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

  Blaine ended to solid applause from the other comedians. They knew him, remembered him from the previous summer. No one doesn’t like Blaine Capatch.

  Three more comedians went up and then it was my spot. I only had to do five to seven minutes. I mean, I’ve got an hour of solid-gold, can’t-miss material, right? For a moment I flashed to Jack Nicholson as the Joker in Tim Burton’s Batman, lit from below and sneering over a blood-streaked newspaper about the Dark Knight’s terrorizing Gotham’s criminal.

  “Terrorizes? Wait’ll they get a load of me.”

  Yep, those were the strip-mall psych-up strategies I’d run in my head back then, but they’d worked so far, hadn’t they? This audience was mine.

  And up I went. I forget who the emcee was.

  But they are very pleasant as they read my name and ask the audience to welcome me and I step to the mike stand and I pivot not speaking immediately I’d learned that you see you don’t just rush to the mike and start telling jokes like you’re terrified you’ll lose them right off the bat you take a moment show them you belong up there you’re confident and they’re in good hands they can relax and let themselves be taken anywhere you want to take them and then I clear my throat and look down at the stool next to me and it hits me all of a sudden I’m the only comedian besides Blaine who didn’t go up onstage with a notebook I wanted to show them I had my act all memorized I was a professional and ready with the jokes locked and loaded so here comes one look right out of the chute hi I’m Patton Oswalt and I’m cute and cuddly which I say with the same inflection I perfected out on the road and usually just saying that itself gets a laugh and puts me at ease ’cause I know I’ve got a killer line to say afterward but what in the fuck there’s nothing nothing not even a chuckle and so I say too quick I don’t pause enough like I do when the audience is responding I say you know what THAT means right and before I can let them answer I too quick let tumble out can’t get laid ’cause when a girl says you’re cute and cuddly it’s like she’s saying oh you’re like Teddy Ruxpin let me stick a tape cassette up your ass and you can talk to me while I fall asleep and it’s hitting me now after seeing everyone else go up that holy fuck that isn’t even really a joke at all it’s a set of words designed to get a laugh from people who aren’t really listening who are half-drunk and wondering when the fried shrimp are going to get there I just heard the comedian say laid and Teddy Ruxpin and ass and I guess that means there’s a joke there so ha ha ha only this isn’t the kind of crowd I’m performing for now in the Holy City Zoo it’s other comedians funny comedians who give a shit how they write their jokes and none of them went for easy laughs and this is the way I’m announcing myself in a new city no risk no thought nothing to see here and I get dry-mouthed and rush right into the next joke something about Bob Dylan performing at Kings Dominion but that’s an amusement park in Virginia no one here knows what the fuck Kings Dominion is but I’m just hurrying to the Bob Dylan impression which is also a surefire laugh and when things are starting out shitty a way for me to buy myself a little breathing room but again nothing not a peep why the fuck would they care about a Bob Dylan impression especially after seeing Greg Behrendt’s more conceptual smarter Jimi Hendrix stuff so I go into a story about having a hernia operation last year which totally didn’t happen it’s a fucking lie but there’s all these funny jokes about bedpans and the drugs they give you and still nothing so now I’m three and a half minutes into what’s supposed to be a seven-minute set and I go into my killer closer about the tampon commercials with that never-fail punch line Tampax we’re not number one but we’re up there and this gets a fucking groan of course why would it not it’s so fucking shitty and I say good night and walk off the stage like I’ve had my shins shot off.

  Hello, San Francisco! There’s a new kid in town!

  Blaine and I watched the rest of the show. When the show ended we mingled. Blaine seemed to know everyone. Greg Behrendt tried to be friendly but he couldn’t help looking at my bolo tie and saying, “Really?”

  Everyone was leaving. Blaine and I walked across Clement Street to a restaurant called Taiwan. It was the color of an old, pink rose and made the best dim sum I’d ever tasted. It’s still there. Go in sometime. Sit at the third table to your right as you pass the hostess station. That’s where Blaine and I sat that night, and ordered fried rice, and drank tea, and quietly tore pages out of our notebooks.

  Old set lists. Lists of jokes, and concepts and ideas we were working on. We carefully, methodically, brutally ripped away everything we’d built inside clubs like Garvin’s and in a thousand forgotten one-night gigs in bars and restaurants and colleges. By the time our waiter slapped our check on the table, we were the proud owners of blank notebooks. We had no choice. Change or die.

