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

by Patton Oswalt

  Dana had one arm. He’d lost the other one to cancer. Being the film freak I was, I never bothered to ask about it further. Or even what his last name was. Not enough time before or between the films. A one-armed schoolteacher, teaching kids in the shitty L.A. school district, probably full of more stories and personality than the electric fables being projected above us. But I was more focused on the mummies and vampires and dinosaurs and aliens to take a deeper interest in an actual, unique human being sitting right next to me. Such was my addiction, at that point. Cut off from the world. A ghost, but breathing and jacketed with flesh.

  I looked over at Dana and he must have seen something in my eyes.

  “You okay?” he whispered.

  I said, “All of these . . . these movies are kind of blending . . .”

  Dana laughed and then suppressed it. “I know what you mean. It’s kind of cool, isn’t it?”

  I didn’t say anything. I was dead set on a course of cutting off more and more human contact in my life—of cutting off more and more life—so that I could devour more movies. You know, to become a director. Though, I imagine, you should probably know something about human dimensions, and connections, and all the facets of emotion, if you’re ever going to want to put anything memorable on-screen. Like Casablanca.

  Or Kids.

  But all I was focused on, in the initial heat of my addiction, were the two dimensions of the screen and the ritual of the Five Books.

  Five Million Years to Earth ended and Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed began. It was eight p.m. on a Sunday night. Peter Cushing is extraordinary in that movie, and even my exhaustion fog and slippage couldn’t dilute Cushing’s sharp-edged, misanthropic tour-de-force in what is hands-down Hammer Films’ best Frankenstein movie.

  Halfway through the movie, after Dr. Frankenstein has charmed and sweet-talked the widow of a man he’s secretly cut up and restitched into what will be a confused, pathetic monster, Cushing turns to the camera—to his two unwilling associates—and barks, “PACK. We’re leaving!”

  It’s a verbal gunshot, and it’s the last thing I remember from this two-day Iditarod of cinema. Captain Kronos: Vampire Hunter started immediately after Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed ended. Caroline Munro is in that one. I can’t remember a single frame. I sat there. I stared at the screen while it was projected. I couldn’t tell you a single thing about it.

  Dana and I walked out of the empty DGA Theater. Midnight. Twelve movies in two days.

  “We made it,” said Dana, grinning.

  “We did,” I said. We stood there.

  “Well, I’ll see you,” said Dana. I think my glazed, jittery-­pupiled look unnerved him. He walked away, west down Sunset, three blocks east of where I’d parked. I watched him go and then, eerily enough, stopped myself from saying, “PACK. We’re leaving!” out loud.

  I wasn’t leaving any time soon. Not the world of the sprocket fiend, that’s for sure. I found out, one year later, that the addiction could follow me anywhere. Even back home to Virginia.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  You Can, Unfortunately,

  Go Home Again

  Sterling, Virginia,

  Thanksgiving 1996

  I’m sitting in a movie theater in Northern Virginia, hating my best friend from childhood.

  It’s Wednesday, November 27. I’m home visiting my family for Thanksgiving. I’ve got days to kill afterward, except I have to kill them back in my hometown, which is difficult.

  First, most of my friends have moved away. Either completely out of state, to new lives and families and jobs, or to suburbs or towns so far away that navigating the DC metro traffic just to see them would, coming and going, eat up an entire day for what would probably amount to an hour or so of awkward conversation. At least it seems awkward to me. What’s wrong with people? All they want to yak about is their kids or places they’ve traveled to or divorces or affairs or encounters they’ve had in bars or at weddings or family reunions. Don’t they want to talk about the movies of the newly rediscovered French crime master Jean-Pierre Melville, or the Dogme 95 movement, or the dozen or so hidden references in the latest Tarantino film? Why are people so boring?

  And then I got a call. The first friend I made in Virginia, when my family moved there from Tustin Meadows when I was five. My dad decided to make Northern Virginia our permanent home after that move. Good-bye, blond hair and suntan. Hello, pasty pudginess.I

  “I’m here visiting my folks,” he said. “You free one of these days? I’m here ’til Saturday.”

