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

  I watched them stalk the stage and bomb, or stand still and slay, or a combination of both. They seemed as delighted by the failures as they did by the successes. But these weren’t successes or failures with the same pace or flavor as those you’d experience during a week in an office cubicle. I was certain of that, at least—I was spending eight hours of zombie time in a legal firm Monday through Friday. No, those successes and failures had a secondhand flavor and a mine cart’s pace. They only affected you insofar as they made someone else succeed or fail. And they were stretched out and diluted—first over the space of a week, then months and years and, before you realized it, over the span of a life you were looking back on with rage and exhaustion.

  But once you walked onstage you rented, if only for five minutes, a kingdom where you owned the air, you owned time, you owned silence, you owned attention and indifference and defeat and failure. If you could master that kingdom, you could trade up for bigger and bigger kingdoms. It wasn’t a fair marketplace you traded in, and there were plenty of people who built their kingdoms solidly, only to see them usurped and diminished by bold thieves, fleeting flavors and the chummily mediocre, but it wasn’t any more harsh than the cubicle world. At least, that’s how I saw it. Like I was seeing it now, in the New Beverly, when Norma Desmond suddenly stands up and thrusts a rebuking hand into the glowing chrome beam of a movie projector, demanding that time and silence come under her thrall again. Even if you know nothing about the process of filmmaking (as I do at that moment), you can sense the fear, excitement and risk that went into a scene like that—for the writer to conceive it, for the director to facilitate it, for the actors to execute it and for the editor to hinge it to the flow of a thousand other moments with as much gambled on them.

  And even more than the thrill of the stage, there was the Hang.

  Before and after sets, waiting to go on or coming down off the high (or swimming up through the low) of a set, comedians talked to each other in a coded cant that I craved over the warmed-over catchphrase chatter of the cubicle. I copped, immediately, to one of the first and most enduring bonuses to being a comedian: you got to hang out with comedians. You sat by the source of the jokes. You saw them get formed and could maybe add to or refine them. The back-and-forth, the jousting and competition, and the heat it emitted. Another vent of creativity, hidden in the darkness. Instead of one silvery movie screen, you were in a forest of agile, hyper-wired minds. I imagine newsrooms, cop bars and marine platoons have the same hum. And if you pick up that frequency, you’re saved. And doomed.

  I wanted to be doomed.

  I will not trust a comedian who doesn’t hang out with other comedians. Or who doesn’t really have any comedian friends. Or worse, if they do have comedian friends, they make sure their friends are less funny, and less successful, than they are. Because they must suspect (or learned early) that nothing funny, startling or original is ever going to fly out of their minds. Why be reminded by the stony, unimpressed faces of the most talented of your tribe? Better to rely on the love of fans and sycophants who, you hope, don’t know better.

  Watching those first few open mikes before I stoked my courage, I couldn’t figure out what I was more excited by: the Stage or the Hang.

  So on July 18, 1988, I made the leap. A god-awful five-minute set at Garvin’s, in front of—and I’m being generous—twelve people. Jokes about Mike Tyson, jokes about Gummi Bears and jokes about being nervous. Yuck.

  And then one joke—it was barely a joke, come to think of it. It was only an idea. Something you’d let float in the air during a Hang, see if anyone responded, bat it around, riff anything off of it.

  “I think they should replace the word of with the word o. It’d make life a lot less serious. Like, if a wife comes home, and she’s upset, and her husband’s like, ‘What’s wrong, sweetie?’”

  Here came the drop: “And she says, ‘The doctor says I have cancer o’ the cervix.’ Huh! That doesn’t sound so bad!”

  A single laugh. And it was from a comedian. Mark Voyce. And when I say a single laugh, I mean it was a barking, mirthless “Hah!” Which, I was to discover, was how comedians laughed at each other’s jokes. We’re so inside our heads, thinking of the set we’re about to do, or the one we just did, that the objectively stated hah, like a nod between samurai, is some of the highest praise you can hope for. It’s a way of saying, “Despite how deeply I’m living in my own head right now, and thinking about my jokes, you’ve just said something that punched through that Wall of Me.”