  The Holy City Zoo was my third Night Café. I went in wanting to be a comedian. I left wanting to be an artist. I know that’s pretentious and grandiose and half of the comedians reading this right now are thinking Fuck you, poser but it is the absolute, embarrassing truth. Don’t think for a second I don’t value my years writing forgettable, passable, meat-and-potatoes jokes on the road. As you’ll see, when I reached my fifth Night Café, those four years of hackery saved me.

  But for now? In 1992 San Francisco? I needed the dark thought-temple that was the Holy City Zoo to burn my skills to the ground and force me to start over. I experienced complete humiliation in those four and a half ­minutes—but I also glimpsed a better Hang, whispers of better Stages, and, if I didn’t crack or lose faith or just puss out and go home, the possibility of becoming a better comedian. So I spent the next year, over and over again, passing through those swinging doors. I watched. I wrote. I bombed. I bombed less. I wrote more. I started venturing out to the other clubs the city had to offer. Cobb’s. The Punch Line. Then outside of the city—Tommy T’s and Fubar’s and the Punch Line in solid-steel Republican Walnut Creek.III Slowly, and with way more crash-and-burn.

  I unlearned.

  So those were Night Cafés one through three. The first one was a projector-bulb beacon, which led to the second one. The second one contained a vocation, which I followed to the third one. The third one—the Holy City Zoo—contained an art. I curse the humiliation and bless the annihilation, and even more valuable than the impulse toward art, I gained an inner radar for dark, hidden places where the strange ones go. That inner beacon led me down to Los Angeles, a little more than three years after my Holy City Zoo debut/flameout. Where I found myself on Beverly Boulevard, in the sunshine, staring at the New Beverly Cinema.

  The New Beverly Cinema, May of 1995

  I was gonna be a director. The New Beverly Cinema was going to teach me how.

  It had better, I thought. I was lucky, but for how long? After three years in San Francisco, I managed to get a staff writing job on MADtv. More money than I’d ever seen in my life. More money in two weeks than I’d made in my first year as a professional comedian.

  But the boom years of stand-up comedy were over by 1995. I watched the Washington, DC, comedy scene fold up at the end of 1991. The San Francisco scene began collapsing two years later. The Holy City Zoo? Gone. One year after my first set, closed up. A karaoke bar.

  “We’ve been running across a log bridge that’s coming apart behind us,” said Blaine as we packed up our Lower Haight apartment in April and got ready to drive down to Los Angeles and plant ourselves in an office at Ren-Mar Studios, cranking out sketches like “Gump Fiction” and “Republican Gladiators.” We’d still do comedy at night, we told ourselves. More comedians were moving to Los Angeles from San Francisco, and New York and Boston, and they brought a DIY attitude with them. So stages were beginning to appear in coffee shops, and Laundromats, and record stores. We were still a year from someone calling our scene “alternative comedy,” so for now, it was simply “comedy not in clubs.” I saw a lot of fun and creativity in it. But how the fuck would I keep myself in what Blaine called “rent
and ramen”?

  So I sat in the New Beverly. And watched. And thought. And retraced. The projector beam when I was five. Garvin’s when I was nineteen. The Holy City Zoo when I was twenty-three. The Lure. The Job. The Art. Following the Art had led me to another Job. MADtv. An office. A fun job, but it was hard, sometimes, to squeeze Art out of it. I thought comedy club audiences were an impassable firewall. Then I met network executives.

  And now the New Beverly Cinema, at twenty-six. Night after night, films by people who’d found a way to make Art and Commerce dance together to whatever tiny tune was playing in their heads. It seemed impossible to me, to make that leap. Too scary. My penned-veal suburban instincts were rearing their heads again. I mean, I had a job. A really good job, come to think of it. I couldn’t have stayed in San Francisco forever, I told myself. Ultimately, you had to be down in Los Angeles. I’d find peace here. Hadn’t Sherman Torgan? Up in his ticket booth, with a million combinations of double features in his head? He lived in San Francisco for a while in the late sixties. Scouted for the studios. Loved movies, like me. But moved back down to Los Angeles. Gotta be where the celluloid is fresh. Opened the New Beverly, kept Art alive. Barely made any money, but he was at peace. Wasn’t he?

