then he goes crazy. He'll just forget the script and the scene he's supposed to be doing and do his thing. It's a sickness, I think. He must have done it again. He got canned." This type seems like a clone of the rebel on the outs with studios in a never ending battle for independence of vision, the likes of Dennis Hopper or Orson Welles, perhaps, the only sort we can imagine Bukowski identifying with, or even consorting with, in his flirtation with Hollywood.

Racine's firing brings him back from France and soon he and Pinchot have taken residence in, where else, the Venice ghetto, the same environs that captured Hopper's imagination. They easily acclimate to the Venetian vibes and pander their newly acquired vision of a transition life style, keeping chickens so that they can save their money for wine and cigars. They fend off young black boys from the spoils of the family business in gestures of survival burlesqued in a fashion that only Bukowski can pull off:

The chickens! HEGGS! All the time we eat HEGGS! Nothing but HEGGS! Poop, poop, poop! The chickens poop HEGGS! All day, all night long my job is to save the chickens from the young black boys! All the time the young black boys climb the fence and run at the chicken coop! I hit them with a long stick, I say, 'You muthafuckas you stay away from my chickens which poop the HEGGS!' I cannot think of my own life or my own death, I am always chasing these young black boys with the long stick! Jon, I need more wine, another cigar!

He spends the remainder of his time practicing gambling on a little electric roulette wheel.

Harry Friedman is another one of these transitional figures (anti-heroes?) peopling Chinaski's universe. He's a ruthless authority figure and somewhat familiar character in the Bukowski lexicon (conjuring "the Stone," supervisor Johnstone in Post Office ('71), who put the cocky Chinaski through postal hell and, like a drill sergeant, tried to break him). He's an immanent god-like figure who supervises all the wrangling desires the rest of us submit to again and again, but who seems to harbor some conflicting impulses to the point of demonstrating a disdain for what he represents. Is this a caricature of Hollywood power moguls, or the discovery of Dostoyevskyian energies derivative from the monied film scene yet blindly and obsessively devoted to its destruction? These kinds of formations are not all that alien to Bukowski's world. Friedman and Nate Fischman are the executive producers of Firepower Productions. They're new in Hollywood, outcasts in a certain sense yet penultimate members of the Club. Nobody knows quite what to make of them. They used to make exploitation films in Europe. They arrived in America almost overnight and began making scores of movies. They are hated by everyone, but they are dealers, capable of delivering product with maximum efficiency, conjuring Don De Lillo's host of caricatures who operate in seedy realms of dollar deification. Bukowski describes Friedman making an entrance at his own birthday party: "Here he came in an old suit, no necktie, top button missing from his shirt and the shirt was wrinkled. Friedman had his mind on other things besides dress. But he had a fascinating smile and his eyes looked right at people as if he were x-raying them. He had come from hell and he was still in hell and he'd put you in hell too if you gave him the slightest chance. He went from table to table, dropping small and precise sentences."

References to Friedman punctuate the novel, hearken back to the struggle of Chinaski's earlier days when he was always up against the pricks and assholes—bosses—having it in for him. Chinaski is racked by the ups and downs of film production, and all the whipping boys who put it to him over and over again. Chinaski is apprehensive about participating in a competitive (ersatzly so: ideas squelched by marketing savvy), boorish process that most often produces bad films. (One gets the feeling that had the film failed it may have been a relief for Bukowski, who then would still be able to foist a warrior Chinaski on us for a good example, a raging bohemian always trying to beat insurmountable odds)

So Bukowski's foray through tinsel town doesn't produce the easy results we might expect. In a certain sense he sets a trap for the reader. Early on we are on the lookout for some scapegoat, someone who can be blamed for sustaining a world which so magically trades off quality and dealing. We never really find one, and perhaps we never really find the hero-god either. We get a slew of characters whose motives never seem to be either as jaded or as revelatory as one might expect. Chinaski is always at odds with the powers of the film scene, implicitly expressing his superiority over what they claim to represent, but at times comes off as a convert to it, one who after all is just like the rest, who wants a successful premiere to bank on. At one point he tells Pinchot that he wants a "white stretch limo with a chauffeur, a stock of the best wine, color tv, car phone, cigars…." There's a certain sinking feeling here that lingers until the "bullshit" is over; then it's back to a Bukowski-land more familiar to his readers, one where the good and bad guys are at least somewhat recognizable.