  I said, “So am I! Yeah, what do you want to do?”

  “I dunno. I may be busy nights, actually, with all these relatives coming in.”

  I said, “Then let’s go to Hunan Gardens in Herndon some afternoon, then go catch a movie next door.”

  He laughed. Hunan Gardens was a strip mall Chinese/­Polynesian restaurant that, when we were seventeen, would serve us those big-ass tiki-style alcoholic drinks without bothering to look at our IDs. Going back there now, on a Wednesday afternoon, sipping Zombies and Scorpions out of skull-and volcano-shaped ceramic mugs, was boozy nostalgia at its best.

  Next door to Hunan Gardens was a second-run movie theater. The Herndon Twin. Movies for $2. Gone now, of course. But in 1996? It was my old suburb’s closest approximation to the New Beverly.

  Not that they were showing Ozus or Chabrols to the housewives and night-shift workers of Herndon. In our case, full of rum and fried rice and swaying in the bracing November afternoon air, we could choose between Bill Murray in Larger Than Life or Bruce Willis in Last Man Standing.

  “Willis,” said my friend. I agreed. Two tickets. Just like at the New Beverly, our ticket seller tore our stubs. I wondered if he resold the other half of the tickets, like I used to when I worked at the Towncenter 3, pocketing the money to spend on cassette tapes later. I wouldn’t have blamed the poor guy. We were the only ones in the theater.

  So my friend and I chatted for a while. Gossip about mutual friends from childhood—who’s married, or divorced, or living back home with the folks. I told him stories about Los Angeles, about some of the more colorful, difficult guest stars on MADtv. He told me about his job, about how they were trying to “put the company on a page on the Internet” so people could “shop at [the company] with their computers.” Neither of us could see, in the long run, how that would work.

  We were a couple of minutes from the movie starting and I chuckled. To him, it seemed as if I was laughing at nothing specific.

  “What’s funny?”

  I said, “Not really funny. But what’s weird about this movie is, it’s a remake of an Italian film, which was itself a remake of a Japanese film, which itself was based on an American crime novel.”

  My friend stared at me.

  “This movie is Fistful of Dollars, basically. Which was an Italian film. And that was a remake of Yojimbo, you know, the Kurosawa film, with Toshiro Mifune? And Kurosawa based Yojimbo on Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest. And this movie is based on Red Harvest, but it got there by way of Fistful of Dollars and Yojimbo.”

  My friend continued to stare at me.

  “Never say Hollywood doesn’t have new ideas,” I said. And gave him a laugh.

  He stared at me another moment and then leaned in, close. “Why . . . did . . . you . . . bring me to this thing?”

  He seemed deeply angry. I couldn’t figure out where the anger was coming from. The lights went down and Last Man Standing began.

  It’s not a good film. I love Walter Hill, and the cast is nothing but reassuring favorites—Willis, and Christopher Walken, and hey, there’s Bruce Dern and William San­derson and David Patrick Kelly, he of the clinking, bottles-on-fingers Luther from The Warriors. But sometimes a lot of terrific people come together with stellar source material and even the right idea about filming it (dusty, Prohibition-era starkness) but, to par
aphrase John Huston, “the thing doesn’t happen.”

  It doesn’t happen in Last Man Standing.

  Not that I have time to think about it. My friend takes full advantage of the fact that we’re alone in the theater together to emit a steady stream of heavy ­“Uuucccccchhhhh” sighs and “Who the hell is this guy?” and “I can’t even follow this” complaints. “Is this supposed to be a samurai thing?” he asks at one point, when all the characters are eating a spaghetti dinner.

  The movie reaches its dusty, wheezy, bloody conclusion and we walk out into the early evening.

  “Well that made zero sense. Seriously, why’d you take me to that thing?” my friend complains.

  I’m speechless for a moment. I gather my thoughts and say, gently, “It was . . . come on, it was so simple. He’s in town, there’s two gangs fighting, he plays them against each—”

  My friend cuts me off. “Italian movie based on a Japanese movie based on some old book? Why’d you tell me that?”

