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

by Patton Oswalt

  Eventually.

  But back then, still in my carb-burning twenties, I didn’t see the flesh avalanche coming. I didn’t see a lot of things happening around me. Like my bosses’ growing frustration with my constant whining about our show’s not being more innovative. Or my then-girlfriend’s disillusion with our relationship. Or a lot of my friends’ avoidance of me, especially if there was the threat of movies entering the conversation. I had been an Asperger’s-y movie fan when I got to Los Angeles three months earlier. And now? After scoping out where all of the first-run, rep, museum and campus screenings were? I was a jabbering, repellent acolyte.

  Oh man. I just looked at my old calendar pages from May of 1995 through July of the same year? And keep in mind—I was writing down every movie I saw in a movie theater. And only theater viewings. So this wasn’t counting movies I watched on TV—either broadcast or on VHS or a then-rare DVD.

  Just in theaters: twenty-two films. Some old classics like Kiss of Death and Steamboat Bill, Jr. New, quality films like Muriel’s Wedding and Crumb. But mostly crap. Crap either because it’d come out and I wanted to see everything (Die Hard with a Vengeance, Batman Forever) or crap because it was in one of my Five Movie Books.

  Bloodsucking Freaks (Sunday, June 18, at the Sunset 5 at midnight), for instance, which had some weirdly brilliant performances because the director, Joel M. Reed, pulled his cast from experienced off-Broadway actors. It’s a schizophrenic experience, watching that movie. Cheap gore and clumsy gallows humor delivered with genuine panache and skill. The disconnect is more disturbing than the red Karo syrup dripping off of the obvious mannequin body parts. Or Maniac, on another Sunday at midnight at the Sunset 5.I Now that I think of it, they were doing some sort of exploitation film festival on successive Sundays. I was determined to see every single one. They were all listed in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film, anyway. Who cared that I was showing up for Monday morning pitch meetings sleep deprived, incoherent and still coughing up shards of popcorn kernel husks? I was becoming a director.

  And now we get to August of 1995. The mustard sunshine daggers of late-summer Los Angeles throbbed through the slats of my office window. And once it got dark, and relatively cool, I’d be off to the movies.

  This is what one month’s movie menu looked like:

  Friday, August 4,

  Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb at the New Beverly

  I skipped a Friday night MADtv taping to go see this, which was probably my third viewing at that point. But it was the first of mine on the big screen and, seeing as it was listed in two of my Five Movie Books, a can’t-miss.

  I’ve seen this movie at least four more times since that screening, but this is the one I remember the most. Probably because I was so thirsty to receive it. I’d spent the day struggling with some half-assed sketch idea of mine that I couldn’t find an engine for, a nebulous half-a-joke that stared back at me from my Mac’s screen like a snide drunk I was facing down in a bar. And now—Kubrick. Especially in Strangelove, a movie at once sprawling and precise, inhuman and tragic.

  I remember this screening because, when Peter ­Sellers appears for the first time as Strangelove, reversing himself in his wheelchair (while keeping his head at the same jaunty angle and his smile in the same forced rictus as FDR), the crowd I was seeing it with exploded with applause. And we’d already seen him as Colonel Mandrake and President Muffley. But here he was, a much-­imitated, recontextualized pop culture reference, springing up from his place of origin. Imitation leads to exhilaration when you follow it back to its source.

  I left the screening feeling recharged in my nascent comedy snobbery. If Kubrick could wring laughs from nuclear annihilation at the height of the Cold War, while also throwing in Nazis, sexual frustration and the beginning of the nerds vs. jocks schism (Sellers’s Muffley vs. George C. Scott’s General Turgidson), then I should be going even farther with my sketches, with my stand-up, right?

  Sunday, August 6,

  La Jetée at the New Beverly

  Chris Marker’s moody, near-motionless meditation on the costs of time travel and nostalgia—barely half an hour long but leaving you feeling like you’d just been dragged through a lifetime’s worth of emotion and loss. This must have been showing with other movies—Sans Soleil? Maybe a Tarkovsky? But all I wrote down was La Jetée.

