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The legend of the novel Ask the Dust and the making of the movie based on the title are far more interesting than the finished product.
Alas, I was more absorbed listening to Robert Towne, the legendary writer responsible for what many consider the finest screenplay ever written, Chinatown, on the Ask the Dust special features than I was in watching the movie.
Towne, who turns 72 at the end of this year, talks about knowing John Fante, who wrote the Depression-era Ask the Dust, and about Los Angeles, the city of his birth. As anyone who knows Towne's movies appreciates, the writer dearly loves and is fascinated to this day by the City of Angels. (Towne must be a rarity in Hollywood, someone actually born in Los Angeles.)
Of course, on the DVD Towne also talks about Hollywood and the movie business and the tortured and protracted process in turning this forgotten novel into a small movie, released on DVD this week after a very short run in the arthouses of the continent. Fante gave Towne a first edition copy of Ask the Dust in 1971, and Towne wrote the screenplay in 1993. Turning the book into a movie was clearly a labour of love for Towne, who knew he didn't exactly have a property that shouted blockbuster. (It's hard to imagine that too many people in Hollywood know more about the movie business - on creative or business levels - than Robert Towne.)
Towne thought Ask the Dust would make a compelling film. He did not, however, labour under "any illusions that others would necessarily feel the same way."
It was a story rife with racism, the characters are unsympathetic - as Towne says, "actors wanted to do it, and studios didn't.''
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The story of actors and studios, you could argue.
(The actors likely just wanted to work with Towne, one would posit.)
At one point - actually a pre-Pirates of the Caribbean point - Johnny Depp wanted to star as Ask the Dust's Arturo Bandini, a struggling writer living through the hard-times L.A. in the early '30s. Colin Farrell, positioned well enough on the A-list at the time presumably to muscle the project along, ended up as Bandini.
If you are wondering about the Irish Farrell playing the Italian Bandini, you are well to wonder. Farrell seems miscast, and his strange performance suggests none of the inner turmoil of this character.
Most of the movie is given over to Bandini's bizarre, bickering relationship with a Mexican waitress, played with changing pitch by Salma Hayek.
Ask the Dust is about racism, writing and the peculiar nature of Los Angeles at that time, but even the great Towne, who also directed the film, can't make this one work. It is agonizingly slow and silly enough to elicit giggles at the wrong time. It is beautiful to look at and, as with any Towne film, the writing is often fine, but the actors are not up to the challenge, nor was Towne able to translate the book in a meaningful way. (Either that or the book wasn't up to Towne's standards.) You can see the ending a mile off, in a mawkish MOW-fashion that is hardly worthy of Robert Towne.
Go back to the special features and listen to Towne talk about the history of Los Angeles, an adolescent city at the time of Ask the Dust. It was, he says, a "city of the very old and very young,'' a "city of fractured families or no families at all.''
There is a parallel, Towne argues, between the character's fates and that of the city's. Not fully realized in the film version of Ask the Dust, unfortunately.
Here's hoping that Hollywood lets Towne make his own next great L.A. story.
ASK THE DUST - original rating: 2 SUNS (out of 5); DVD rating: 2 SUNS (for the movie, 4 for the special features)