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

  I was right in the middle of this, by the way. My sets at the Largo were going great guns, and my road gigs—my headlining gigs, where I was actually making money (after MADtv decided to soldier on without me at the end of season two in 1997)—were starting to suffer. I was slow in realizing that a killer half an hour at the Largo meant about five solid, usable minutes on the road. Again, Mitch Hedberg’s warning, unheeded.

  On top of all this, I was falling deeper and deeper into my movie-watching-for-success-in-comedy superstition. I look back in my calendars and I’m amazed I didn’t kill anyone, racing from some of these Monday night screenings to make it to the Largo. The New Beverly was always a godsend—a seven thirty screening of The Pink Panther or Jason and the Argonauts at the New Beverly meant a short drive down Beverly, a right onto Fairfax and then snag a parking space in the alley behind the Largo and zip through the kitchen with plenty of time to grab a drink, go over my notes, get a feel for the crowd and go onstage. Tales Café, just a little farther down La Brea from Beverly, was an equally short drive. I’ve done sets at the Largo with the image of James Coburn’s paper-­shredder grin from The President’s Analyst in my head, or Jane Wyman’s perky sneer from Crime by Night, after racing from Tales.

  But other nights. Oh man. A restored print of It’s a Wonderful Life at the Nuart, all the way out in Santa Monica? How did I get through my set and not burst into tears, from the combination of both terror from the drive and emotion from the end of that film?

  And even worse—one night I made it all the way from the Town Center 5 in Encino, fresh from a screening of The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,IX and still made it to the Largo in time to do a set. I don’t remember that set going well. Maybe I used up whatever luck I got from seeing de Sica’s gorgeous memory box of a film in not dying while I slalomed and McQueen’d my way to another Monday night ego rub.

  You see, the Largo was worth the risk. Because it completed an arc that started at Garvin’s. Garvin’s, back in DC in the summer of 1988, was a meat-and-potatoes vocational portal. This is stand-up comedy. You can either do it or not. If you show up every week, you’ll get better. If you get better, you’ll get work. Once you start getting work you need to figure out what will keep getting you work and craft your comedy along those lines.

  Four years of that, of solidly working the road, of trying to learn how to make any audience my audience. A lot of failures. A lot of triumphs. After a few years, I became bulletproof, as far as having to go up and win over any crowd with material that anyone could relate to, that the majority would recognize, be amused by and then forget the instant they left the club. I made myself bookable, competent and, ultimately, disposable.

  Then came the Holy City Zoo. Pure innovation for innovation’s sake. Risk taking in front of no one—or tiny crowds that would hone in on you and not the jokes you were telling. Suddenly I had to chew my way out of the safe, pastel cocoon of road material I’d built around myself and learn to walk the stage in the raw red of my exposed psyche, the deep blue of my lurking depression, the stinging white of my angers and resentments, the blazing yellow of my cowardice and the black black black of whatever dark thoughts I might be having. The Zoo was a flight simulator—where it was safe to see what it felt like to nose-turf the 747 of your art and you could walk away unharmed. It wasn’t going to launch you onto a TV or movie screen, but it would help you link up with comedians who would make you better at what you did—only because you had no choice. You either got better or they cast you out. Unlike the Garvin’s comics, they weren’t impressed with the work you were getting. They were impressed with the work you were doing.

  And then, the Largo. Where, miraculously, those two ideas—art and commerce, risk and opportunity—fused and created a nameless new drug. It hung in the air, a narcotic vapor, and we all breathed it. It made all of us ambitious, competitive, resentful, jealous and, ultimately, more creative than we’d ever been before or since. At least, that’s how it affected me.

  I look again at my calendars from this time—the sets I did, the movies I saw. And it hits me—I can remember almost every detail of each night at the Largo. The other rooms, other dates? I did sets at the Improv and the Laugh Factory, as well as places with names I can barely remember. Book Grinders. Checca. The Upfront Theatre. Tempest. I mean, I went onstage at all of ’em. Told jokes. But I couldn’t tell you with whom, or what I said, or what anyone else did.

  At the same time, I was seeing every single movie I could. There they all are, noted in the calendar boxes, with the theater I saw them at. And not just classics at the New Beverly. I was going to see big-budget new releases, too. Turbulence at the Galaxy. The Relic at Mann’s Chinese. First Knight. Judge Dredd. Double Team. Volcano.

  I couldn’t tell you anything about them.

  But I remember the way Dennis Hopper said, “Hey, wait . . . ,” to the spooky girl who might be a mermaid near the beginning of Curtis Harrington’s Night Tide—the way he delivered the line with just the right blend of longing, madness and terror. Or Timothy Carey screaming, “Please . . . please . . . please . . . please . . . take my HAND!” in The World’s Greatest Sinner. Every second of Laura Dern’s brilliantly empty-headed performance in Citizen Ruth. Harry Morgan, far away from his kindly Colonel Sherman T. Potter persona, sliding the penknife under Richard Basehart’s fingernail in Outside the Wall. And so many more—random moments from small, brilliant, mostly forgotten films, which nevertheless burned their way into my memory better than anything the movie studios could attach sparklers and CGI to.