  To go from Kubrick’s massive, orchestral doomsday screwball to, two days later, Marker’s elegant single postapocalypse stanza was the kind of thrilling drop that only the true film freak gets to experience. It’s like driving, listening to the radio, being completely at the whim of whatever the deejay wants to play. Instead of some perfect mix tape that you’ve assembled, making you thus fully aware of the shifts in tone to come, you surf in the foam of chance. I drove cross-country in 1992 and one night outside of Denver, listening to a classic rock station, the end of Pink Floyd’s “Breathe (Reprise)” was winding down. The words “to hear the softly spoken magic spells” floated away on the highway ink. And then a beat of silence and then Elton John’s “Saturday Night’s Alright for Fighting” sneered out of the speakers, a hilarious, drunken youthful rebuke to Roger Waters’s morose musings on wasted time. I remember laughing out loud at the gear-stripping brilliance of the reversal.

  I felt the same way leaving that Sunday afternoon screening of La Jetée. Only I wasn’t laughing. Again, I was frustrated, seeing two more of the extremes that film could exist at. I was writing on a sketch show for the Fox network. Why wasn’t I summoning and executing brilliance like that in the stuff I pitched? Why was I being so lazy?

  Wednesday, August 9,

  The Bicycle Thief at the New Beverly

  The first and only time I’ve ever seen this. I probably need to see it again, now that I’m a dad. At the time, in my twenties and thinking I’d never get married or burden myself with kids (I needed all the sleep I could get if I was going to make all of the before-dawn call times a director has to deal with), I loved this film academically. Recovering a stolen bicycle becomes as edge-of-your-seat important as, say, blowing up a Death Star or defeating a twenty-five-foot killer shark. A quick meal of fried bread is the equivalent to the father and son bonding over the table, of a warrior’s victory banquet. You’re rooting for two people you probably see a dozen times a day, in a 7-Eleven, in line at the DMV. It’s the kind of movie that makes you realize that each person you glance at, interact with or ignore is an epic film or thrilling novel you’ll never get to experience. Makes you bless the grandeur of life and curse it at the same time for being too painfully narrow and brief.

  What if I could successfully pitch a sketch about a guy just trying to retrieve a wallet he left at a Laundromat? Could I smuggle even a small slice of The Bicycle Thief into a filmed short for MADtv? Would they let me direct it?

  Thursday, August 17,

  Hiroshima Mon Amour at the New Beverly

  I know people hold this and The Seventh Seal up as examples of why art films or foreign films suck, but for once? The dullards are right. I hated this movie when I saw it in college but I had to see it again to make sure. It wasn’t even in one of my Five Movie Books. But I watched it and it pissed me off all over again and ended up confusing me, a year later, when I went to see Resnais’s Last Year at Marienbad, which is an even bigger arty-farty fuck you and I ended up really liking it.

  Sigh.

  Saturday, August 19,

  Belle de Jour at the Los Feliz 3

  Buñuel made this movie in 1967, fer chrissakes. That’s all I kept thinking when I was watching it. Casual prostitution, and boredom, and boredom with sex treated hilariously? And what was in that box? None of the whores would agree to its owner’s entreaty, before Catherine Deneuve shrugged her flawless shoulders and all but looked at the camera like a Flintstones animal appliance muttering, “It’s a living.”

  Something shocking, something that goes too far—that
’s where my thinking has to be from now on, I raged to myself, leaving the theater and crossing Vermont Street to the House of Pies for a late evening slice of pecan and some coffee. It’s 1995, fer chrissakes. Kurt Cobain and GG Allin are dead. What the hell am I doing with my life?

  Friday, August 25,

  Kids at the Sunset 5

  Here it was. Here was the next shocking thing, as far as I was concerned. I was mesmerized by the energy and heat and sweat and cum up on the screen. It made me resee my teenage, suburban years as maybe not so bland as I remember them. Because I suddenly remembered the constant, tormenting fuck-throb of adolescence, how it yanked and shoved me in some pretty embarrassing directions, how I could scorch away the wick of an entire day on the distant promise of sex or even a glimpse of female flesh. There I was, up on the screen, fractured into a dozen different inarticulate, real characters, pinging around a grimy New York City on an even hotter summer day than the one in Do the Right Thing. That movie ended with a racial apocalypse. Kids begins and ends with a sexual one, only it’s an apocalypse at plague pace. I’ve never seen Kids again. I haven’t needed to.

