Seeking Bukowski Inspired Films

So I’m finishing Septuagenarian Stew yesterday and one of the final stories is called “Mad Enough” which appears to be based on Buk’s experiences around the film “Tales of Ordinary Madness” which according to IMDB was the first film adaptation of a Buk story.

Mad Enough is an interesting story in which Buk doesn’t hide his dislike of Ben Gazarra’s portrayal of the character in the film (whom he calls Ben Garabaldi in the story). He even details how he shouted obscenities during his viewing of a screening for the film. At the end of the story, Buk discusses how he is approached by a producer who wants to make a film based on 5 of his short stories and have each of them done by a director from a different country (Spain, France, Japan, etc…)

After reading the story, it piqued my curiosity as to whether there are other films out there inspired by Buk that I wasn’t aware of. Sure I had already seen Tales of Ordinary Madness, Barfly (more times than I can count), and most recently Factotum. But were there more films out there that I wasn’t aware of?

So I decide to begin my quest by an innocent enough search for “bukowski movies”. Near the top of the list I see a link to Buk’s profile on IMDB. Naturally that would be the best place to discover anything new so I quickly make my way there.

At the top of the list I see a title called “The Suicide”. I click on the link which takes me to the movie page at IMDB and after reading a comment, see that the movie is available for viewing at Myspace. I head on over to the page and watch the 14 minute short. It’s a great little film which I highly recommend. The filmmaker has created a site for the film at www.thesuicide.net so you can save yourself a visit to Myscrape.

I was happy to have gotten some instant gratification after starting my quest and will now make my way down the complete list of films listed at IMDB. One last interesting note…after going back to “Mad Enough” to reference for this post, I notice that Buk’s fictitious name for Tales of Ordinary Madness in the story was “Songs of the Suicide Man”. Strange coincidence eh?