Edward Bunker
Edward Bunker was born in Hollywood, California, United States on December 31st, 1933 and is the Screenwriter. At the age of 71, Edward Bunker biography, profession, age, height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, measurements, education, career, dating/affair, family, news updates, movies, and networth are available.
At 71 years old, Edward Bunker has this physical status:
In prison, Bunker continued to write. While still incarcerated, he finally had his first novel No Beast So Fierce published in 1973, to which Dustin Hoffman purchased the film rights. Novelist James Ellroy said it was "quite simply one of the great crime novels of the past 30 years: perhaps the best novel of the LA underworld ever written". Bunker was paroled in 1975, having spent 18 years of his life in various institutions. While he was still tempted by crime, he now found himself earning a living from writing and acting. He felt that his criminal career had been forced by circumstances; now that those circumstances had changed, he could stop being a criminal.
He published his second novel, Animal Factory to favorable reviews in 1977. The following year saw the release of Straight Time, a film-adaptation of No Beast So Fierce. While it was not a commercial success, it earned positive reviews and Bunker got his first screenwriting and acting credits. Like most of the roles Bunker played, it was a small part, and he went on to appear in numerous movies, such as The Running Man, Tango & Cash and Reservoir Dogs, as well as the film version of Animal Factory, in 2000, for which he also wrote the screenplay. In 1985, he had written the screenplay for Runaway Train, in which he had a small part, as did Danny Trejo thanks to Bunker's help; the two had known each other when they were incarcerated together years before. The film helped launch Trejo's career.
In Reservoir Dogs, he played Mr. Blue, one of two criminals killed during a heist. The film's director, Quentin Tarantino, had studied Straight Time while attending Robert Redford's Sundance Institute. Bunker was the inspiration for Nate, Jon Voight's character in Michael Mann's 1995 crime film Heat; Bunker also worked as an adviser on the film. In The Long Riders, he had a brief role as Bill Chadwell, one of two members of the James-Younger Gang killed during a bank robbery in Northfield, Minnesota.
Prior to his death Bunker assisted in production of short films alongside Canadian director Sudz Sutherland such as "The Confessions of a Taxicab Man", "The Spooky House on Lundy's Lane" and "Angie's Bang". He also wrote and directed a Molson Canadian Cold Shot commercial.
Bunker's hard-boiled and unapologetic crime novels are informed by his personal experiences in a society of criminals in general and by his time in the penal system in particular. Little Boy Blue, in particular, draws heavily on Bunker's own life as a young man. He recounted in an interview, "It has always been as if I carry chaos with me the way others carry typhoid. My purpose in writing is to transcend my existence by illuminating it." A common theme in his fiction is that of men being sucked into a circle of crime at a very young age and growing up in a vicious world where authorities are at worst cruel and at best incompetent and ineffectual, and those stuck in the system can be either abusers or helpless victims, regardless of whether they're in jail or outside. Dennis McLellan wrote:
Bunker said that much of his writing was based on actual events and people he has known.
In Bunker's work, there is often an element of envy and disdain towards the normal people who live outside of this circle and hypocritically ensure that those caught in it have no way out. Most of Bunker's characters have no qualms about stealing or brutalizing others and, as a rule, they prefer a life of crime over an honest job, in great part because the only honest career options are badly paying and low-class jobs in retail or manual labor.
Robert Dellinger met fellow inmate Bunker in 1973 at the federal prison on Terminal Island, where Dellinger taught a creative writing class. They became lifelong friends, with Dellinger making the public announcement of Bunker's death, and saying that "Bunker wrote with energy and a muscular style that very few people have, and his words just literally jump off the page".
Bunker's autobiography, Mr. Blue: Memoirs of a Renegade, was published in 1999.