Celebrate Charles Bukowski's 103rd Birthday with Bukowski: On Film

August 16th would have been the 103rd birthday of the acclaimed Los Angeles author and poet Charles Bukowski and New York Times best-selling author Marc Shapiro has spent the past year interviewing directors and actors who have worked with Bukowski over the years to bring us the definitive volume on Bukowski ‘s contribution to cinema in the just published Bukowski:On Film

If ever there was a match made in hell, it was legendary writer Charles Bukowski and the movies. Bukowski hated movies and moviemakers with a passion. The late writer would often chronicle his dislike in short stories, poems and novels. On the other hand, Hollywood filmmakers, from all strata of the industry, flocked to the powerful, raw and magnetic energy of his stories and poems and the cinematic possibilities they held.

Marc Shapiro delves into this complex hate/love relationship between author and auteur(s) with countless interviews of those who made cinematic sense of all levels of Bukowski films, from student efforts, to art house, to even the short experimental ones. The book also explores the obscure Bukowski films that were not so much released as escaped to. Of course, Shapiro also looks closely at the handful of major studio features coupled with close Bukowski confidants who offered up their reasoning behind the late author's hatred for the industry that, in many cases, he profited from.

Bukowski: On Film takes a deep, probing, often humorous and psychologically insightful, look at Bukowski and those who were driven by passion to try to get Bukowski right.

Shapiro is currently working on a group biography of Beatle Kids for Riverdale Avenue Books to be published in 2024.