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

by Patton Oswalt

  He said, “I just hosted a party at the Sundance Film Festival for six hundred people.” That was his way of introducing himself. This was before he said his name, come to think of it.

  “Um, that’s, uh—”

  “And now I gotta come home to my five-room house in Malibu, and I find out a bunch of C-list actors are reading a script that I’ve optioned?” said the Kale Salad Eater with Rage Issues.

  “Well, we’re not charging any money for it, and it’s—”

  The Hot Yoga Enthusiast’s face turned purple with wrath and he spat, “Oh fuck you, that doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter and you know it fucking doesn’t goddamned cocksucking matter!!!” I felt sorry for his desktop Zen sand garden when he got home later that night. His yin-yang peace-symbol necklace charm bobbed up and down on his chest as he screamed.

  “Do you have any idea what Jerry Lewis did to this script when he got his hands on it? Any fucking idea? It’s an important story and it needs to be told the way it was originally written and I’ve got Chevy Chase interested in it and you have no! fucking!! right!!!”

  This was the one point in the conversation where I became truly terrified. Not of him. I was terrified of suddenly exploding with laughter, right in his face, and causing him to turn into a Pillar of Roaring, Sentient Wheatgrass and strangle me.

  Chevy Chase. In clown makeup. In Auschwitz. I wanted, more than anything in the world, to see that film. If my shutting down my reading could do anything toward helping that become a reality, I felt like it was my cosmic duty to man up and disappoint my audience.

  The Would-Be Producer and his bulging neck veins stomped back to his Volvo and screeched away, after I assured him that not a single word of the bastardized miracle that was The Day the Clown Cried would be uttered by my hopeless company of nobodies. And I also promised him I would never never never do anything like this again in Los Angeles, cross my heart and hope to die. This seemed to placate him, and his reminding me, again, that he’d hosted a party at Sundance for six hundred people seemed to calm him down even more.

  The sun was setting and the audience was settling in. I walked back into the theater, giddy and depressed.

  I was giddy about the whole Chevy Chase/clown makeup/Auschwitz thing. I was depressed for two reasons. The first being that I realized it wasn’t Jerry Lewis who had presented the cease-and-desist. It was this beautiful, bellowing bozo who truly believed this was a Script That Must Be Filmed. I was also disappointed in myself, for making the internal decision to agree to his demands. I was cringing at how I was going to break the news to the cast. But this was outside the mere sphere of my own honor and stature. The Powerhouse Theatre was in jeopardy, along with the owner. What was it that Stephen King wrote, near the end of his novella The Body? If you die alone, you’re a hero. Take anyone with you, you’re dog shit. I was feeling the same way, at the moment, about legal action.

  So I lowered the boom on the cast. There was frustration, and amusement, and some quick haggling as we all figured out what to do. David Cross pointed out that, in their haste and stupidity, they’d cc’d the cease-and-desist letter to Dave Coulier, who was also mentioned in the “Pick of the Week” blurb. We all had a nice laugh over that, but it didn’t change my mind.

  The lights went down and I stepped out onstage with the cease-and-desist letter in my hand. I explained to the audience what had happened. Boos. Groans. And then, piece by piece, we all improvised an evening around the fact that we’d been canceled. Bob and David improvised their interpretation of exactly what happened when the producer found out about the reading in LA Weekly (“How the fuck will anyone go see our movie in Kansas if eight people watch a script reading for free in Santa Monica?”). Paul F. Tompkins did a flawless phone call between the producer of the film and Peter O’Toole, trying to snake the role of the clown away from Jerry Lewis. Toby Huss played a concerned white supremacist who took issue with the screenplay’s “negative” depiction of the Third Reich. And then everyone did a massive, free-form, back-and-forth “interpretive dance/pantomime/musical” version of the screenplay. Sloppy, hilarious and impossible to sue. What else could you ask for in an evening of theater?

  I stayed true to the promise I gave to Soy Spasm the Producer. I never once did another reading of The Day the Clown Cried in Los Angeles. Every other reading I did was in New York. If it makes him feel any better, I tried my best to avoid any C-list entertainers. I hope he considers Stephen Colbert, Will Arnett and Fred Willard at least B-list. I mean, they’re no Chevy Chase . . .

