As the underworld turns

Interview, Sept, 1996 by Michael Kaplan

The publication of Edward Bunker's first novel, No Beast So Fierce, coincided with his 1973 sentencing for the attempted robbery of a Beverly Hills bank. At that point, Bunker had spent the better part of his thirty-seven years either behind bars or committing crimes (including drug dealing, extortion, forgery, and armed robbery). Upon his release from prison in 1975, Dustin Hoffman - who had optioned No Beast and went on to star in the movie version, Straight Time (1978) - dispatched a limousine to pick him up. Since then, the crime-free Bunker has co-written Runaway Train (1985), acted in Reservoir Dogs (1992) - he was Mr. Blue - and Heat (1995), and penned three more gritty novels. His latest, Dog Eat Dog (St. Martin's Press), is the unrelentingly hard-boiled, reality-based tale of a crime spree gone violently awry.

MICHAEL KAPLAN: During your criminal days, was there an antihero you admired?

EDWARD BUNKER: I always liked the rebels, the bank robbers, the righteous outlaws, the movie characters played by Cagney and Bogart. They glamorized the individual and showed guys with a real sense of honor. I remember Cagney taking vengeance on Bogart for betraying him [in Angels With Dirty Faces, 1938]. They showed me that it was O.K. to kill a squealer. What I didn't like were the mob guys. They would commit crimes at night, then go home and live bourgeois lives.

MK: Is crime glamorized more today than it was in the past?

EB: Criminals, both in movies and life, have gotten more violent, but I'm not sure if art imitates life or life imitates art. If you live in the ghetto, your role models are the glamorized gangsters you see in the movies. The kids today who shoot people have no real existential awareness. I look at some of these rap videos and they remind me of The Birth of a Nation [1915].

MK: So glamorized violence in a movie can inspire someone to commit a crime in a certain style?

EB: Look, I know guys who saw Straight Time, watched the way we robbed the jewelry store, and then committed that exact crime.

MK: How did you become friendly with Caryl Chessman - one of the most vicious criminals of his time - when you were in San Quentin?

EB: Chessman liked me because I beat the shit out of some guy who tried to fuck me. So he had a guard bring me a copy of Argosy magazine with an excerpt from his book, Cell 2455, Death Row. Seeing that was a revelation. It was like God talking to Moses. I figured that if this fucker could get his name on a book and in a magazine, I could do it. Like Chessman, I was a bookworm; we both had high IQs.

MK: Why does Hollywood love crime?

EB: It makes money around the world, and out here they're only interested in money. But there's something else, as well. I see sociopathic deviancy in a lot of actors. You'd be surprised how many movie stars have sympathy for criminals. Actually, their personalities are very similar.