  “You can have peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.” Robert Heinlein wrote that. Well, I had neither. I wasn’t free at MADtv, and I wasn’t at peace inside my head.

  Because the Holy City Zoo, as much as it made me pursue Art, had also made me jealous and competitive. And not in a good way. Now, at age twenty-six, when I saw a comedian do something brilliant or new? I wasn’t energized by it. Not like I had been at Garvin’s, when I was nineteen. Now I got threatened and envious and spiteful. Self-sabotaging. Los Angeles in 1995 was becoming a honey lure for writers and comedians who were so much funnier, so much more inventive and quick than I could ever dream of being. I’d fooled myself into thinking I was this young gunslinger, but now I felt like a nerve-blasted old cowboy with a shaky hand and a rusty revolver. There I was, I thought, at MADtv, struggling to explain to a network suit what Apocalypse Now was, and how it could be funny if done through the prism of a Rankin Bass special.IV Meanwhile, over at HBO’s Mr. Show, my onetime San Francisco roommate Brian Posehn was writing and performing with Bob Odenkirk (from Chicago) and David Cross (Boston by way of Atlanta). They were changing the form, the way we’d been trying to at the Zoo. How had they willed that impulse onto television? I sure hadn’t. I was going to be swept away and forgotten. I’d end up like the sad old local headliners I’d see come into Garvin’s on a Tuesday night. Never moved out of their hometown, never stretched their skills. Hopping onstage to massage their egos for seven minutes, and then home to empty calendars, old jokes, compromise.

  Remember the bullshit, grandiose victories I could imagine for myself? Well, I could do tragedy even better. Brooding in the dark of the New Beverly with Welles and Kurosawa and Bergman all that summer was a day spa for my depression.

  I didn’t know it, all through the months of self-serving terror and projected panic, but I was soon to enter my fifth Night Café. I couldn’t enter it then—mainly because it didn’t yet exist.

  * * *

  I. Show your kids Irreversible, Salo or The Last Temptation of Christ before you show them any silent film. Even the benign ones are unintended windows into stuttery, subconscious terror rhythms.

  II. I should probably point out here that when I say “East Coast” I mean Virginia, and North Carolina and Maryland and Delaware. I never made it up to New York between 1988 and 1992. Not to Boston, either. And Chicago? Unthinkable. Never had the money, couldn’t get the bookings. And I was also kind of a pussy. Like I said earlier, I was a suburban-raised veal. Imperviousness to the honk and hustle of big cities was a callus I hadn’t grown yet. Too bad—the same thing I’m describing here, in San Francisco in 1992, was happening on an even more intense, profound level in New York, Boston and Chicago. I would have been chewed up even worse in those cities. I hope that’s not too much of a spoiler. Keep reading—I’m sure you can tell, but this gets ugly.

  III. I got to work with Bill Hicks one more time at the Walnut Creek Punch Line. I saw him walk half an audience one night and when one lady barked at him, “Don’t you believe in God?” he retorted, “I do. I just don’t believe in people.”

  IV. They eventually shot my idea—a year after I left the show. Well, I really didn’t leave. They didn’t have me back. And with good fucking reason. I was a judgmental, sour asshole of a writer. Quick with a criticism and never with a fix. A comedy and film snob who rolled his eyes half the time and turned in typo-filled scripts. But they shot it. And put my name in the credits. Misspelled. Revenge? They were entitled. The sketch was called “A Pack of Gifts Now,” and it was lovingly animated by a stop-motion genius named Corky Quakenbush. An elf is sent by toy makers to the North Pole to terminate “the Kringle” and his cultlike operation of toy makers “with extreme prejudice.” And, ironically enough, one of the producers I clashed with, Fax Bahr—who codirected the documentary Hearts of Darkness, about the making of . . . Apocalypse Now—shepherded the sketch through, with all of my visual jokes and references intact, and plenty of his own, which made the sketch even better. Even got a mention in TV Guide. Thanks, Fax. Sorry I was such a dick. Part of being in your twenties is not knowing an ally when you see one.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Largo

  Los Angeles, 1996

  October 22, 1996. I was hunkered down in the New Beverly, while Jean Cocteau’s 1946 Beauty and the Beast swam across the screen above my head. Living arms holding candelabras reached from walls. Magic pools. Wicks that lit themselves. Time and gravity ignoring the rules of the universe, bending and flexing to the logic of Cocteau’s tiny, enclosed eggshell dream theater of a film. Later on I checked off this film in my Psychotronic Encyclopedia. Michael Weldon, in his thumbnail description, mentioned how anyone viewing this movie would wonder why people can’t make movies today that look half as good as this fifty-year-old masterpiece.