  Postscript: I didn’t write down the exact date. I must have been too stunned, when it happened, to remember to write it down. But the year after the Powerhouse Theatre disaster, I came within ten feet of The Day the Clown Cried.

  At least, I think I did.

  It was early August 1998. Henny Youngman died in February of that year. I and about a dozen other comedians were brought to the CBS Television City studios, weeks before the Muscular Dystrophy Association Labor Day telethon. Jerry Lewis had an idea—have a group of young comedians come out, during the telethon, and each perform one of Henny’s signature one-liners.

  I can’t tell you who else was in that room, meeting with Jerry, discussing the idea. For one, Jerry fucking Lewis was sitting there. I said hello briefly and that was it, as far as our interacting.

  The second reason I can’t tell you who else was in that room besides me and Jerry was the fact that a silvery, bulletproof-looking briefcase was sitting on Jerry’s desk, between Jerry and me. And urban legend had it that Jerry carried the print—or at least a videotape—of The Day the Clown Cried with him, at all times, in a big, bulletproof briefcase.

  And there it was. As far as I knew.

  Jerry had us each do a one-liner and it was clear, almost instantly, that this was a bad idea.

  But I could not take my eyes off of that briefcase. What if something in my brain fritzed out, some politeness firewall crumbled and burst, and I grabbed the briefcase and ran? Fled into the city, with whatever minions Jerry Lewis could muster scouring the earth searching for me? Would the videotape even be in there? Could I get to a pair of VCRs in time to make a dub, to send it out into the world? What would happen if I did?

  I stood, frozen. After the last comedian did a Youngman joke, Jerry’s assistant thanked us, wished us a pleasant day and, through tone and stance alone, sent us out of the room. I looked at the briefcase one last time. Then at Jerry. He looked back at me—right into my eyes—but betrayed nothing. Did his eyes say nothing because there was nothing to say? Or was it a trained response, a defense built up after years of guarding his terrible, forbidden prize?

  It’s my briefcase–from–Pulp Fiction moment. Occasionally, in my dreams, I pop the lid on that case and a rebuking, Ark of the Covenant, Nazi-melting glow bursts from its maw and turns me into soggy, goy ashes. Other times, there’s a returned letter from Dean Martin and a bottle of Ensure. Each possibility holds secrets and terrors.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Amsterdam

  January 7–13, 1998

  I was standing inside the Van Gogh Museum on January 11—a gray, rainy Sunday. And I was crying my eyes out.

  Not because I’d been let go by MADtv. And not because their decision was right. No one gives a shit if you can point out that a sketch idea was already done by Saturday Night Live or Monty Python if you don’t have a better suggestion. It also didn’t help that my writing at the time was so fashionably half-assed. I hadn’t even developed my distaste for typos, which made all the sketches I turned in look like I’d written them while being chased by Turkish assassins on a drifting steamboat.

  I also wasn’t sad because my comedy wasn’t going over well in Amsterdam. I’d been booked there for a week at a club called Toomler. Me and Louie CK. Louie was headlining and absolutely killing. His ideas were huge and his delivery was simple. I was still in that awkward stage where
my ideas were simpler and less startling than I cared to admit, so I masked that with a lot of unnecessarily ornate vocabulary and dense cultural references. The audiences were very . . . polite to me.

  I didn’t do myself any favors by making a beeline for Amsterdam’s pot-friendly “coffee shops” and inhaling lungfuls of White Widow, Abraxas and Deep Purple every morning with my coffee, orange juice and croissants. After one afternoon spent at a shop called Lucky Mothers, where they packed three joints’ worth of high-­octane weed into a Snickers bar, which I promptly ate while walking around, I did an entire set of comedy with my eyes closed. The pot didn’t affect my diction or lucidity. I could speak clearly. I knew the order of all of my jokes. I could deliver everything perfectly and professionally. But I could not physically keep my eyes open. The audience didn’t seem at all shocked. They’d seen smacked-assed young Americans before. And watching me deliver jokes with my eyelids firmly snapped shut ended up being way more entertaining than the actual jokes.

