Edward Bunker

Edward Bunker wrote crime fiction first, and several of his books were adapted for the screen. The unusual thing about his film career is that he tended to be inside the adaptations: he wrote the scripts for Straight Time, Runaway Train and Animal Factory, and acted in all three, as Mickey, as Jonah, and as Buzzard.

As a performer he was cast almost exclusively as men who have done time, or who deal with people who have. He is Mr. Blue in Reservoir Dogs, the credit most people know him by, though it is barely a part. The rest is character work in genre pictures: Capt. Holmes in Tango & Cash, Lenny in The Running Man, the nightwatchman in Miracle Mile, Chadwell in The Long Riders, Cardoza in Relentless. He was still doing it in 2005 as Skitchy Rivers in The Longest Yard.

What he brought to those rooms was a face and a bearing that directors trusted to make four lines land without help from the script. This catalog holds his screen credits rather than his novels, so the writing his reputation actually rests on has to be tracked down somewhere else.