It is not unusual for a celebrity to produce a tell-all memoir about his or her embarrassing, crippling addictions, and in his new memoir actor-comedian Patton Oswalt has confessed his own.
Not to drugs or alcohol. Oswalt’s fine with those. No, his drug-of-choice was on 35mm film, projected on a 72-foot screen, night after night.
In “Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film,” Oswalt’s second book, he details the four years he spent compulsively watching over 250 movies while writing for “MADtv” during the day and working as a standup comedian at night.
Those were movies in a theater, mind you. He also watched movies on TV but those didn’t count. Nor did any movie where he missed the first 5 minutes, because that’s not how compulsion works.
In the early 90s Oswalt frequented the New Beverly theater in L.A. which featured an eclectic run of classic movies on film, as God intended. After a double-bill of “Sunset Boulevard” and “Ace in the Hole” one night he went home and looked them up in the five massive books on movies he owned, and he checked them off and added the date and the theater name and by that point it was all over. Once you start making checkmarks in a list your downward-spiralling obsession is pretty much guaranteed. Like a baseball player growing out his beard or a poker player with lucky socks, he knew, he knew that if he watched all the movies on his list and absorbed the lessons they had to teach he’d ultimately become a great director.
As he wrote in the forward to the book, “This will be either the most interesting or the most boring addiction memoir you’ve ever read.”
Fortunately Oswalt is funny and he nails his target — himself — with easy, self-effacing wit. Reading “Silver Screen Fiend” you really get the sense of how badly this habit screwed up his life, his job, his friendships and his love life. Racing around Los Angeles to different theaters and film festivals and indie showings, losing sleep to catch one more movie. At one point he describes making his then-girlfriend walk alone to her car at 2 a.m. because there was “an all-night horror-thon at the Cinerama Dome” and obviously she knew how important that was. (She did: she broke up with him.)
And as he writes he also shares his encyclopedic knowledge of film. With every movie mentioned he adds a tidbit of trivia, some context as to its importance, and the barest hint of the sort of nonstop infodumps with which he used to obliviously assault his friends because how can you enjoy a movie unless he first tells you every single thing to be known about it? “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?” he wrote. “Why are people so boring?”
All of this was to service his desire to become a director, and that’s why this book resonates with me. Not because I love film, but because I’ve read over 50 books on writing and my unfinished novels languish on my hard drive. For anyone who has ever spent much more time trying to learn how to do something than they’ve spent actually doing the thing, everything Oswalt says will make perfect sense.
When he’s not talking about his movie-watching he also describes the culture-shock of bringing what he thought was a solid routine to the harsh realities of the 90s L.A. comic scene, and how he and it developed over the next few years. You get great and funny stories about how he bombed, how he improved, how his friends did, how he tried to make his one line in “Down Periscope” Oscar-worthy, and why Jerry Lewis hates him.
The book careens around time and often lapses into a stream-of-consciousness riff, dropping you right into the frenetic mindset of a “sprocket fiend.” It’s a faster read than you might think since the final sections are a list of imaginary movies that never were, part of his eulogy for New Beverly owner Sherman Torgan, who died in 2007, and the last 33 pages are the 250+ movies he watched during the course of the book.
“Silver Screen Fiend” is half memoir, half cautionary tale and it’s almost like hearing the current, self-deprecating Oswalt yell back over the years at his earlier, know-it-all persona.
“Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film,” by Patton Oswalt. Scribner, 240 pages. Hardcover: $25.00. Ebook: $10.99. Audiobook: $17.49.