  I was crying because I was looking at, essentially, a collection of self-portraits that van Gogh and his circle of then-friends—Gauguin included—had done of each other and then exchanged, “Secret Santa” style, one Christmas when they were broke and unable to buy each other presents.

  It was one of the many times I’ve been completely, from-the-ground-up wrong about how I saw the world and my assumptions about how to live in it. In that moment, looking at all of those little self-portraits, exchanged by a circle of friends to make a poverty-level Christmas bearable, all of my beacons were scrambled.

  Van Gogh did have true, crackling genius inside of him. But it didn’t save him, and despite what I always believed about how absolute geniuses must view the world and move through it, unencumbered by sentiment or responsibility, van Gogh didn’t look to his genius to save him. He wanted to live in—and be saved by—the world.

  The man who tore The Night Café from the boarded basement of his subconscious also organized a simple, prosaic gift exchange among his friends. So he and his friends could have a Christmas. So the world they lived in could seem a little less dim, cold and bleak. The Night Café and Secret Santa. I can never know for sure, but I’ll bet the inspiration about the gifting of the self-portraits pleased and comforted him far more than The Night Café ever could.

  What the fuck was I doing? I’d been in Amsterdam almost a week, and despite spending most mornings walking around and seeing the chess clubs, museums, red-light districts, Anne Frank House and pot cafés, I was also spending a good portion of my afternoons holed up in my hotel room, devouring Criterion Collection DVDs. I Know Where I’m Going!, Ali: Fear Eats the Soul and Hiroshi Inagaki’s Samurai Trilogy. Hoping for some sort of frisson of madness to unlock . . . something. What? Some hidden Key to Directing that needed to be teased out of my head? I was traveling with Louie CK—a stand-up on his way to becoming a filmmaker by simply shooting film. I’d probably watched three times the amount of films that guy had seen, so far, in his life. But I hadn’t shot one frame of celluloid.

  One afternoon Louie and I went walking, randomly, through the north part of the city. We found a basement chess club. Nothing formal. Card tables set up. Old men slapping pieces onto cheap chessboards. Cigarette smoke. Strong tea in plastic cups. A woman in the back with a sandwich press. You want a ham and cheese? Two guilders. You only have one? Fine, one. Here’s your sandwich.

  Paperbacks with no covers, ancient magazines. Cats curled up in the window. At three o’clock, with no warning, the owner suddenly shooed everyone out.

  “Closing. We have to close. I remembered a thing I have to do.” Unsmiling, but weirdly polite. It was how his day was going. Everyone should have been happy for the few hours he was open.

  Walking away, Louie said, “That’d be a good place to end up. A good life to have.”

  “What, running a chess club?”

  Louie said, “He doesn’t exactly run it. He just really likes chess, so he found a little space where some of his friends, and random people like us, can come by and play. Maybe have a sandwich, some tea. That’s a peaceful life.”

  I said, “Probably doesn’t have to answer to anyone.”

  “Opens and closes when he wants.”

  I said, “I wonder, then, back in the States? When you see some little, I don’t know, model train shop? Or candle store or used bookstore? I wonder how many foreign travelers have stepped into those places and thought the same thing we’re thinking now, about that chess club.”

  Louie said, “Well, yeah. We see that stuff every day in our lives, and we don’t think twice about it. But you see it in a foreign country and it makes you rethink your life.”

  That conversation stayed with me, always. Mainly for its own merits. But, years later, when Louie got his show on FX? That brilliant, one-of-a-kind show he does at his own pace, with no notes, in a small way for zero money because he loves writing and acting and directing, and also showcasing his funny friends? He finally got his Amsterdam chess club.

  I remember another conversation with Louie, during after-show drinks, when he waxed horrific and hilarious about tourism:

  “One way to do a city like this would be to put your passport and a change of clean clothes and a wad of money in a safe-deposit box. Or a locker at a train station, right? And you leave the key with someone you trust, who’ll know where you are. And then you go out and eat the city whole. All the booze you want, pot, any pills that get thrown at you, anything sexually, stuff you can’t even remember. And you know you’ve got this escape hatch in a little storage locker somewhere. And you can scrub off anything you do to yourself for a twenty-four-hour period. Either a city like this, or maybe somewhere in Thailand or Jamaica.”