  And it was all I needed to doom me forever. Since that night—leading all the way up to this afternoon in May, sitting in the New Beverly—a week hasn’t gone by where I haven’t gotten up on a stage at least four times a week. Usually closer to ten. Seven years, and never a week without shows, somewhere.

  That streak is about to end. I sit here, as Ace in the Hole winds down to its final, twilight-before-oblivion shot of Kirk Douglas slumped at his desk, with no future and not a garlic pickle in sight. I have the same feeling I had back in San Francisco at the Improv, and then a year later at Garvin’s in DC. I glimpse—in black and white, and not the garish primary-colored sport coats and T-shirts of late-eighties American stand-up—another world I want to enter. What is their Hang like, the directors? What is their thieves’ cant? Did Wilder’s fellow directors recognize the genius of Ace in the Hole in its day? Did they know it instinctually, or was it years of labor before they could see through paltry box office and negative reviews to something that would last beyond the momentary inferno of failure? The same way comedians would watch Andy Kaufman, and then Larry David and Colin Quinn, marveling at the grace and balls it took to completely disregard the audience, to always go for broke with every line? It’s one thing to do it onstage—it’s you alone, soaring or sinking. But a movie? Weeks and months and years of collective labor by talented people in front of and behind the camera? How do you convince anyone to take that sort of risk and then maintain that commitment through all of the bad days of shooting, all of the hopeless hours in the editing room? How do you convince anyone to ever work with you again? What kind of person does that cauldron pressure produce, over time?

  I step out into the infant twilight of a Saturday evening in Los Angeles and begin my first full week of not going onstage in seven years. There are stages I can hit tonight, too. If not to perform, to watch. Someone great, someone shitty, it doesn’t matter. The great ones show you what you can get away with. The shitty ones remind you what never to bother with.

  Instead I go back to my apartment at Normandie and Hollywood, just up the block from the LITTLE ARMENIA and THAI TOWN signs, forever in cross-angled conflict. I get out my copies of The Film Noir Encyclopedia and all three volumes of Danny Peary’s Cult Movies as well as the Necronomicon of Z-grade celluloid—Michael Weldon’s indispensable Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film. I want to read up, in classic fledgling-movie-junkie style, on the movies I’ve just seen. There’s Sunset Boulevard in Cult Movies volume 1, with Peary’s usual loving, combative praise. There’s Ace in the Hole, under the title The Big Carnival,VI in The Film Noir Encyclopedia.

  As I read about them an idea strikes me. I get out a pencil and, after etching in a dark, graphite-gray star next to each title, I note the date and location of where I saw it. A star, “5/20/95” and “New Beverly Cinema” go next to Sunset Boulevard’s entry in Cult Movies. The same for Ace in—well, The Big Carnival—in The Film Noir Encyclopedia.

  And for no reason save for the fact that these are the five volumes in front of me as I sit cross-legged on my living room floor, I decided that part of My Training will be to see how many titles I can star, date and place-name in these books. These five books. At the time, I’m thinking, “How many in one year?”

  And on Tuesday, instead of going up and doing a set like I usually do, trying to hone my skills as a comedian, I find myself back at the New Beverly. You see, The Nutty Professor is
playing. And it’s listed in both The Psychotronic Encyclopedia and volume 1 of Cult Movies. So, I mean, I have to see it. To, you know . . . check it off.

  I won’t even learn that much from watching The Nutty Professor, an exhausting comedy made by an exhausted man. Jerry Lewis, in the getting-to-know-you phase of his Percocet addiction, wrestles with the two-headed snake of his loathing of Dean Martin’s soul and his thirst to live Dino’s life. It’s an ice-water-on-bare-skin naked shock, watching Jerry’s id play out in that movie. I sit in the New Beverly, letting Jerry Lewis’s nasal cri de coeur bounce off of me, thinking of all the loud, aggressive, alpha-clown comedians I’d been stuck with on the road. It is nothing I ever want to do on-screen.

