Writer's Cramp: ASK THE DUST
March 27th, 2006
It’s easy to believe that Robert Towne’s new movie, Ask the Dust, has meant a lot to him. As he tells it, he spent at least eight years trying to get it made. And he may have wanted to do it for a lot longer: he was a friend of John Fante, the author of the same-named novel he’s adapted for this movie, and Fante died almost twenty-three years ago.
Fante was, like Towne, a screenwriter, but a much less heralded one. He toiled in Hollywood’s dream mills when writers could be rather well paid, but were seldom accorded much influence or respect. Like many other writers, Fante hadn’t intended to be a scenarist. He went to L.A. as a very young man from Colorado in the early ’30s to write fiction.
Ask the Dust is an autobiographical reworking of his experiences, centering on one Arturo Bandini, a similarly young, poor Italian-American aching with yearning for literary recognition and social acceptance. The novel, like most of Fante’s literary output, never achieved much popular success, and the meager results helped propel him into screenwriting. Ask the Dust did meet with general critical favor and Towne, like other writers, evidently has cherished it for decades.
His movie is a sad one, in more than one sense. Towne’s motivations were very probably authentic (particularly for Hollywood) and personal, but his Ask the Dust doesn’t serve either himself or Fante’s memory well. It doesn’t capture a viable character in its version of Bandini, nor the louche, rough-edged milieu of the novel, L.A.’s geographic and social backstory, as it were. Ironically, even though Towne famously mined some of the same territory in the script for Chinatown, and knows the city, he hasn’t been able to translate the novel’s scene and story into film. There are glimpses of what must have spurred his efforts, but they’re too isolated, and their treatment too zestless or confused.
Fante’s novel reportedly moved around a wide, colorful swath of urban underclass society, but movies can’t entail nearly as much as novels can include, and Towne has concentrated on the stormy, star-crossed love affair between Bandini (Colin Farrell) and Camilla (Salma Hayek), a Mexican café waitress.
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Fante was, like Towne, a screenwriter, but a much less heralded one. He toiled in Hollywood’s dream mills when writers could be rather well paid, but were seldom accorded much influence or respect. Like many other writers, Fante hadn’t intended to be a scenarist. He went to L.A. as a very young man from Colorado in the early ’30s to write fiction.
Ask the Dust is an autobiographical reworking of his experiences, centering on one Arturo Bandini, a similarly young, poor Italian-American aching with yearning for literary recognition and social acceptance. The novel, like most of Fante’s literary output, never achieved much popular success, and the meager results helped propel him into screenwriting. Ask the Dust did meet with general critical favor and Towne, like other writers, evidently has cherished it for decades.
His movie is a sad one, in more than one sense. Towne’s motivations were very probably authentic (particularly for Hollywood) and personal, but his Ask the Dust doesn’t serve either himself or Fante’s memory well. It doesn’t capture a viable character in its version of Bandini, nor the louche, rough-edged milieu of the novel, L.A.’s geographic and social backstory, as it were. Ironically, even though Towne famously mined some of the same territory in the script for Chinatown, and knows the city, he hasn’t been able to translate the novel’s scene and story into film. There are glimpses of what must have spurred his efforts, but they’re too isolated, and their treatment too zestless or confused.
Fante’s novel reportedly moved around a wide, colorful swath of urban underclass society, but movies can’t entail nearly as much as novels can include, and Towne has concentrated on the stormy, star-crossed love affair between Bandini (Colin Farrell) and Camilla (Salma Hayek), a Mexican café waitress.
read more
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