Bukowski And Hollywood: The Man Who Hated The Machine That Fed Him

Charles Bukowski belonged to that strange class of writers who built a career by cursing the system, only to be swallowed by that same system in the end. For decades, he wrote dirty realist poems and novels about drunks, losers, and the working poor, a body of work positioned against polished, commercial literature. But somehow, the same man ended up with more film adaptations than many Pulitzer-winning writers. This contradiction did not escape him, and it became the subject of one of his late works: Hollywood, the novel that tells the strange story of writing the screenplay for Barfly.

The Writer Who Did Not Want To Get In

Bukowski's contempt for cinema was not a performance. He really did find movies boring, artificial, and too obsessed with surfaces. In interviews from the 1970s and early 1980s, he dismissed film as a medium for people who could not handle the sustained attention literature demanded. "Most movies are shit," he said repeatedly, with the relaxed certainty of a man who had walked out of plenty of theaters.

This was not just aesthetic snobbery. For Bukowski, cinema represented everything his writing rejected: careful control, collaborative compromise, money-driven motives. His work celebrated the raw, the unpolished, the accidents that happen when you are too drunk or too tired to perform competence. Film production, with its armies of technicians and layers of supervision, was structurally opposed to that ethic.

So when French director Barbet Schroeder spent years trying to convince Bukowski to write a screenplay based on his own life, the writer's resistance made sense. What did not make sense, what Bukowski himself could never fully explain, was why he eventually said yes.

Hollywood: A Documentary Of Disgust

Published in 1989, Hollywood is Bukowski's account of writing Barfly and watching it get made. It is not a triumphant story about an underground writer conquering the mainstream. It is a catalogue of nervous breakdowns, absurdities, and small betrayals, written in Bukowski's characteristically plain style.

I had previously written about the film here: ( Barfly (1987): The Only Screenplay Bukowski Wrote Against Hollywood >> ). When Hollywood the novel and the making of Barfly are considered together, Bukowski’s troubled relationship with cinema becomes much clearer.

The book treats the film industry as a foreign environment inhabited by people who speak a different language. Casting sessions turn into exercises in superficiality. Production meetings reveal that decisions are made according to concerns Bukowski finds incomprehensible: marketability, star power, test audience reactions. He watches his words being shaped and reshaped by people who have lived nothing resembling the life he wrote about.

What makes Hollywood interesting is not anger, Bukowski had written angry books before. It is confusion. He genuinely seems baffled by what he is doing there, why anyone thinks this will work, and why he keeps showing up to meetings. The book reads like the field notes of an anthropologist who realizes halfway through that he has become part of the culture he is studying.

The darkest irony appears near the end: Barfly gets made, becomes reasonably successful, and Bukowski earns enough money to never worry about rent again. The system he despised solved his oldest problem. The machine he rejected throughout his career had fed him.

The Underground Writer As A Film Product

After Barfly, Bukowski's work became film material in a way that would once have seemed unthinkable. In fact, this transformation did not stop with one film. Many films and documentaries were made from Bukowski’s writing, his life, and his archive. I gathered those works separately under the title Every Film And Documentary Adapted From Charles Bukowski’s Books >> . Factotum (2005), Ham on Rye (unreleased), various short films, documentaries, countless dramatic readings, and staged performances, the catalogue kept growing even after his death. Directors continued to find something filmable in writing that was openly anti-cinematic. But as the only film whose screenplay he personally wrote, Barfly (1987) always remained in a separate place.

This raises an interesting question: what exactly was the film industry adapting? Not Bukowski's prose style, which was the foundation of his work but almost impossible to translate to the screen. Not the internal monologue that carried much of the content. What remained were plot elements: drinking, fighting, dead-end jobs, ruined relationships. The aesthetic was stripped away; the lifestyle became the product.

Chuck Palahniuk experienced his own version of this tension when Fight Club became one of the most commercially successful adaptations of underground literature in American history. But Palahniuk's case inverted Bukowski's: his book was almost unknown until the film became famous. The film did not capitalize on an existing literary success; it created one. Palahniuk found himself in the strange position of being grateful to an industry he had written a critical book about.

I also wrote about Palahniuk’s identity beyond the shadow of Fight Club under the title Chuck Palahniuk Is Not Just Fight Club, He Is The Writer Of Sentences That Cut Like Rusted Blades >>. That is why the parallel between Bukowski and Palahniuk is not only about cinematic success; it is also about the writer’s image, the reader, and the way an industry repackages both.

Bukowski never had to feel grateful. His literary reputation had been established independently. But that did not make him less uncomfortable. If anything, it may have made him more uncomfortable. Gratitude would at least have given the situation a kind of logic. In his case, there was no logic, only the fact that the film industry could take the work of a man who did not want it.

What The Machine Does

Underground literature, by definition, stands against what is glossy, commercial, and respectable. So what happens when it is absorbed by the most commercial art machine in the world?

The Bukowski case shows the answer: the machine takes the image, not the content. Not the words, but the attitude. Not the writing, but the writer. The Bukowski figure in Barfly, played by Mickey Rourke, is not a version of the real Bukowski but a caricature. More handsome, more romantic, more digestible. The world of cinema took the drunken poet and turned him into a charismatic rebel figure.

This transformation was inevitable. Cinema is an industry built around producing narratives that can be sold to large audiences. The strength of Bukowski's writing was precisely that it was not sellable: its honest depiction of ordinariness, repetition, and the fact that most of life is not dramatic but boring. When you translate that into film, you have to lose something. And the thing lost is always the important part.

Bukowski knew this. Hollywood was written with that awareness. But he wrote the screenplay anyway. He let the film happen. He took the money. And then he wrote a book saying the money had not been good for him.

If Bukowski is new to you, maybe the right way to understand him is not to start directly with the harshest or most famous texts, but with the right reading order. For that, I also prepared a roadmap titled A Roadmap to the Madness: How to Read Charles Bukowski >> 

Maybe that is the greatest irony: Bukowski's most honest work about his relationship with the film industry is impossible to adapt. Because you cannot sell a story about how empty it feels to sell yourself. The machine can swallow many things, but it cannot swallow its own criticism.

Or maybe it can. This is Bukowski. Someone is probably trying to buy the screenplay rights to Hollywood right now.