  I ought to point a camera at my life. Or the people around me, I thought, leaving that screening. I had that weekend before a Monday morning MADtv pitch meeting. Now I had Buñuel, and a stolen bicycle and Slim Pickens riding a nuclear warhead and teenage lust and the heartbreak of time travel in my head. I think I went out the next night and got Russian-wedding drunk at the sketchiest bar I could find. I probably ended up staring at the sky while the scotch and ginger ale detached my mind from my body. I was going to pull down the universe and strain its essence through a comedy sketch, is what I probably thought. Scotch-drunk. Film-drunk. Self-drunk.

  Monday, August 28, eleven a.m.

  MADtv pitch meeting

  My head feels like a rotted cantaloupe, and my body is a single corpse in a cosmic, mass grave. I’ve got three pages of handwritten notes—partially from Saturday night (illegible) and partially from that Monday morning (trying to decipher the drunken, roller-coaster penmanship over McDonald’s coffee and a McMuffin).

  Garry Campbell and Brian Hartt, both veterans of The Kids in the Hall, have each finished their individual pitches. Brilliant, as always. Brian is weeks away from becoming the head writer. Then Blaine Capatch, my office-mate, pitches six or seven wicked, literate, oddball sketches.

  Over to me.

  “What if . . . now, follow me here . . .”

  Everyone’s following me. Go ahead.

  “It’s a bunch of kids . . . like, younger. In their early twenties. And there’s been this apocalypse. They’re living in ruins. The ruins of Los Angeles. You can just make out it’s Los Angeles in the ruins. And there’s this one girl we’re following, her mom, you see, is working in this brothel. Like, okay, wait. They’ve turned a ruined bicycle shop into a brothel. And there are these mutants coming in who want to do certain sex acts.

  “Okay, no, wait. What the sketch is about is, there’s this brothel in this postnuclear wasteland, and it’s a younger girl in her twenties, and she’s arguing with her mom about how uncool her mom is about not being up on all of the new mutant sex acts that everyone’s doing.

  “But what we reveal, what we do as a twist is show that the mom is actually a time traveler, and it’s the mom taking her daughter, uh, forward in time, because she’s worried that her daughter getting into skateboarding will lead her to drugs or dangerous sex, only the mom is such a hysterical prude that she’s zapped them forward to this crazy, violent, postapocalyptic scenario. It’s like the mom is saying, ‘See where all the skateboarding is going to take you?’ Only this is the mom’s overkill method of doing that.

  “And then what’s worse for the mom is that her daughter still isn’t shocked, and is more embarrassed that her mom is too uptight to have weird, uh, tentacle sex with mutants.

  “Oh, and we could do it in segments, and keep interspersing it throughout the episode, little short films that, when you get to the end, tell this whole story. It’d be really, uh, innovative.”

  Silence. Then Adam Small, one of the executive producers, with the poise and patience of a saint, says, “Well, write up a version. Let’s see it on paper.”

  “Yeah, okay. I’ll give you a better idea what I’m talking about.”

  Then I go back to my office, play Doom for two hours, and write a sketch about a really dumb doughnut shop employee. They don’t use it. They’re right.

  This is the first time it hits me—maybe I need to change my life.

  Two days later, Wednesday, August 30, I’m back at the New Beverly, seeing a double feature of Blow Out and Dressed to Kill.

  “You really only need to see Blow Out,” says Sherman, tearing my ticket. “Dressed to Kill’s kind of a mess.”

  But they’re both in The Psychotronic Encyclopedia, so I’m in for the duration. And, as it turns out when Dressed to Kill ends? Sherman was right. I really only needed to see Blow Out.

  Less movies, more living. That’s what I’m saying to myself as I walk out onto the street. Gonna make that change, soon . . .

  But a few more hits of celluloid can’t hurt, right?

  Or maybe a massive, brain-shorting overdose?