So much of the novel ponders the status of Bukowski's readers, his fans, as if he might be trying to work out his own ambivalent relation to the film world. There are only a few moments where the film world is treated sympathetically, and we sense a great deal of worry about how his viewers/readers perceive him. Once he and his wife Sarah hustle out of a bar full of leather jackets when he is recognized and greeted lynchmob style: "… I can kick your ass,… can you still get it up?… can I read you one of my poems?… come on stay and drink with us! Be a good guy! Be like your writing, Chinaski! Don't be a prick!" A fellow has mailed an example of his poetry with the cover letter: "… Piss on you! You were once a great writer! Now you suck! You've sold out! My grandmother writes better shit than you do!… You gobble your own weenie under sky of vomit!" He receives such dispatches three or four times a month. Chinaski admits that he has a love-hate relationship with his audience.

This is so, perhaps, because he embodies, in so many ways, the true working class hero who aspired to get beyond repressive circumstances but found little to attract him in the world of tinsel. Caught between nostalgia for a vitality of lumpen life that hardly existed, and longing for the successful completion of the next stage of self-realization, he somehow wavers in a sea of bitterness, apologizing, lashing out, and oftentimes just self-destructing. There's a lot in Chinaski—and Bukowski—to identify with for many. Even the well-to-do, feeling disdain for dumb complacency, the stupid crowd, fatigue with the events of a day, can easily muster an anti-social arrogance and identify with Chinaski as he tells the world to fuck off. But maybe as he becomes too many things for too many different people, his identity is polished over with enigmatic imagery, inviting aggressive misunderstandings. Only a star in the contradictory limelight can know and explain what this is like. And each discovery of misunderstanding, excessive praise and hyperemotional attachment may force another fade into silence and obscurity to ponder one's true value. Chinaski, the man who has fought and resisted all his life, submits a silent message to be read in his absence: "Every time somebody spoke to me I felt like diving out a window or taking the elevator down. People just weren't interesting. Maybe they weren't supposed to be. But animals, birds, even, insects were. I couldn't understand it … I'm not happy around people and after I drink enough they seem to vanish."

Chinaski did nearly die of a hemorrhage in his early thirties from the effects of alcohol abuse, and was advised to start playing the horses instead of drinking himself to death. He was told by doctors that if he took another drink he'd soon die. He began to go to the track on a daily basis, "then, slowly, I began to drink a little again. Then I drank more. And I didn't die." Self-obsessed, detesting the culture that throws up artificial barriers and interactions between him and the outside world, does he play around with the dangerous edge in isolation, fulfilling the mandate of a working class hero who might have just won the lottery? In 1985, roughly the same time as when Barfly was being written, Bukowski told the Saturday Review: "I drink wine as I write (usually a good California wine, perhaps Gamay Beaujolais). I don't know if I write when I drink, or drink when I write … My routine is: at about 10 p.m., three or four nights a week, I'll open a bottle of wine and turn on the radio to classical music, and I type until two or three in the morning."

Bukowski has cultivated an image (reinforced by a media that makes sure the public won't forget the trail of alluring qualities attached to his person over the years), that can't be sullied by Hollywood or Bohemia. He's in his own camp. Witness his perennial obstinate refusal to be caught by any category or person intruding into his inviolate space, a well-deserved creation that sanctions the nature of his life-long struggle. Secure in this space of his own making, he directs his own movie, and responds to the media and public in ways we would expect from an author above the fray. There's been little need to say much, beyond the obvious and self-evident, about those works created through adversity, a life of drinking and brawling that becomes more or less imprinted on the page as fiction. Hollywood and Barfly, according to Bukowski, told it like it was and is, narrated a period of his life that until that time hadn't been written about much. It was the aesthetics of the drinking scenes in Barfly that he really appreciated, and there seems to be more than a little pride in having become the best alcoholic possible while still preserving his ability to write effectively. He has no regrets about any of it. In fact, he relishes the possibility of being part of the lineage of the best writer-drinkers: O'Neill, Faulkner, Hemingway, London and others. Bukowski knows the strange and desperate lives drunks live better than most. And for him, as for Chinaski, the booze can only free up the typewriter keys for better service.

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