  I’m waiting to see what that TV show’s going to be.

  Then we visited the Rijksmuseum and viewed Rembrandt’s The Night Watch. The painting had been slashed with a shoemaker’s knife in 1911, and again in 1975 (this time with a bread knife, leaving massive, still-visible scars) and, finally, eight years before our visit, by an acid-­throwing maniac. More madness, this time surrounding a painting depicting, at least in its action, law and order shining a beam through the darkness.

  And how was the museum protecting this dark star of a canvas from future attacks? A single velvet rope between two stanchions, a nearby fire extinguisher and a sleepy, septuagenarian security guard.

  “That probably includes a lunch break for the guard,” said Louie.

  So there I was, my second-to-last day in Amsterdam, alone inside the Van Gogh Museum, getting kicked in the head. Gently. Again. Unlike the movies, where Our Hero suddenly has some massive revelation and becomes a New Person instantly, the true road out of a rut consists of a bunch of small, sharp kicks. Here was one small kick—crying in public, thinking of Vincent, clinging to the cliff-edge of friendship, and peace, and happiness, and being pulled down by a demon with paint-gob eyes and streaked, blazing claws of color.

  Other kicks were piling up. The Hammer Studios marathon. And my trip back to Virginia for Thanksgiving. The Day the Clown Cried debacle at the Powerhouse Theatre. And now this. I’m embarrassed to say it, but looking at those little self-portraits? I thought of a line from Apocalypse Now. When Dennis Hopper is describing Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz:

  “The man is clear in his mind. But his soul is mad.”

  And I still had a year and a half to go before the final kick that launched me out of my movie-watching madness.

  CHAPTER TEN

  The Knave of Queens

  March 26–27, 1998

  Movie-wise, March of 1998 was looking like a champion. I started the month seeing Dark City in Toronto, then went back to Los Angeles for a gorgeous print of Les Enfants du Paradis at the New Beverly. And then, of course, The Big Lebowski. Endless night, battered hope and bowling noir. Nice beginning.

  The month ended surreal.

  I s
aw The Big Lebowski in Sherman Oaks on Friday, March 6. Brian Posehn and I went, fresh off the plane from Portland, Oregon, where we’d spent four days writing the pilot script for Super Nerds, which Comedy Central would shoot and then bury in a salt mine somewhere in Colorado. Oh well.

  We spent the next day in a studio somewhere on the outskirts of Silver Lake, dressed as hookers and being filmed by Maynard Keenan for a video. His band, Tool, had a song called “Hooker with a Penis” and he wanted footage of shadowy, man-shaped but ostensibly female dancers to be projected behind him when they performed at the Palladium on March 26. He asked us. We are tragically, hopelessly man-shaped, Brian and I. So we squeezed into garters and nighties, threw boas around our necks and danced for the cameras. Our silhouettes were captured for eternity. Maynard and his crew took some still photographs of our journey into half-assed cross-­dressing. At one goofy juncture, I sat on the toilet and pretended to wipe my crotch with a wad of toilet paper while scowling from under the curly bangs of a black wig. Snap! Comedy!

  The night of the concert I was sober and looking to go home early. The next day, Friday the twenty-seventh, I was set to tape the pilot of The King of Queens. All the way out at Sony, in Culver City. I was ambivalent about the pilot and frustrated at the concert about having to stay sober. I liked getting a solid buzz at a show and letting the sonic surge scrape my frontal lobes. Tool, live, is a full-body scour.

  I could have used the scour, too. The rest of the month, film-wise, had gotten relentless and heavy. Hidden Fear (repressed, late-fifties noir, set in Denmark [!]), then the documentary Waco: The Rules of Engagement (burned babies), then Mean Streets (“You don’t fuck with the infinite”), John Sayles’s Men with Guns (the grinding hopelessness and sudden blood under eco-friendly tourism) and finally Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser (more genius at the price of madness).