Synopses & Reviews
Review
"The movie-making machinations of the title town are exposed in this thinly veiled roman a clef about a hard-drinking poet-novelist tamed screenwriter. Presumably based on his experiences writing the movie, "Barfly," Bukowski lays open the absurdity and egotism of the film industry from the worm's-eye view of a screenwriter....This novel is funny, and it moves quickly." Independent Publisher
Review
"Bukowski depicts perfectly a business where your cheque is always in the post: the elation
never lasts and rip-offs are standard practice....a superb snapshot of what filmmaking at
the fag-end of the Hollywood dream is all about." Times Literary Supplement
Review
"Charles Bukowski, West Coast poet and patron saint of drinking writers, or writing drinkers...has written a classic in the
take-the-money-and-don't-run category of Hollywood fiction....this is fiction disguised thinly enough for even
non-cinephiles to see through the pseudonyms." Molly Haskell, New York Times Book Review
Synopsis
Hank and his wife, Sarah, agree to write a screenplay, and encounter the strange world of the movie industry.
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 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.