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

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  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. Who’ll look for you amongst all those? People like to believe in things, and policemen are just people. Or so I’m told. Frankly, our problem is so simple it’s 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 O’Toole, in Richard Rush’s 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 can’t 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! People’s 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

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  FIRST EPILOGUE

  SECOND EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  APPENDIX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  COPYRIGHT

  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.

  I’ve enjoyed my share of LSD and mushrooms.

  They exploded my being from the inside out—

  while I sat and listened to music.

  I’ve done my due diligence as far as vices,

  but I’m 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 you’ve ever read.

  I can’t promise it ever gets “harrowing,”

  but I can promise that I tried—I really tried—

  to make it funny.

  Here we go.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Movie Freaks and Sprocket Fiends

  The New Beverly Cinema,

  May 20, 1995

  Listen—you don’t have to follow me into the darkness here. It’s sunny out. It’s a syrupy Los Angeles Saturday afternoon in May of 1995. We’re 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. Life’s going on.

  We’re about to enter the New Beverly Cinema for a double feature of Billy Wilder’s 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, Wilder’s 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 wasn’t 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 later—Ace 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 you’re talking to a relatively fresh-faced twenty-six-year-old on a sunny sidewalk, you can tell something’s wrong, can’t you? The way I talk in unwieldy chunks of paragraphs, rather than inquisitive sentences. I’m a boxing glove with a horseshoe inside of it, conversationally. I speak at you. I speak through you. You’ve got the queasy feeling you might not even need to be here right now, and I’d still spit Facts About Billy Wilder into the afternoon air.

  You’re not up for two movies? Hmmm. Wanna just see the one? I mean, you’ve gotta see Sunset Boulevard. Gotta. You’ve never seen it? How can you be alive and not have seen Sunset Boulevard?I I mean, I’m 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? You’re gonna bail?

  That’s cool. Maybe I’ll 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 un
der gray glass, those eyes. I’ve 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 Sherman’s customers know what’s 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. There’s 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, I’m soon to discover. In four years, to the exact day I’ve purchased the ticket that’s now in my pocket, I’ll find out exactly how sharp Sherman’s memory is.

  But now it’s 1995, and the first of many nourishing, sun-warmed days has been pushed behind me, behind the swinging doors of the New Beverly. I take my bent, warped-spring seat in the briny darkness. This is the sort of abyssal darkness deep-sea fishes thrive on. Fueling themselves on glowing, volcanic vents on the ocean floor. The New Beverly has a volcanic vent of its own—up on the wall, there, big enough for a megalodon shark to swim through. Or a horde of zombies to shuffle through. Or a fleet of spaceships to fly through. Or a teardrop on Ingrid Bergman’s hopeful, heartbroken face to slip through. Me and the other deep-sea fishes inside the New Beverly—the movie freaks, sprocket fiends,II celluloid junkies, single-­star satellites and garden-variety misanthropes, loners and sun haters—we, too, feed from the glow pulsing off of the screen. The movie screen—that’s our volcanic vent.

  Trailers for upcoming movies unspool—The Nutty Professor is playing on Tuesday, along with Cinderfella. Hmm. Repulsion and Knife in the Water. Never seen either at this point in my life. Gonna check those off. It’s starting to dawn on me, as I sit in the New Beverly and munch, alternately, popcorn (salt) and Red Vines (sweet), that this is the beginning of My Training. My Training to Become a Great Filmmaker. Hasn’t Scorsese seen every movie ever made, and doesn’t he still lurk in his Manhattan loft, projecting some obscure British horror movie on a 16 mm projector, looking to be inspired by a single out-of-context tableaux of brilliance? The summer before now I was disintegrated and reassembled by Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction at the Alhambra in San Francisco. Isn’t Tarantino this holy fool who can take various parts of disintegrated movies and reassemble them into a greater whole? Like . . . like . . . oh! Yeah! Like that scene in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, where Eli Wallach disassembles all of the different revolvers to make the Supergun he’s going to use to ventilate Clint Eastwood? There! Haven’t I done, just now with the Eli Wallach analogy, what Tarantino does on a more epic, transcendent scale in his films?

  I remember walking out of that screening a year before, when Pulp Fiction had finished its Möbius-strip narrative and the audience floated back out into the world on the magic carpet of Dick Dale’s “Miserlou.” I saw it with Blaine Capatch and Marc Maron, two comedian friends.III

  “You wanna go get some lunch, or some coffee?” asked Blaine.

  I said, “Nah, I gotta go.”

  “Where?” snapped Maron. “Gotta go home and burn that screenplay you were working on?”

  Good one, Marc. And good advice, as it turned out. I hadn’t even considered writing screenplays up to that point. My ambition then—six years into a stand-up career—was to get an HBO special. The rest of my Career Whiteboard was a blue question mark in erasable ink.

  And here I am, a year later. Sitting down to devour two Billy Wilder films. One I’ve seen (Sunset) one I haven’t (Ace). A fledgling completist. It starts here. And on an actual movie screen, so I can clock the experience of how I react to the film. As well as the unspoken vibe of the audience around me, of how the amorphous, mass “we” responds to the film. What pierces us. What pings off us, leaving only an echo. What passes through us. What misses us. Look at me—aren’t I a diligent soon-to-be filmmaker, doing my time in the darkness like this? Not just watching movies on videotapes or, someday if I ever get rich, DVDs? On. A. Screen. This is a serious crossroads in my life, a new path, and I’m confidently making my first steps.

  By sitting in the dark.

  No, I’m no dilettante. Light through celluloid, onto a movie screen. Darkness and uncomfortable seats. That’s the only way I’ll see these, from now on. Give me more laps, coach. I’m a champion. Someday. Can’t you see it?

