Colin Farrell starring as John Fante

Arturo Bandini is back to on the large screen. After a boring Joe Mantegna (who starred with Ornella Muti in "Wait Until Spring Bandini") here comes today's raging star, Colin Farrell (S.W.A.T., Daredevill, Intermission) directed by Robert Towne, production by Tom Cruise. It seems the moment has finally come for the author of "Ask the Dust" to step on the front stage. This time the masterpiece of the writer from Boulder will be made into a film - twenty years after his death on 18 may 1983. Alongside Farrell as Bandini, Camilla Lopez will be played by prominent actress Salma Hayek; and Hellfrick (the protagonist's next room neighbor in the Bunker Hill hotel) will be played by Donald Sutherland. Filming will start in South Africa beginning March 2004, and its debut is scheduled for 2005. In an interview Robert Towne told Variety that he was almost "embarrassed to admit that he had been thinking of 'Ask the Dust' since 1970".

Towne is among the best known scriptwriters in Hollywood; he is the author of the whole Mission: Impossible saga, Greystoke, Heaven Can Wait, The Last Detail, Chinatown, Shampoo, and The Two Jakes. He stated his first encounter with "Ask the Dust" was during the documentary collection for "Chinatown" and that Fante's novel was "…the only book I found that made me understand how people talked at the time". A movie with such casting, produced by Tom Cruise and distributed by Steven Spielberg's Dreamworks, is almost a guarantee of worldwide success. This story is among the best loved by Fante's lovers (a true army, if you read below) and tells about a man, Arturo Bandini divided between his love of literature and his other love for the gorgeous Camilla Lopez, a Mexican waitress.

The Abruzzese reading Fante find in his stories the father's (and John's) Abruzzo, the hard work as a mason, the cold of the mountains, the humiliations of early 20th century immigrants, the will to make it, their desperate endurance and pride. Fante is one of those writers whose Abruzzese roots envelop his whole works. His father Nicola (Nick) left Torricella Peligna, a small center in the province of Chieti, in 1901. John was born in Colorado (amid snow-capped mountains so much alike the Abruzzo landscape) in 1909. After his best-selling novel "Wait for Spring Bandini" (1938) and "Ask the Dust" (1939), he was sucked into Hollywood showbiz, and for decades he worked with the major movie companies as a screenplay writer, leaving his art aside.

He was rediscovered thanks to Charles Bukowski in the late Seventies, blind and legless due to diabetes, and by then approaching his life's end. But in his works, Americans and especially Los Angeles inhabitants can discover all the love he felt for their city. According to Robert Towne, "Ask the Dust" is by far the greatest Los Angeles novel, even better than "The Day of the Locust". This is a much deserved consecration, even if 20 years after John Fante's death.