A movie based on John Fante’s novel, Ask the Dust, opened last week in theaters. It was directed and written by Robert Towne, who wrote "Chinatown." It stars Selma Hayek. I happen to love that novel as well as Fante’s "Wait Until Spring, Bandini." He is one cool writer who has been bundled with Charles Bukowski. But I like him much better.

I found this bit of info on Boing Boing. There’s a also piece about Fante on Salon.

Fante — the name rhymes with Dante, which must have afforded no end of
amusement to someone whose best-known character constantly proclaimed a
desire to be "the world’s greatest writer" — is one of the true bad
boys of 20th century American literature. Born in 1909 and raised in an
Italian American ghetto in, of all places, Boulder, Colo., Fante fits
into no particular niche. Many refer to him as the quintessential L.A.
novelist — not exactly the most glowing of recommendations, but one
that does take in, after all, Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West,
whose "Day of the Locust" was published in 1939, the same year as "Ask
the Dust." (Michael Tolkin, author of "The Player," is a longtime
admirer of Fante’s work. He recently told the Los Angeles Times that if
the Los Angeles school system was serious about its curriculum, it
would "make ‘Ask the Dust’ mandatory reading.")