  I say, “What’s that got to do with anything? None of that was in the movie. It’s a straightforward—”

  “Why’d you put that in my head?”

  I’m dumbfounded. I can’t conceive that knowing all of the details about the making of a film—especially one with a hilariously convoluted route to conception like Last Man Standing—can be anything but pleasurable.

  But it isn’t. Not to him. And, in the next moment, I realize what it is.

  Movies, to him and the majority of the planet, are an enhancement to a life. The way a glass of wine complements a dinner. I’m the other way around. I’m the kind of person who eats a few bites of food so that my stomach can handle the full bottle of wine I’m about to drink.

  No, wait. I’m lying. I’m realizing that now. Back then, in the lobby of the Herndon Twin, I’m pitying my friend and disgusted at his narrow-minded, suburban view of films. In my world, seeing an afternoon matinee of Last Man Standing should be a prelude to driving into DC, maybe catching Rashomon or The Earrings of Madame de . . . at a rep theater. This idiot wants to go to a bar, maybe watch a sporting event and talk to people, play cards, socialize.

  What a waste, I think, slipping deeper into my ­addiction.

  I get back to Los Angeles that Sunday. That evening I’m at the ticket booth of the New Beverly, buying a ticket to see Jackie Chan’s Drunken Master.

  “I didn’t see you this week,” says Sherman, handing me my stub.

  “I went back home for Thanksgiving.”

  He asks, “See any movies?”

  I mutter, “Yojimbo.” Then I go inside, and eat the fried rice I bought from across the street, and watch Jackie Chan drunkenly kick and punch his way through an army of bad guys. Internally, I kick and punch myself deeper into my addiction.

  But I’ll be directing soon. Only not in the way I always imagined it.

  * * *

  I. Sure, I’ll rewrite the facts to make it seem like it was the state of Virginia that forced me to be inert, be addicted to carbs and shun the sun. Allow an old man some delusional comfort, won’t you?

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Day the Clown

  Didn’t Cry

  The Powerhouse Theatre,

  January 27, 1997

  “Chevy Chase was born to play a clown who leads children into a gas oven!”

  That’s Bob Odenkirk, onstage at the Powerhouse Theatre in Santa Monica, improvising one of the most brilliant lines in a brilliant night of comedy that me and all of my friends had to lash together at the last minute. I’d been handed a cease-and-desist order one hour before the show started. Jerry Lewis was pissed and threatening legal action. Or, at least, that’s what I initially thought. It turned out to be even worse, and, tragically, funnier than that. You’ll see. Let me give you a little background here.

  It was my twenty-eighth birthday. The year before, I’d gotten my hands on the shooting script of Jerry Lewis’s The Day the Clown Cried. It was a drama about a clown in Auschwitz, forced by the Nazis to entertain Jewish children on their way to the gas chamber. If he does this, his life will be spared. But his conscience can’t bear the burden, so, at the last minute, he enters the gas chamber with them. Slam. Hiss. Fade to black.

  The script was originally written by Joan O’Brien and Charles Denton. But when Jerry Lewis decided to make it, he made . . . revisions. Slapstick. Pratfalls. A scene where it’s so cold in the concentration camp barracks that the clown—named Helmut Doork—pisses ice. I wish I was making this up. No, wait, no I don’t.

  It was glorious. As Harry Shearer wrote, in a Spy magazine article about actually being able to see the movie, “It was like going down to Tijuana and seeing a painting on black velvet of Auschwitz.”

  The tortured history of The Day the Clown Cried has been recounted elsewhere. The legends that have grown around it are contradictory, fascinating and exhausting.

  My deal was simple: I’d gotten my hands on a copy of the script. I pared it down to a manageable length, saving all of the most Jerry Lewis–ian scenes, and started doing live readings of it at the Largo.

