Charles Bukowski’s semi-autobiographical novel Women is to be adapted for the big screen by the production company behind The Hurt Locker, reports The Tracking Board.
Voltage Pictures, also known for indie hits such as William Friedkin’s Killer Joe, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s Don Jon, has obtained screen rights to the 1978 book. Women features Bukowski’s regular alter-ego Hank Chinaski, a booze-soaked LA writer juggling the many women who admire him for his literary genius. The film will be based on a screenplay by Ethan Furman.
Previous big screen adaptations of the novelist and poet’s writings include 1983’s Tales of Ordinary Madness, which starred Ben Gazarra, 2005’s Factotum, with Matt Dillon, and 1987’s Barfly, featuring a young Mickey Rourke as Chinaski and based on a screenplay by the writer himself. James Franco recently finished work on a biopic titled Bukowski, based on Neeli Cherkovski’s 1997 autobiography Bukowski: A Life, which will star Josh Peck as the prototypical writer-drinker. Franco successfully settled a lawsuit last year alleging the film was also partly based on the writer’s semi-autobiographical novel Ham on Rye.
No cast details are yet available for the film version of Women, and the project does not yet have a director. Known as the laureate of American lowlife, Bukowski died in 1994 at the age of 73, having turned in thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels. His prolific rate was largely courtesy of his throwaway attitude to writing - he once said the process was “like taking a shit, you smell it and then flush it away ... writing is all about leaving behind as much a stink as possible”.