  More trailers. Touch of Evil and Kiss of Death are coming up. Noir! Nice! I became addicted to film noir during the three years I lived in San Francisco, when the Roxie Theater on Sixteenth Street would do its noir festival every spring. I saw H. Bruce Humberstone’s brilliant I Wake Up Screaming in 1993. That scene where psycho policeman Laird CregarIV stares, openmouthed and turtle-­eyed, as the film of his now-dead, unattainable dream girl plays in the smoky interrogation room? The one he’s using to torment slick, grinning Victor Mature, hoping to railroad the poor bastard into the electric chair?

  That got me. Wow, did that get me. It was Frankenstein’s monster staring at his hissing, stitched-together Bride and knowing she’d never return his truehearted, cemetery love. It was also me—although I didn’t know it yet—­shoveling popcorn and licorice into my gaping mouth while every film I would devour off of the New Beverly’s stained screen could march and lunge and glide and swoop out of the darkness. I’ll create one of those someday, I tell myself. And my films will march and lunge and glide and swoop in ways no one has ever dreamed of. All I have to do is keep watching. I’ll know when to make my move.

  At this point in my life, I have every reason to believe that this is a viable process for mastering a creative skill. This strategy worked for me before. For instance: When I was nineteen, I wanted to be a comedian. I’d spent the first nineteen years of life memorizing every comedy album I could play on my parents’ turntable. I knew the exact timing for the pause between the words waited and July in Bill Cosby’s “Revenge” routine.V Not only did I memorize every heckler put-down on Rodney Dangerfield’s No Respect and Steve Martin’s A Wild and Crazy Guy, I could even recite, perfectly, the hecklers—walking themselves into vinyl, drunken, douchebag immortality. Yes, I could recite George Carlin’s “seven dirty words” and all of their permutations, Richard Pryor’s multicharacter “God Was a Junkie” off of Supernigger and pretty much every single flawless word from Emo Philips’s E = MO2 and Steven Wright’s I Have a Pony. I could also sing every Python song, and recite, word-perfect, the “Bookshop” sketch off of Monty Python’s Contractual Obligation Album. Come senior year, I did “Bookshop” in a forensics competition. Both voices, back and forth. That was the first time I experienced, if only secondhand, the effect that doing comedy had on the comedian. The laugh you get after dropping your joke is akin to a rush of emotional heroin after the nerve-scraping silence of the setup. That’s how the addiction begins. But unlike a common junkie, you crave the discomfort as much as you do the high. The risk of that silence sputtering into nothing, or, worse, anger and jeering from an audience, is what makes the laughter that much sweeter. And you keep chasing that scenario where you artificially set up the . . .

  . . . deadly, deafening, jarring SILENCE . . .

  —and then the—

  . . . gentle, roaring-through-your-veins surf-crash of LAUGHTER.

  And “chasing that scenario” meant going onstage, over and over again. Except in my case—my frightened, self-doubting, raised-in-the-suburban-Nerf, penned-veal timidity that I’ve fought my whole life—going onstage first meant going to stages. And watching. Like I’m doing now, in the New Beverly. I have no idea, sitting here in the dark in May of 1995, that the watching will stretch into four year
s.

  And why would I? It didn’t take me four years of watching, as a wannabe stand-up, before I hopped onstage. I mean, there were nineteen years of absorption, but did that count? Then there was a Christmas visit to San Francisco when I was eighteen years old, with my family. We stayed at the Marines Memorial Club and Hotel, and around the corner at Mason and Geary, in a space now inhabited by a jazz club, was an Improv.

  I walked down, talked the doorman (Dave Becky, who would briefly be a future manager of mine) into letting me slide by the twenty-one-and-older restriction and watched a show. Pro showcase. Short sets. Solid, forgettable material in front of happy tourists. But even in the blandness of a weeknight showcase of airline food and cats vs. dogs and men vs. women boilerplate stand-up, there was still the simple, addicting solute underneath it. SILENCE/laughter. I’d tasted the drug in high school. Now I was visiting the equivalent of a junkie’s shooting gallery. The pallor of the comedians’ skin, their free-for-performers nacho-and-rail-drinks breath, their constant brushes with instant failure and annihilation—none of it drove me away. I wanted in.

  I’m feeling the same pull, here in the New Beverly, watching William Holden floating facedown in the pool at the beginning of Sunset, the police flashlights knifing around him while his voice-over fills the icy theater air.

  How ballsy! That’s the beginning of the movie! Seriously, what an all-chips-on-one-spin way to start a film! I want to do that. It won’t take long, I say to myself, hearing the buttered thunder crunch of another mouthful of popcorn in my ears. Maybe a year, tops, of My Training here at the New Beverly, and I’ll be aiming a lens at something that will swoop.

  A year after my visit to the San Francisco Improv I was a nineteen-year-old college sophomore. I spent my summer weeknights watching open-mikers at Garvin’s in Washington, DC. Professionals would drop by every now and then but Tuesdays and Wednesdays at Garvin’s were a raw meat duty-dance. My first Tuesday watching a show some skinny guy named Blaine Capatch made a Harlan Ellison reference during his set. No one I’d grown up with read Ellison, let alone knew who he was. Now here was this guy, using him as a casual reference. In the same show Mark Voyce—later to be my roommate—said, mock-­jovially, “You know, it takes all kinds.” Then his voice shifted to a Balmer-accent diesel bark: “No, it don’t. We just have all kinds.” I was an H. L. Mencken junkie all through high school, but I’d never heard his worldview distilled into such a single, elegant dart. And there was fourteen-year-old Dave Chappelle, who performed onstage like he’d been doing comedy for forty years.