  Two weeks before this I’d been downtown, at the Orpheum, watching a double bill of The Man from Planet X and the original Night of the Living Dead. Did George Romero remember those reaching limbs from Beauty and the Beast when he made Dead—those fish-belly zombie arms insistent through the slats of the farmhouse, where the group of desperate outsiders barricaded themselves against the ravenous waves of flesh eaters? Come to think of it, did Roman Polanski also have that image in his head when he made Repulsion, and Catherine Deneuve had her blazing, third-act freak-out?

  Connections pinged in my head while I watched. This was how I was consuming movies. More connective tissue the more films I saw. A year plus, since that Saturday spent with Billy Wilder, and almost nightly, I was returning to the New Beverly. And my hunger for films led me to other rep sites, too. Sherman Torgan was cool with that. He was the confident madam of an abiding brothel. There is no sating a film freak’s itch for variety. The New Beverly started as a doorway for me, and then became a hub. So I ventured out. First to the then-in-its-infancy American ­Cinematheque—a pirate operation that roamed from theater to theater, hoping for a home, its final nest in the Egyptian still years away. And then the late, lamented Tales Café (a gorgeous book-closet of a theater with plush, irregular chairs; a 16 mm projector; and stacks and stacks of short story collections—absolutely no novels, only short story collections). The mighty Nuart on Santa Monica, one of a chain of Landmark Thea-tahsI that combined the restored classics with the up-and-comers like Christopher Nolan, Ramin Bahrani and Harmony Korine. And, finally, the impossibly lush, eerily understaffed and inexplicably-supplied-with-the-cleanest-prints-I’ve-ever-seen Four Star on Wilshire. Chinese Triad? Russian mob? What in God’s name was happening there? Where did they find a scratch-and-blemish-free print of Abel Gance’s Napoleon? Why was the snack bar sometimes, literally, thr
ee boxes of Sno-Caps and three Sprites, each for sale for fifty cents? It closed. It’s gone. I don’t want to dig any deeper. I value my life. I walked away from you, Four Star, but not before seeing a print of Gone with the Wind so perfect it felt like a massive hallucination from another dimension, where humans more operatic than us found a way to make the South’s defeat in the Civil War the sexiest calamity that ever crashed into history.

  But despite all of my film-junkie wanderings, the New Beverly was home base. And that night was a rarity for me. One movie, not the double feature I usually gobbled down. Just one film, complete immersion, and as much burning into memory as I could manage.

  Because now, a year and five months after moving to Los Angeles, I’d found another competitor for my evenings. In fact, much like the other rep theaters that occasionally drew me from the New Beverly’s punishing seats, it was a host of lesser Night Cafés, enticing me toward the next big one, the next Room I Would Enter and Not Leave the Same.

  After that first week, in 1995, of doing no stand-up—of getting my staff-writer sea legs and taking my first nibble at film freakdom, a gnashing, celluloid-crammed ­swallow—I’d roared back into my routine of going onstage as much as I could. If gluttony was the way I was going to learn filmmaking, I thought, then that was how I was going to keep my comedian muscles limber and lethal. As much stage time as possible. It was the only way I knew.

  So this was my routine, that first year:

  1) Wake up in my blank, Ikea-heavy apartment on Normandie. 2) Drive to work at Ren-Mar studios. 3) Carb-and-coffee-heavy breakfast at craft services. 4) Pitch sketches. 5) Play Doom and Hexen at my computer for most of the day, then hastily write whatever sketches they accepted twenty minutes before they were due. 6) Self-­righteously piss and moan about the legitimate notes and concerns the producers had with my sloppy, poorly executed concepts. I mean, couldn’t they see how brilliant my idea was? Who cared about the typos or the fact that the sketch might not really have an ending? Ambiguity is what classic cinema and memorable sketch comedy are all about, maaaaaaaaaan.