Promotional Postcard and DVD for Documentary “Born Into This” (2003)

This package includes the DVD of the Film Born into This as well as a promotional postcard for the March 21, 2003, showing at Cinema 21 in Portland, Oregon.

It measures approximately 6” x 4.25”.

It is in Mint Condition other than a pencil price mark on the back.

The DVD does not appear to have scratches and should play as if new. It comes in a high-quality case, with tough plastic and a button that releases the CD from the case.

Note: Should any used CD or DVD recording have issues while playing, I will refund your money and you can keep the CD/DVD.

Review Excerpt from the legendary Film Critic Roger Ebert:
He was 24 when he had sex for the first time. She was a 300-pound prostitute. He remembers her name. As he tells the story, he does an extraordinary thing. He blushes. Here was a man who made a living and became a legend by being hard-boiled, and he blushes, and in that moment we glimpse the lonely, wounded little boy inside.

John Dullaghan's "Bukowski: Born Into This" is a documentary about the poet and novelist who died in 1994. It draws from many interviews, from footage of poetry readings, and from the testimony of his friends, who include Sean Penn, Harry Dean Stanton, Bono and the publisher John Martin, who started the Black Sparrow Press specifically to publish his work. There are also the memories of his wife, Linda Lee Bukowski, who loved him and cared for him, despite scenes like one in the film where he kicks her and curses at her.

That was the booze talking, you could say, except when precisely was Bukowski sober? He drank with dedication and abandon for most of his adult years, slowed only by illness toward the end. And he chain-smoked little cigarettes named Mangalore Ganeesh Beedies. "You can get them in any Indian or Pakistani store," he told me in 1987. "They're what the poor, poor people smoke in India. I like them because they contain no chemicals and no nicotine, and they go very well with red wine."

Linda Lee Bukowski, it must be said, possessed extraordinary patience to put up with him, but then she understood him, and his life was often as simple as that: A plea for understanding. I sense from his work and from a long day spent with him that even when he was drunk and angry, obscene and hurtful, he was not the aggressor; he was fighting back.

The movie opens with Bukowski on a stage for a reading, very drunk, threatening to come down into the audience and kick some ass. There is another reading where, backstage, he asks the organizer, "You got a little pot on the stage I can vomit in?" He drank most every day, red wine for preference, and his routine usually included a visit to the track, a return home, and long hours at his typewriter with classical music on the radio. For all of his boozing, he was, like the prodigious Thomas Wolfe, amazingly productive.

San Francisco -- where to this day you can find a shelf of Bukowski, most of it with the bold Black Sparrow lettering on the spine.

John Martin, the publisher, says he offered Bukowski a monthly stipend to live on, with the condition that he quit his job at the post office. One of his first novels was Post Office, a snarl at the daily torture of hard work under stupid bureaucrats. It snarled, yes, but it also sang, and was romantic and funny. It came directly from Bukowski's life, as did such autobiographical novels as Women and Hollywood.

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