Novel: Hollywood

Overview

Hollywood is Charles Bukowski’s late-career roman à clef about the creation of the film Barfly, narrated by his alter ego Henry Chinaski. The novel follows a hard-bitten poet who, after years on the literary margins, is drawn into the movie business to write a screenplay about his own misspent past. What begins as an unlikely collaboration with an ardent European director widens into a tour of an industry that runs on charm, money, fear, and illusion. Bukowski turns the process into material, transforming meetings, parties, casting battles, and press junkets into a comedy of errors about art colliding with commerce.

Plot Summary

Chinaski is approached by a director who reveres his barroom stories and wants a film built around that life. Flattered and wary in equal measure, the writer bangs out a script with surprising speed, then discovers that writing is the easy part. Hollywood opens its doors and its labyrinth all at once: producers court him and then squeeze him, lawyers hover over every phrase, and agents translate enthusiasm into leverage. A marquee actor briefly attaches to the project and demands changes; Chinaski, allergic to vanity rewrites, balks, and the production teeters until a different lead steps in. An actress of old-school magnetism signs on, the budget wobbles, and the director pulls audacious stunts to keep financiers from killing the film.

Chinaski and his partner watch the circus from their modest home, punctuating crisis calls with horse-track afternoons and the care of cats. On set he witnesses the uncanny spectacle of his former self being reenacted for cameras and strangers. He is alternately amused, proud, and estranged; the words are his, but the gestures belong to actors, lighting, and money. As the shoot threads through skid row bars and night streets, he registers the sheer machinery needed to reproduce squalor and tenderness.

The movie wraps, and a new carousel of promotion begins. Chinaski attends parties where compliments sound like transactions, gives interviews that slice his answers into sound bites, and sits through a premiere that feels like an out-of-body experience. When the reviews arrive, he absorbs praise and condemnation with the same shrug he honed at the typewriter. The novel ends with a retreat to the domestic rituals and small salvations that outlast the industry’s glow.

Characters

Henry Chinaski anchors the narrative with a voice at once caustic and bemused, refusing to fake awe before power. His steadfast companion grounds him in ordinary life and health, softening the edges of his misanthropy. The director, passionate and quixotic, is the project’s beating heart, while producers, agents, and publicists revolve in a comic constellation of desperation and spin. The lead actor and actress become mirrors for Chinaski’s past, magnifying and distorting it under the hot lights.

Themes

Authenticity versus performance drives the book. Hollywood tries to buy the writer’s scars and bottle them; Chinaski resists being turned into a mascot for his own legend. Compromise, inevitable in collaboration, is weighed against the integrity of lived experience. Fame is portrayed as a carnival prize that costs more than it gives, and art as a stubborn private practice that survives precisely by refusing to flatter. Aging and sobriety thread through the episodes, lending perspective: the bars are now a set, the demons mostly retired, the appetite for disaster cooled.

Style and Structure

Bukowski writes in clipped, anecdotal bursts, stitching vignettes into a loose chronicle. The humor is bone-dry, the sentiment kept under lock, and the eye for absurd detail unblinking. Dialogue snaps, scenes end on anti-epiphanies, and the prose trusts the reader to feel the joke and the bruise without signposting either.

Significance

Hollywood doubles as self-portrait and industry satire, capturing the strange moment when an outsider’s grime becomes marketable glamor. It stands as a late summation of Bukowski’s preoccupations, work, luck, lust, mortality, while documenting the one time Los Angeles asked its crankiest laureate to help manufacture his own myth.