  I’m in Los Angeles, with a steady writing job on weekdays at MADtv, a dozen “alternative comedy” spaces to go up in and work on material—and now this, the New Beverly, my $5-a-night film school.

  Pretty good trio of films to start off my education with, right? Sunset Boulevard—a cynical, heartbroken writer, dragged to his doom by a true believer in the illusion of film. Ace in the Hole—a satanic, exploitative reporter who picks apart a dying man at the bottom of a pit in the hope that his career will rise back into the sun. And The Nutty Professor—an ignored nerd who’s tempted by popular monstrosity. Obsession, darkness and magical thinking. Sitting in my apartment late in the night, penciling the star, date and venue name next to The Nutty Professor in two film books, I will have no idea I’ve entered my fourth Night Café.

  It will be four years before I pull myself out of it.

  * * *

  I. This same conversation is happening, simultaneously, across every other facet of the arts. It’s happened before I say this to you, it’s happening while I say this to you and it will keep on happening, forever and ever. Someone at a used record store is admonishing a friend for never having heard Love’s Forever Changes. At a used bookstore, an ever-ravenous bookworm shakes their head sadly at their friend, who’s never read Charles Portis’s Masters of Atlantis. Or someone’s never had the fries at the Apple Pan. Or encountered Michael C. McMillen’s art installation The Central Meridian. Or visited Joshua Tree. An infinite crowd of apostles, spreading the word to their unwashed, heathen acquaintances.

  II. Sprocket fiend is the name I have for the subterranean dimension to my film addiction. The subtle, beneath-the-sound-track sound of the clattering projector in those old rep theaters, especially the New Beverly. The defiant, twenty-four-frames-per-second mechanical heartbeat that says, at least for the duration of whatever movie you’re watching, the world’s time doesn’t apply to you. You’re safe in whatever chronal flow the director chooses to take you through. Real time, or a span of months or years, or backward and forward through a life. You are given the space of a film to steal time. And the projector is your only clock. And the need for that subtle, clicking sprocket time makes you—made me—a sprocket fiend.

  III. Well, Maron was—and still is—a beloved frenemy.

  IV. Died young. Thirty-one. Heart attack after a crash diet. He had the girth and skull of an unforgettable character actor, but he tried to whittle himself into a boring leading man. The knife hit bone.

  V. Four seconds.

  VI. Films rereleased under different titles. Another annoying, alienating weapon in my film fiend conversational spray. “Yeah, I saw a cheap print of Franju’s Eyes Without a Face, under the title The Horror Chamber of Doctor Faustus. Must’ve been a print that got sent out on the drive-in movie circuit in the sixties. Imagine some poor yokel, killing an evening with a double bill, when Les Yeux Sans Visage gets slung at him after half-snoozing through The Alligator People! Hey, where’re you goin’?”

  CHAPTER TWO

  My First Four

  Night Cafés

  Arles, France,

  September 1888

  Here’s where I explain what I meant when I said “Night Café” back at the end of the last chapter. We have to go way back for the explanation, but it won’t take long. Just to the end of summer 1888.

  I love the end of summer, by the way. The hellish wick of August, beginning to yield to the waiting fall. Leaves finally surrendering their green, the sky having one last furnace exhalation before it’s safe for a coat to show its face in the afternoon. So this is a pungent, rancid shank of history we’re about to gnaw on, the awfulness of August 1888.

  Seriously, what was in the air in the dying summer of 1888? Did our planet pass through some gigantic, ghostly comet? One that hissed and emitted pure evil? What hung off of the twilight mist and, in the morning, rustled out of view at the first hint of sunlight?

  On September 4 of 1888 George Eastman registered the trademark, and also clinched the patent, for his roll camera film. Five days earlier, on August 31, Jack the Ripper left the throat-slit, butcher-gutted body of Mary Ann Nichols on the bricks of Buck’s Row in London’s East End. Fast-forward to September 8—four days after Kodak film existed in the world. The body of Annie Chapman was dumped in a Whitechapel doorway.

