It’s one month and counting until the Twin Cities release of Factotum, the Minnesota-made film based on a semi-autobiographical book by Charles Bukowski. Since filming of Factotum wrapped late in the summer of 2004, anticipation in the local film community has been eclipsed by other higher profile, more star-studded projects—with the fall release of North Country and last summer’s giddiness about the St. Paul filming of Robert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion, it’s not surprising that the relatively low-key Factotum fell off a few radar screens. But since the film’s mastering, earlier this year, Factotum and its stars—Matt Dillon, Marisa Tomei, and Lili Taylor—have started picking up accolades. The film was warmly received at its world premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last May and was later selected for the Sundance Film Festival, where it will screen this month.
Locally, the Twin Cities release of Factotum kicks off with a preview screening, hosted by Lili Taylor, at Walker Art Center on February 3. It opens elsewhere on February 24. When they finally see it, Minnesota filmgoers likely won’t be following Factotum’s job-jumping, binge-drinking, womanizing protagonist as closely as they do its characterization of their home state. After all, while Bukowski’s book was set in Los Angeles, the movie version was adapted for a Minnesota setting. The actors speak in the local patois, for example, and one day soon, a jury of Minnesotan film fans will submit its decision on whether that makes the natives look as goony as some thought it did in 1996’s Fargo (which was made by Minnesota natives, unlike Factotum).
Film boosters were successful in luring Factotum’s Norwegian director and New York producer here, at least in part, because of our surfeit of dumpy buildings. Location manager Shelli Ainsworth, a local, sought out area relics—places she likens to “skid row”—to help paint the film’s vintage, slum-bunker aesthetic. Bars, of course, house many of the film’s key scenes, and Ainsworth put them at Nye’s and Cuzzy’s in Minneapolis, as well as the Dubliner in St. Paul, all of which feature an atmosphere similar to that found by Mickey Rourke’s character at Los Angeles’ the Golden Horn in Bukowski’s 1987 film Barfly.
In Factotum, Matt Dillon plays yet another incarnation of Barfly’s main character, Henry Chinaski, the self-styled writer and drunk at the center of four Bukowski novels. Dillon’s version of Chinaski hops between blue-collar jobs at such Minnesota mainstays as Green and White Taxi and Island Cycle Supply, and makes his home, appropriately enough, at Hennepin Avenue’s ramshackle Fairmont Hotel (made famous by the Tom Waits song, “9th & Hennepin”).
Jim Stark, Factotum’s New York screenwriter and co-producer, thinks the film is something of a time capsule for all these old buildings, many of which find themselves at risk of being bulldozed or refurbished into condominiums. Stark, a big Waits fan, was particularly passionate about capturing the Fairmont. “Look at this place! It’s almost gone,” Stark said, with feeling. It was the summer of 2004, and he was standing on Ninth Street just outside the old hotel as scenes for the movie were being filmed inside. (Within weeks of the project’s completion, a giant orange sign appeared along the Fairmont’s Hennepin Avenue façade, announcing that it soon was to be renovated.)
Many concessions were made to adapt Factotum to its new Midwest digs. For example, in the book, Chinaski takes a job as a janitor at a Los Angeles newspaper, where he’s assigned the task of polishing a brass rail. In the movie, however, because the scene was shot at St. Paul City Hall, Dillon instead finds himself polishing the highly visible Vision of Peace statue, which depicts a Native American. And, of course, Bukowski’s version of Chinaski wasn’t fluent in the dialect of our North Star state, nor did he work a stint at the Gedney Pickle Factory in Chaska.—Christy DeSmith
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