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“I didn’t understand what the ring was. I couldn’t interpret it in my life…but I think at that time I was taking it too literally. Ultimately I came to understand that the ring is everywhere. It depends on how much of a fighter you are in life. The hardest opponent you have is yourself.” - Martin Scorsese

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“Charles Bukowski was a prolific underground writer who used his his poetry and prose to depict the depravity of urban life and the downtrodden in American society. A cult hero, Bukowski relied on experience, emotion, and imagination in his work, using direct language and violent and sexual imagery. While some critics found his style offensive, others claimed that Bukowski satirized the machismo attitude through his routine use of sex, alcohol abuse, and violence. “Without trying to make himself look good, much less heroic, Bukowski writes with a nothing-to-lose truthfulness which sets him apart from most other ‘autobiographical’ novelists and poets,” commented Stephen Kessler in the San Francisco Review of Books, adding: “Firmly in the American tradition of the maverick, Bukowski writes with no apologies from the frayed edge of society.” Michael Lally in Village Voice maintained that “Bukowski is…a phenomenon. He has established himself as a writer with a consistent and insistent style based on what he projects as his ‘personality,’ the result of hard, intense living.”- Poetry Foundation

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Hunter S. Thompson was just 22-years-old in 1959 when he first began writing The Rum Diary, or what he initially called “the great American rum novel.” He envisioned it as something of a contemporary and rum-soaked version of The Great Gatsby, one of Thompson’s favorite books. Based on the time Thompson spent working for an English language newspaper in San Juan, Puerto Rico, The Rum Diary fictionally chronicles the drunken and debauched life of Paul Kemp, an American journalist sauntering through San Juan with a savage lust for women, blood and booze. Once finished, Thompson spent nearly a decade revising and shopping it to publishers before reverting to other projects. It wasn’t until 1998 that Thompson was finally able to publish The Rum Diary.

Now, more than a decade later Thompson’s great American rum novel will make its way to the big screen Oct. 28, starring Johnny Depp as Paul Kemp and Amber Heard as Kemp’s enigmatic love interest, Chenault. Celebrating yet another milestone in Thompson’s ever-growing list of achievements, we’ve gathered some of Thompson’s most memorable stories from Playboy magazine in one place on Playboy.com and have curated the iPlayboy “On Beyond Gonzo” Commission of Thompson-inspired pieces and articles featuring the savage illustrations of Ralph Steadman. -   James H. Ewert Jr., Playboy

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A gang called The Warriors are framed for killing a gang leader trying to unite all the gangs in New York City. With other gangs gunning for them they must get back to the home turf of Coney Island…

Directed by Walter Hill, and written by David Shaber and Walter Hill. Based on the novel by Sol Yurick.

Starring Michael Beck, James Remar, Dorsey Wright, and Brian Taylor.

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Based on true crimes, the first episode of the Red Riding Trilogy, 1974, stars Andrew Garfield (The Social Network, Boy A) as a rookie journalist working for the Yorkshire Post investigating the disappearance and presumed serial killing of local girls.

Directed by Julian Jarrold, and written by Tony Grisoni.

Starring Andrew Garfield, Sean Bean, David Morrissey, and Rebecca Hall.

Based on the novels of David Peace, the trilogy consists of episodes 1974, 1980, and 1983. Each episode connected by the location and crimes involved, as well as several recurring characters.

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Oliver Barrett

A submission in the Quentin vs. Coen art show which has run through New York and San Fran, and closes out in Los Angeles this weekend at  Beyond Eden Art Fair. Entrance is FREE.

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The Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock, explores the diabolical act of forcing a man to drink-and-drive home in the film North by Northwest.

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From Nicolas Winding Refn, the director of ‘Drive’, and starring Tom Hardy (Inception, RocknRolla), Bronson is based on the true story of Michael Peterson and his alter-ego Charles Bronson, a man that would become known as “the most violent prisoner in Britain”.

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“Since his first novel, “A Drink Before the War” (1994), which introduced his team of pessimistic young detectives, Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, Dennis Lehane has burnished his mystery and crime novels with a beat cop’s back-alley sense of Boston. From “Gone, Baby, Gone,” a novel about the hideous toll of drugs, to “Mystic River,” his agonized glimpse at the long fallout of child abuse, Lehane has scorched a bold — though occasionally melodramatic — image of that city onto readers’ imaginary map of America.

Our literary atlas is going to have to get a lot bigger after “The Given Day,” Lehane’s massive, enormously readable new novel about the Boston police union strike of 1919. This is a rich period of Boston history, and Lehane touches on much of it — the influenza outbreak of 1918, terrorist attacks by anarchist groups, striking American workers, racial tensions in a post-Reconstruction America and, of course, mismanagement of the Boston Red Sox.” - John Freedman, NY Times (Read More)

In 1969, a 14-year-old Beatle fanatic named Jerry Levitan snuck into John Lennon’s hotel room in Toronto and convinced him to do an interview. 38 years later, Levitan, director Josh Raskin and illustrators James Braithwaite and Alex Kurina have collaborated to create an animated short film using the original interview recording as the soundtrack. A spellbinding vessel for Lennon’s boundless wit and timeless message, I Met the Walrus was nominated for the 2008 Academy Award for Animated Short and won the 2009 Emmy for ‘New Approaches’ (making it the first film to win an Emmy on behalf of the internet).

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The Rum Diary is an upcoming film based on the novel of the same name by Hunter S. Thompson. Directed by Bruce Robinson (Withnail & I), and starring Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, Aaron Eckhart, Giovanni Ribisi, and Richard Jenkins.

Paul Kemp (Depp) is an itinerant journalist who grows tired of New York and America under the Eisenhower administration and travels to Puerto Rico to write for The San Juan Star. Kemp begins the habit of drinking rum and becomes obsessed with the woman Chenault (Heard).

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Beat the Reaper by Josh Bazell

In the opening scene of “Beat the Reaper,” the former mob hit man Dr. Peter Brown pauses in the act of disabling a mugger to give readers a paragraph-length tutorial on the architecture of the human arm. Halfway through the paragraph he throws in an asterisk, and in a footnote points out that the lower leg is a lot like the forearm, only less fragile. (Read More)

“Tell me how I should be. Just tell me. I’ll do it.” - Dean

Blue Valentine: Directed by Derek Cianfrance and starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams.

“Jim Helton and Charles Christopher Rubino’s end credits for Cianfrance’s Blue Valentine is a last look of what was and what will not be.

In a managed duality of the intimate and the expansive, a hypnotic racked bokeh of celestial colors spreads across the night sky with Grizzly Bear’s “Alligator” conducting the atmospherics, elevating the experience of the film to something glorious.” - Art of the Title (Read More)