Patton Oswalt - Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film

Thank you for downloading this Scribner eBook.

Sign up for our newsletter and receive special offers, access to bonus content, and info on the latest new releases and other great eBooks from Scribner and Simon & Schuster.

C LICK H ERE T O S IGN U P

or visit us online to sign up at
eBookNews.SimonandSchuster.com

For Sherman Torgan,
all twenty-four frames of this
are yours

Film is a disease, when it infects your bloodstream, it takes over as the number one hormone... it plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to film is more film.

Frank Capra

Oh Bert, do stop this worrying. You must have heard surely of movie magic. You should be a stunt man, who is an actor, who is a character in a movie, who is an enemy soldier. Wholl look for you amongst all those? People like to believe in things, and policemen are just people. Or so Im told. Frankly, our problem is so simple its almost beneath us. Now listen to me: That door is the looking glass, and inside it is Wonderland. Have faith Alice! Close your eyes and enjoy.

Peter OToole, in Richard Rushs The Stunt Man

Already the present starts plotting its recurrence

somewhere in the future, weaving what happens

in among our fabrics, launching its aroma, its music

imbuing itself into floorboards, plaster, nothing can

stop it, it cant stop itself. You will never have access

to its entirety, and you have asked how to calculate

what resists calculation...

Timothy Donnelly, Dream of the Overlook

This WAS our dream, surrounding us. The fucking studios! Peoples dreams were their business, and they knew their business. They had us by the heart, and we just walked, and looked around, and longed, all the way to the cattle chutes.

Michael Shea, The Extra

No good movie is too long and no bad movie is short enough.

Roger Ebert

Contents

I like to drink.
At my drunkest the worst I do is rewatch
Murder on the Orient Express or fall asleep.
I used to smoke a lot of pot. All it made me do
was go on long walks by myself and laugh at things.
Ive enjoyed my share of LSD and mushrooms.
They exploded my being from the inside out
while I sat and listened to music.

Ive done my due diligence as far as vices,
but Im an unbearable slouch when it comes
to interesting stories connected to them.

This will be either the most interesting or
the most boring addiction memoir youve ever read.
I cant promise it ever gets harrowing,
but I can promise that I triedI really tried
to make it funny.

Here we go.

CHAPTER ONE

Movie Freaks and Sprocket Fiends

The New Beverly Cinema,

May 20, 1995

Listenyou dont have to follow me into the darkness here. Its sunny out. Its a syrupy Los Angeles Saturday afternoon in May of 1995. Were standing on Beverly Boulevard, just west of La Brea. Wide, pleasant street. A few blocks walk from restaurants, some vintage furniture stores, coffee. Midnineties hipsters are wearing what they think is cool that week. Orthodox Jews committed to their wardrobe thousands of years ago and are walking it like they talk it. Lifes going on.

Were about to enter the New Beverly Cinema for a double feature of Billy Wilders 1950 smash-hit, critically acclaimed Sunset Boulevard. Wilder cowrote and directed Sunset Boulevard in 1950, took home an Oscar for alchemizing its brilliance at the typewriter, and saw it nominated for ten more Oscars. Wilder etched his name onto the first year of a new decade with a knife made of ink and celluloid.

I can see you want to say something here but now the Fact Fever is on me, and I bulldoze right over you and keep gabbing.

The second feature on the double bill is Ace in the Hole , Wilders follow-up. Cowritten and directed, again, by Wilder. A man who had not only Sunset Boulevard behind him but also Double Indemnity and The Lost Weekend. He wasnt simply riding a wave of success when he started Ace in the Hole. He was on a three-engine speedboat of triumph and he punched through the waves like a shark gone blood simple on surfer guts. He pushed his winnings back onto a single square at the roulette wheel of cinema and gave it a confident spin.

Wait, let me finish. I know, hang on...

Where was I? Oh yeah Ace in the Hole. That one. The opposite of Sunset Boulevard , success-wise. Double zeroes. House wins. Box office bomb, critical revulsion. Some cynical industry types nicknamed the movie Ass in the Wringer. Poor Wilder got one Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay (back when the writing category for Oscars was divided up between Motion Picture Story and Screenplay) and saw Jan Sterling, the lead actress, grab a much-deserved National Board of Review for her sly, reptilian tour de force. The Venice Film Festival tossed an International Award into his bruised, bloodied lap, as well as nominating him for a Golden Lion (which he lost).

Not that the awards stopped there. In 2007 fifty-six years laterAce in the Hole was nominated for a Satellite Award for Best Classic DVD. Which it lost to the fortieth-anniversary edition of The Graduate.

Hang. On. In a minute. Sheesh.

Billy Wilder still had Stalag 17 , Sabrina , The Seven Year Itch , Some Like It Hot and The Apartment ahead of him. At the bottom of this particular valley in his career was a trampoline, apparently.

I could go on, and I do. This is where you start to pull away. Where you should start to pull away. Even though youre talking to a relatively fresh-faced twenty-six-year-old on a sunny sidewalk, you can tell somethings wrong, cant you? The way I talk in unwieldy chunks of paragraphs, rather than inquisitive sentences. Im a boxing glove with a horseshoe inside of it, conversationally. I speak at you. I speak through you. Youve got the queasy feeling you might not even need to be here right now, and Id still spit Facts About Billy Wilder into the afternoon air.

Youre not up for two movies? Hmmm. Wanna just see the one? I mean, youve gotta see Sunset Boulevard. Gotta. Youve never seen it? How can you be alive and I mean, Im definitely seeing both of these, but if you only want to catch Sunset Boulevard and then split, fine with me. There are cameos by Erich von Stroheim and Buster Keaton, and did you know that Jack Webb is... ?

... Really? Youre gonna bail?

Thats cool. Maybe Ill call you later.

I turn to the ticket booth and hand my $5 to Sherman Torgan, the owner and visionary behind the New Beverly. This is my first time, ever, visiting the theater. Sherman stares from the scratched, grimy ticket booth window. White coals glowing under gray glass, those eyes. Ive sat in booths like that before, taking tickets, with zero interest in the customers handing their money through. I stared out at a procession of faces, most of them tilted up and away from me, at the different choices playing at the multiplex I once worked at. The New Beverly has one screen, and Shermans customers know whats playing. And they rarely tilt their heads up. Their eyes are, more often than not, aimed at the ground. Or, like mine, into the middle distance.

Sherman takes my money and hands me two pale, orange tickets. Theres no one to tear them when I enter, passing to his right and crossing the six or seven feet of dingy carpet to the concession stand, where the air becomes saltier, greasier, stickier and all-around more delicious as I approach. I weigh the cost of a medium popcorn against a large one. In the booth, Sherman files away the memory of my face. He remembers everyone, Im soon to discover. In four years, to the exact day Ive purchased the ticket thats now in my pocket, Ill find out exactly how sharp Shermans memory is.