Life Sentences: Edward Bunker
Woody Haut

There is no one better at depicting the criminal world and the ease with which society can draw someone into that world than Edward Bunker. Concerning his own criminal past, Bunker, born and raised in LA, and having served sentences in San Quentin and Folsom prisons, has said, 'If God weighed what was done to me against what I did, I'm not sure how the scales would tip.' These days, with ever-increasing numbers being placed behind bars, Bunker's stories have become more relevant than ever. The downside is that, having spent much of his life locked up, and writing about it with such urgency and accuracy, Bunker not only risks narrative repetition, but invites prurient interest and a pseudo-hip voyeurism. Nevertheless, Bunker, increasingly in demand as a screenwriter, can hardly be blamed for how he is perceived by others.

When not incarcerated, Bunker, born in 1933, has maintained a special relationship with Hollywood. The son of a stagehand and a chorus girl, Bunker proved too much for his single father to handle. It wasn't long before he was involved in a life of petty crime. Each time he was apprehended, the stakes were raised and the number of places to incarcerate him diminished. Despite the fact that he was still committing what amounted to petty crimes, Bunker became, at the age of 17, the youngest inmate to walk through the doors of San Quentin.

It was there that he met the 'red-light bandit' Caryl Chessman, perpetrator - Bunker believed him innocent - of a series of sexual assaults and robberies on Mulholland Drive (aka Lover's Lane, or, in homage to the excitable wrestling announcer of the 1950s, Dick Lane). Even though he hadn't murdered anyone, Chessman would be controversially executed in the late 1950s (Bunker on the death penalty: 'No doubt some deserve to die... How do we decide? I refer you to Camus' monumental essay "Reflections on the Guillotine".'). While in prison, Chessman had written four books: Cell 2455 Death Row, Trial by Ordeal, The Face of Justice, and a novel about a boxer, The Kid was a Killer. Except for an alcoholic ex-newspaperman he'd met in Camarillo State Hospital, Chessman was the first writer Bunker had ever come across. Chessman would lend him Jack London's The Sea Wolf and George Santayana's The Last Puritan. From there the young inmate moved on to Dreiser, Wolfe, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Dos Passos and Faulkner. More than anyone else, Chessman would be responsible for Bunker joining the ranks of such prison writers as Chester Himes, Jean Genet, London, O'Henry, Clarence Cooper Jr and Malcolm Braly, as well as those, like Robert Tasker, Ernest Booth and Jim Tully, who, upon their release, would write screenplays in Hollywood.

Between sentences, Bunker, thanks to his lawyer, was befriended by Louise Fazenda Wallis, the former actress and wife of producer Hal Wallis. Though her friendship would not keep Bunker out of prison, Fazenda did have a positive effect on Bunker. Arriving in Hollywood during the silent era, Fazenda appeared in her first film in 1913. Two years later she was working with Mack Sennett in his Joker and Keystone Cop films. Not particularly beautiful, Fazenda specialised in playing rural types, appearing in Tillie's Punctured Romance, in which she played Tillie opposite WC Fields, and Norman McLeod's Alice in Wonderland, in which she appeared as the White Queen alongside Fields, Gary Cooper, Charles Ruggles and Edward Everett Horton. Her last film was Edmund Goulding's 1939 women's film, The Old Maid, alongside Bette Davis and Miriam Hopkins. Fazenda was so free with her money that, at first, Bunker thought he was about to become another Hollywood gigolo. But Fazenda had more humanitarian intentions, and the two quickly became close friends. However, it was neither her humanitarianism nor her money, but her library, that first impressed Bunker. For the first time anywhere he found rows of books by a variety of authors, including two of his prison favourites, Teihard de Chardin and Karen Horney. Through Fazenda, Bunker would meet an assortment of Hollywood personalities, and accompany Fazenda to Hearst's castle in San Simeon, where he met Marion Davies, Garbo, John Gilbert, Chaplin ('a good tennis player'), Zazu Pitts, and Hearst himself, who, by then, had only a short time to live.

