INTERVIEW: What was it like to spend an evening with Charles Bukowski? Now we have the answer.
Photo: You Never Had It is a new documentary depicting an evening with famed American author Charles Bukowski. Photo courtesy of Kino Lorber / Provided by official site with permission.
Throughout the illustrious career of Italian journalist Silvia Bizio, she has interviewed many important culture figures and important names that have gone down in the annals of history. When Hollywood Soapbox recently caught up with her, she was taking a momentary break from profiling Oliver Stone as the filmmaker went around Italy on his book tour for the new memoir Chasing the Light.
One of Bizio’s most interesting connections over the years came in the 1970s and 1980s when she covered famed author Charles Bukowski. What began as a simple assignment blossomed into a long friendship and many visits that Bizio paid to the writer’s house in San Pedro, California, where he lived with his wife Linda Lee Beighle. Together they would smoke cigarettes, drink wine and talk, talk, talk into the early hours of the next day.
Luckily, for many of these conversations the cameras were rolling, and Bizio and her son, director Matteo Borgardt, recently unearthed the tapes of these thought-to-be-lost Bukowski interviews. Together they edited some of the best material together for the recently released documentary You Never Had It — An Evening With Bukowski, a film currently available on the Kino Marquee virtual platform. Borgardt directed the feature, while Bizio produced and also serves as one of the on-camera subjects.
Bukowski “was already a legend, very popular in Italy when I came to this country,” Bizio said in a recent phone interview. “I was already reading him, and I went to Los Angeles in 1976 with a scholarship for a master’s and a PhD at UCLA. And toward the end, a few years later, I was starting already to think about becoming a journalist, but I was still studying. I wrote him a letter through his publishing company, Black Sparrow Press, and then I wasn’t hearing anything back. So I didn’t even think about it, and then it turns out the letter had been held at the publishing company. Finally he received it a couple months later, and he wrote me back a letter signed with one of the signature little figures that he was always signing his name with on so many of his books. He invited me to his house to do this interview.”
That initial interview was in 1977 or 1978, and the evening went over so well that Bizio was invited back again, and again, and again. A friendship formed, and Bukowski stopped being a journalistic subject and more of an acquaintance. Bizio was even invited to the writer’s wedding.
“I used to go to his house and have long nights,” she said. “Nights of talking and drinking until late, sometimes with other people; sometimes it would just be us. The person who I dedicate the film to, Fernanda Pivano … she was sort of a mentor of mine, and she was a lady who brought the Beat Generation to Italy really. She translated a lot of the Beat Generation writers, and she knew Bukowski. She used to stay at my house when she would come to Los Angeles, and one day we went to his house in San Pedro together. He was quite the gentleman, so the relationship went on for several years.”
The many interviews and long nights only ended when Bizio gave birth to her son, and her free time was limited. So that was the end of her “crazy drinking nights,” as she put it.
Looking back on the experience and the friendship, the journalist is amazed how much mutual trust they built up in a relatively short amount of time. “I think it was pretty fast,” she said. “I was young. I was 27-28, I guess, and I think we developed pretty much right way an affinity. I must say I adored at the time his writing. … I wasn’t intimidated by him, and I think he found me fun. Keep in mind, Linda Lee was always also at our talks. There was also a friendship that developed with her, too. I didn’t feel any kind of strange feelings coming from him. He was quite a gentleman. He was always very polite with me. I think he had a trust, and I think that was the magic of what transpires in this little film is that you could see there was a sense of trust.”
The story of how Bizio and her son found these lost tapes is worthy of a movie itself. In the intervening years since Bukowski’s death, she would often think back to their conversations and interviews in the late 1970s and 1980s, and clawing at the back of her mind was where the recordings were housed. The journalist renewed her interest in finding them because she was asked by a team of researchers whether she had any unedited photographs of the author. Bizio knew she had some, especially of Bukowski’s wedding, but she couldn’t place where they might be.
“So I started really seriously thinking about those tapes,” she said. “At the time, we also had a house in Rome, so I kept thinking maybe I’ll go back to Rome. And I couldn’t find them anywhere, and then I told my son, in that crazy garage of ours, we’ve got to find those tapes. They have to be somewhere, and so we started taking down the old boxes. It really went that way, and we found this box. And in the box there were the original tapes and the dubs, the copies that I had made at the time.”
The beneficiaries of Bizio’s searching are the audience members who can now relive an intimate evening with one of the most iconic American authors of the 20th century.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
You Never Had It — An Evening With Bukowski, directed by Matteo Borgardt and produced by Silvia Bizio, is now available on the Kino Marquee virtual platform. Click here for more information.