  I gathered together all of my comedian friends and assigned them multiple roles. All except for the role of the clown, which only ever went to one actor, since that person had to do all of the heavy lifting. Toby Huss performed it first, brilliantly. He’d do the clown part as a frightened, fey German when he was interacting with other adults. But for the scenes where he entertained the kids, he’d suddenly be a mean, short-fused, no-patience Frank Sinatra. Later on, due to Toby’s increasingly crazy work schedule in TV and film, Jay Johnston (from Mr. Show) inherited the role, doing a one-man tour-de-force of distilled Jerry Lewis mawkishness and spastic clowning, oftentimes in the same moment.

  And I was directing! Well, kind of. I mean, I had to figure out who to cast where, and make sure everyone was in the right position when they’d step forward, and . . . oh, fuck it, this was the farthest from “directing” anything you can be, but it was something. Plus, my friends were all better, more experienced stage actors than me, so I wasn’t so much directing as staying out of their way.

  I never advertised the show, at first. It was invite-only.

  But word got around. Jerry Lewis’s take on the Holocaust is a unique creature of discomfort and a dirty jewel to behold. And after three hush-hush performances at the Largo, I got a call from LA Weekly. They wanted to make the next reading their “Pick of the Week.”

  This next bit is my fault. I should’ve politely said no and kept it quiet, but my ambition and hunger for fame got the better of me, and I said sure. So they called, and I did a brief interview, and the next week there it was, in a box alongside their other pick of the week, Full House’s Dave Coulier in concert somewhere. “Patton Oswalt Presents A Staged Reading of Jerry Lewis’ The Day the Clown Cried” at the Powerhouse Theatre in Santa Monica. In the paragraph I said a few pithy, oh-so-ironic things about how inane a script it was, that the idea of Jerry Lewis playing a clown at Auschwitz who’s forced to entertain children on their way to the gas ovens was, from that description alone, something that would spill out of the mouth of Joyce Carol Oates or Richard Brautigan, rather than the star of Cinderfella and The Nutty Professor.

  Fast-forward to the day of the show. I was at the Powerhouse early, waiting for the cast to arrive. Every single seat had been grabbed the moment we announced the reading. Again, not charging admission. Simply offering the spectacle.

  I walked up to the theater and there was a man standing on the sidewalk. Try to imagine an even skinnier, even seedier-looking John Waters. A “suit” that was a sport coat desperately matched with an almost-the-same-color pair of slacks. He was holding a sheet of paper. I approached him. He threw it at me. It had no weight, so it fluttered in concentric arcs until one end of the paper hit my pant leg.

  “You’ve been served, Mr. Osweld.” And then he stal
ked away.

  I picked up the paper. It was a cease-and-desist order on the reading. Do not proceed with the performance or face legal action. I glanced over it a few more times and headed inside the theater.

  “What’s up?” asked the manager.

  I said, “I think Jerry Lewis just hit us with a cease-and-desist order. He found out about the reading and is shutting us down.” I’ll admit I felt a little shaky. What sort of power did Jerry Lewis still hold in Hollywood?

  “That’s awesome!” said the manager.

  I wasn’t so sure. The Powerhouse Theatre had been named in the letter, and I didn’t want them getting dragged into any trouble. The theater’s phone started ringing. It was the law firm that had just presented me with the letter. After a few terse phone conversations, the theater manager didn’t find the situation so awesome. The cast—and the audience—was starting to arrive. What the fuck were we supposed to do?

  I sat the cast down—a group that included not only Toby Huss but also David Cross, Bob Odenkirk, Paul F. Tompkins, Brian Posehn, Laura Milligan, Scott Aukerman and Dave Foley from The Kids in the Hall. I told them the predicament I was in. I suggested we go out and just improvise, on the fly, a show about being canceled, about being shut down.

  Most of my friends were cool about it. They were game to try. Cross, as usual, was defiant.

  He said, “Let me see the letter.”

  I handed it to him. The theater manager came backstage and said someone was there to talk to me. He looked a little shaken.

  I walked out to the empty lawn in the back of the theater and was confronted by the single douchiest-looking adult male I’d ever seen. All of the worst aspects of 1) a jock, 2) a shrill NPR listener, 3) a wannabe alpha male and 4) a movie producer, which, it turned out, he was. Or, at least, he said he was.