It wasn't long before Bunker was back in prison, this time San Quentin, his residence throughout the early 1950s. After consulting her friend, California state politician Jesse 'Big Daddy' Unrah, Fazenda hired a lawyer. Thanks to his efforts, Bunker was paroled in 1956, and moved into an apartment over a four-car garage attached to Wallis' home in Hancock Park. Though he tried to remain on good terms with Hal Wallis, the latter would view him with suspicion, even blocking his attempt during this period to find employment as a Hollywood script-doctor. Unable to get studio work, Bunker returned to a world of crime. Less comfortable with Hollywood film people than with the city's demimonde, Bunker began frequenting nightclubs and associating with criminals, prostitutes and drug dealers. After committing a robbery, Bunker became a fugitive from justice, crisscrossing the nation as one of the FBI's most wanted. Once apprehended, and judged criminally insane, he was sent to Atascadero State Hospital, and then to Folsom Prison. It was in Folsom that he began writing his novel No Beast So Fierce. In 1972, while still behind bars, Bunker learned that the book was to be published. Seven years later it would be adapted for the screen by the former diamond-cutter Ulu Grosbard and retitled Straight Time. The book follows a Bunker-like protagonist as he attempts to adjust to life outside prison, only to be forced back into a life of crime. The film stars Dustin Hoffman, who mimics Bunker's mannerisms to perfection. But, in the end, Bunker was disappointed with the film, and still hopes it will be remade, because, he says, 'the truths of the book were not in the first movie'.

The script to Grosbard's film was written by Alvin Sargent, who encouraged Bunker to contribute to the screenplay. It would mark the beginning of Bunker's career as a scriptwriter. He was already familiar with the form, having written a script entitled Slick Willy, about a man in his 50s who breaks out of an LA jail. Having sent it to a New York fellowship award competition, Bunker's script, out of 600 entries, was judged the best. Nevertheless, it was Sargent who was to teach Bunker the art of scriptwriting. By the time he and Bunker worked together, Sargent was already a veteran writer with a career stretching back to the mid-1960s. Among his credits were screenplays for Peter Bogdanovich's Paper Moon, for which he received an Oscar nomination, and Fred Zinnemann's Julia, for which he received an Academy Award. As for Bunker, he would go on to receive credit, along with Djordje Milicevic and Paul Zindel, for the nail-biting action film Runaway Train (1985). Directed by Andrei Konchalovsky ('the best director I've ever worked for'), and starring Jon Voight ('based on somebody I'd known') and Eric Roberts ('there were a lot of kids in prison like Eric, who were wannabes'), the story, adapted from an original screenplay by Kurasawa, concerns two escapees from prison, who find themselves in the Alaskan wilderness, having commandeered a train that literally cannot be stopped.

While Bunker's services are often sought by directors in search of a touch of realism regarding prison life or crime, it seemed logical that he would eventually go into acting. Though he tends to be typecast, Bunker has now appeared in some 20 films, usually playing a professional criminal, the most notable of which is his portrayal of Mr Blue in Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs - a film influenced by Straight Time, which Tarantino studied before embarking on the project. Besides Reservoir Dogs and a small part in Straight Time, Bunker has appeared in the likes of The Long Riders, Runaway Train, The Running Man, Tango & Cash, and Animal Factory.

Bunker's most recent film adaptation is Animal Factory. A follow up to No Beast So Fierce, the Bunker's 1977 novel, the film concerns Ron Decker, a middle-class 25-year-old, sentenced to San Quentin for what he thought would be a minor drugs charge. The sordid reality of everyday life in prison comes as a shock, and Decker, if he wants to survive, must come to terms with it. At the heart of the story is the relationship - essentially, a platonic love affair - between Decker and Earl, a long-term convict, who takes it upon himself to instruct the younger man on the brutal protocol of prison life and the strategies essential for survival. Directed by Steve Buscemi, with Bunker and John Steppling sharing the screenwriting credits, this 2000 film, which stars Willem Dafoe, Edward Furlong and Mickey Rourke, was shot outside Philadelphia at Holmsburg Prison in a mere 29 days. With one film (Trees Lounge) and TV episodes of Oz and Homicide under his belt, Buscemi proves himself adept at depicting the vulnerabilities of inmates (including Rourke who plays Decker's transvestite cell-mate) and the claustrophobic environment in which they must live. Surprisingly low key, the film is a timely critique of the modern penal system and, at the same time, a throwback to the social problem dramas of the late 1940s.