  Three more victims followed. As did the world’s first motion picture. Roundhay Garden Scene—a two-second film by Louis Le Prince. Four people in a garden. Two men, two women. There, on the left, a man in a dark suit takes gentlemanly strides past a woman in a smart white dress. She shifts her feet, turns and takes a step away from the camera. And there on the right, the other couple. A stout woman in a dark dress who appears to walk backward. And circling around her, at a less gentlemanly, more predatory pace, a man in a white, duster-length overcoat and hat. We never see his face. A circling wraith, captured on celluloid.

  No photographs of Jack the Ripper. No movies, either—not even a two-second blip, maybe of his dropping the bloody fragment of Catherine Eddowes’s apron after he killed her on September 30. Whatever was infecting the crisp air near the end of 1888 evaded being captured on film.

  It didn’t escape oil and canvas, though.

  In that same September, in the city of Arles—in the south of France and snuggled by the Mediterranean Sea—Vincent van Gogh painted a masterpiece that destroyed him.

  Vincent van Gogh was a “tormented genius” the way Jimi Hendrix was a “guitar player.” I remember, reading Stephen King’s On Writing, when he said something about how “your art needs to be a function of your life, not the other way around.” Van Gogh’s art had moved beyond being a “function” of his life and had metastasized into a tumor that was keeping him alive only to kill him more slowly. But in Arles, Vincent decided to take control of his “art.” Except that he made it hurry up with the task of his annihilation.

  It didn’t help that Vincent was a religious fanatic. And, again, not to hit the “tormented genius” comparison again, but his career as a simple country priest was cut short when his parishioners were appalled at his intensity, his Saint Francis of Assisi–like commitment to squalor, poverty and filth. His flock wanted Huey Lewis and the News—what they got was GG Allin and the Murder Junkies. And his religious fervor spread to his art, the way cancer will spread to other organs of a sufferer’s body. He had a gift—the gift of transcendent artistic talent. But his religious convictions made him feel that this talent was demonic, and something to be ashamed and frightened of.

  What to do? Simple—he only ever painted what he saw. What he was specifically looking at while he painted. He was only creating a representation of the world as it presented itself before his eyes. See? Demonic forces kept at bay, artistic itch scratched. Win-win.

  For a while. Any true creative endeavor demands constant evolution, growth, experimentation and challenge. As the summer of 1888 bloomed and ripened and then rotted in the August heat, Vincent van Gogh walked the earth feeling like a rusty cage barely holding a cackling, paint-stained legion of bright, gibbering demons.

  And so, to Arles. A change of scenery—that was the solution! A whole city full of people and places
and objects he’d never seen before! More cordwood for the demons to burn away to ash.

  And it didn’t help. “They change their sky, not their soul, who run across the sea.” That was Horace in 65 BC. A truism that applies so perfectly to every one of my friends who leave L.A. for New York, and find themselves a year later with newly toned legs from walking, scraped-raw nerves from the assault that is Manhattan, and a sudden yearning to “. . . I dunno, move upstate, or maybe to Williamsburg.”

  Van Gogh didn’t even have a Williamsburg. Arles was going to need to save him and propel him forward. That combination rarely happens in quotidian existence. In art? It’s as rare as Sasquatch riding a unicorn.

  But, after first arriving, it seemed that Vincent might have pulled it off. The town offered endless, gorgeous sights for him to capture in thick, manic gobs of oil on canvas. Starry, starry night skies, lush interiors, peaceful street scenes where the sea-scrubbed air gave the atmosphere the tickly tingle of a daydream.

  And something even better happened for him, in terms of artistic inspiration. His friend, ex-accountant turned Tahitian layabout artist Paul Gauguin, suggested something radical. Why not paint something . . . from memory? Just once, instead of painting what you’re actually looking at, render an artwork through the prism of recollection. What newer, emotional details might surface through the rigid, unyielding mesh of religion and shame that you’ve used to bind that throbbing, genius brain of yours? Vincent, give it a try.