  * * *

  I. The director of Maniac, Bill Lustig, was there to introduce that screening. A Latino couple, dressed in black leather, sat beside me holding their sleeping baby. It never once woke up, during all of the screaming and stabbings and shotgun blasts of Maniac. Bill introduced his masterpiece succinctly: “I made this film on a wing and a prayer back in 1979. It stars Joe Spinell—” At that moment the Latino dad barked out, “Joe Spinell fuckin’ rules!” Bill answered, “God bless you. Joe’s dead now. Okay, so I’ll be in the lobby after if any of you have questions. On second thought, no. I won’t. I won’t be there. Enjoy the film.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  Overdosing

  Los Angeles,

  October 21–22, 1995

  A shimmering, satanic, alien insect head is hovering over London and I can’t remember if the dinosaurs are coming back or not.

  I’ve spent all of an autumn weekend, Saturday and Sunday, both days starting at ten a.m. inside the DGA Theater, watching a marathon Hammer film festival.

  With a few exceptions, it’s a very rich, color-saturated marathon. It’s a marathon where I’m seeing a lot of the same people over and over again. Peter Cushing. Christopher Lee. The indispensable, sad-eyed Michael Ripper. Buxom women with creamy skin and tight, frightened mouths and impeccable diction.

  The first day whips by in quick succession: The Revenge of Frankenstein, Die! Die! My Darling!, The Mummy, Prehistoric Women, The Vampire Lovers, The Reptile, The Plague of the Zombies. When Tallulah Bankhead had her meltdown near the end of Die! Die! My Darling! and broke out her secret stash of forbidden lipstick, I was still four hours away from Ingrid Pitt’s bathtub scene in The Vampire Lovers (and the fang marks on many a heaving bosom). It was midnight when I staggered out onto the darkened lot, the plot and details of The Plague of the Zombies already leaking out of my skull forever. I got home, checked off my Psychotronic Encyclopedia and went to sleep.

  Only to wake up the next morning at eight, eat a hurried breakfast and head back to DGA for a ten a.m. screening of X: The Unknown. Followed by When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth, Five Million Years to Earth (Cult Movies volume 3!!!), Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed and Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter.

  Playwright Jack Gelber, who penned The Connection, wrote an interesting essay about overdosing on films. He was living in New York in the sixties, when Times Square was a bleak, sleazy wasteland and the all-day, all-night grindhouse theaters ruled the landscape. And, in the middle of a personal crisis, he spent several sleepless days wandering from one theater to the next, watching film after film, nonstop. And he got to a point where all of the films he had seen—gangster pictures, Weste
rns, schlocky sex romps and Z-grade horror movies—started to blend together into one massive, daymare-fueled meganarrative. Humphrey Bogart and Randolph Scott having sex with space aliens.

  Now, on a Sunday evening, near the end of the brilliant Five Million Years to Earth, when our scientist hero, Quatermass, is realizing that maybe our perceptions of God and the devil are just psychic mind-slog from a crashed alien spaceship, and the Very Very British James Donald is riding the construction crane into the glowing insect alien’s head to destroy the vision virus that’s infecting the planet, I experienced . . . slippage.

  I was partially exhausted, which didn’t help. But suddenly the alien insect head turned into Tallulah Bankhead’s face, hovering over Hobbs End, London, screaming about lipstick and God. Mummies, cavewomen and lesbian vampires came spilling out of her mouth. A gigantic Peter Cushing, tight-lipped and driven as Dr. Frankenstein, appeared to sew Tallulah’s mouth shut. But her hellish progeny were loose on the streets, and somewhere nearby Christopher Lee opened the door to the reptile woman’s cage and she pounced on the shambling mummy, sinking her tusky fangs into his powdery, rotted shoulder.

  I blinked, hard. I was awake. I’d made friends with a schoolteacher named Dana, who was also there for the duration. He seemed more amused by the lineup of films than I was. He also, probably, didn’t have a pagan shrine of Five Movie Books crouching at home for him to check the titles off in. He wasn’t quite the sprocket fiend, like me, with absolutely nothing else to do on a weekend but stack it with films. Oh shit, I realize now I was judging him.