FANTE ON FILM: There may be good news for all of us looking for a movie to match “Chinatown.” Writer-director Robert Towne has adapted John Fante’s novel “Ask the Dust” into a film that was screened last week in Denver. It stars Colin Farrell as Fante’s alter-ego Arturo Bandini, who travels from Colorado to L.A. during the 1930s to write the great American novel. Fante made the Boulder-to-Hollywood trip during the Depression and wrote novels and film scripts. He ended up becoming friends with Towne in the 1970s. Towne wrote the “Ask the Dust” script in 1993, ten years after Fante died, but it took more than a decade to get the movie made. Towne has written blockbusters such as “Mission Impossible” and won a screenwriting Oscar for “Chinatown.” So he knows that in Hollywood small movies “like ‘Ask the Dust’ need to struggle to come to life. They must beg, borrow, or steal to get money.” (The quote comes from a 3/17/06 Denver Post article.) In the March 5 L.A. Times Magazine, Towne chronicles his relationship with the legendary Fante and his decades-long struggle to make the film.