Bunker's next novel, Little Boy Blue (1981), focuses on an 11-year-old boy who rebels against the system. To protect himself from society, he resorts to violence, which escalates until he's finally incarcerated. He escapes, is rearrested and once again put behind bars. There he finds his only means of liberating himself from the mental confines of prison life is through literature. This book, like Animal Factory, contains autobiographical elements, and, though courting a mainstream audience, is personal in nature. After Little Boy Blue, 15 years would pass before Bunker's next novel, Dog Eat Dog, which might have gone unpublished had not Bunker found a new agent through fellow writer James Ellroy (Bunker had written a yet to be made script for Ellroy's Suicide Hill). About a group of ex-cons in search of one last score, Dog Eat Dog, on the one hand, articulates the tension between going straight and returning to a life of crime, and, on the other hand, examines the difference between old style gangsters and more recent coke-inspired hoodlums. Here the friendship that exists between the ex-cons is put to the test as they plan an armed robbery that eventually goes wrong. The novel reads like a modern day High Sierra. But Bunker is not about to become another WR Burnett, not so long as he writes fiction that is self-referential and so openly critical of society. Following Dog Eat Dog came Bunker's long-awaited 1999 autobiography, Mr Blue - Memoirs of a Renegade (entitled Education of a Felon in the US), which provides the reader with the low down on the writer's notorious past. Like George V Higgins, Bunker does not consider himself a crime writer, unless, as he says, 'Dreiser, Dostoyevksy and Truman Capote are crime writers'. Crime is simply the milieu Bunker knows best. As he puts it, 'I write novels that happen to be about crime and criminals because I know crime and criminals better than anyone else. At least better than anyone else who can write.'

Courted as the person who understands not only prison life, but the criminal mind, Bunker occupies a special place in Hollywood. Consequently, film people treat him with cautious respect. Some even fear him. But Bunker takes a realistic approach to his work: 'Writers are well paid... I am treated well. I have always had directors who I respected and who respected me. Again, I am not just a screen writer. I'm essentially a book writer.' With Hollywood capable of sinking to criminal-like depths, Bunker maintains that most thieves have more honour than the average Hollywood agent. Bunker has influenced an assortment of directors and writers. When making Heat, director Michael Mann gave the entire crew a copy of No Beast So Fierce to read. Mann's 1995 film reflects Bunker's professional attitude to crime - except, as Bunker says, for the hiring of a fellow criminal whom no one in the gang knows nor has worked with before. What's more, Jon Voight goes beyond Hoffman's performance in Straight Time, playing a character that closely resembles the writer. Says Bunker, 'They had my picture in the make-up room. If you look at Jon Voight in the movie, he looks just like me, so much so that when I go with Danny Trejo, a friend of mine who was in the film, to a restaurant, people say, "Oh, you guys were great." They know it's him and they just assume that I'm Jon Voight.'

In pursuing verisimilitude, Bunker challenges his audience to reach an understanding with the world he once inhabited. While his fiction remains evocative, informative, interesting and entertaining, his approach to the business of screenwriting is never less than straightforward. Attempting to make a living without compromising himself any more than necessary, Bunker stakes out his own ground, saying, 'I'm not going to do a script for free. I'll do it for minimum, but you can't ask me to do it for nothing. They always want to fuck the writer. It really is true.'

Woody Haut's book, From Heartbreak and Vine: the Fate of Hardboiled Writers in Hollywood, is published by Serpent's Tail. No Beast So Fierce is published by No Exit Press.

Posted at 12:00AM Monday 01 Jan 2007