  That’s not to say that I thought all big-budget Hollywood movies were forgettable garbage and that true cinema was to be found solely in tiny, out-of-the-way indies. As the nineties approached the aughts, independent film began to fall victim to the same clichés I was seeing in alternative comedy. One night, after leaving a particularly precious slice of manufactured quirkiness at the Sunset 5, a screenwriter friend of mine said, “Jesus, are there only three plots of independent films? ‘Oh no, we ripped off the mob,’ ‘Hitman on his last job,’ and ‘How do we get rid of this dead body?’”

  He wasn’t wrong. And the makers of Anaconda weren’t wrong to let Jon Voight blaze all over creation with his seven-headed hydra of an accent, or to shoot his death by anaconda from the POV of the anaconda’s stomach as its mouth opened, or have his corpse wink after it regurgitated him to make room for the even-more-­delectable Jennifer Lopez. And Samuel L. Jackson’s interrupted monologue in the middle of Deep Blue Sea? The audience in the Cinerama Dome stood and cheered—I swear to you—when the scene met its bloody, eviscerating ­conclusion.

  It took me a few years, though—and a lot of nights at the Largo and a lot more nights in movie theater seats—before I learned that just because something was “indie” and “underground” didn’t automatically give it value. I also had to learn to look for the moments of substance and impact in the everyday. I was sitting in a minimall Subway having a sandwich one evening, on my way from work to go to the Largo, when I read a quote by Italo Calvino: “seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

  When I got to the Largo, there was a comedian onstage, literally reading a list of things he hated. That was it. No bigger jokes, no deeper insights, no startling twist. Just a list of things he didn’t like. And he killed. That’s when I began to suspect that maybe even the Largo had elements to it that were inferno.

  I also learned, on Thursday, October 2, 1997, that a place that was, in itself, entirely inferno had bits worth saving.X That was my debut set at the Comedy Store. I was scheduled to film my first HBO comedy special in just over two weeks, up in San Francisco. Mitzi Shore, the owner of the Comedy Store, had heard tell of this. She called my manager and wanted to see a set from me.

  The Comedy Store was, to me, a legendary stage with a lot of history. I was excited to do it. I was also very excit
ed about where my career was going. HBO special, regular at this hot new room called the Largo. Things were looking up. Time to do the Store. See what happened.

  I got into the main room and Andrew “Dice” Clay was onstage. I’d been a huge fan of his when I was in college but I’d cooled a bit in my enthusiasm after I started doing comedy and began to think that what he did was becoming a bit repetitive and, after a while, slightly angry and resentful.

  Well, he was spraying anger and resentment all over the room that night. Baiting the crowd, pissed off and seemingly entitled. I instinctively tuned him out as I made my way toward a dark table in the back, to go over my notes and get ready. And then . . .

  . . . I tuned back in. Dice was, more than any comedian I’d seen at the Largo in the past few months up to that point, truly flying without a script. He segued from chatting amiably with a young wannabe actress in the front row to one of the most offensive, venomous, hilarious screeds about what, exactly, the phrase “follow your dreams” meant, especially in terms of Hollywood and the entertainment business. It involved, at various points, being the prettiest one in Omaha, tucking genitals under one’s ass, and Marilyn Monroe. It was childish, profane and 100 percent true.

  He left the stage and the room. I was genuinely, delightfully shaken up. I’d just seen a comedian—a comedian that, I’ll admit, I and a lot of my Largo colleagues would regularly mock—deliver one of the more memorable sets I’d seen in a long time. On a random, rainy Thursday night in Los Angeles, to maybe one hundred people.

  A few more comedians went up, and then me. I only had to do seven minutes. I did the newer stuff that I knew worked, that killed at the Largo as well as on the road. The set went great. The emcee brought me off. I walked away from the stage and there, sitting at the end of the aisle, like a soft, slumping Buddha, was Mitzi.

  She extended her hand. I shook it. Cold vinyl.

  She said, “Do you live in the city?”

  “Yeah,” I answered.

  “Do you want to work as a doorman here?”

  It took me a second to realize what she’d asked me. I recovered and said, “Well, I mean . . . I tour all the time, and in two weeks I’m filming my first—”

  She whipped her hand away. She was still looking at me, but in a way that told me I was no longer in view. I trudged away, devastated. I thought my set went well.

  There was a clutch of open-mikers, hanging at the back tables, waiting for their spot. A few of them came up to me.

  “What’d she say?” This was from a comedian who was older than me, dressed in the height of comedian fashion, if it were 1984.

  “She said I could work as a doorman here,” I said. My tone must have sounded like the whine a balloon makes when it deflates.

  The comedian’s eyes went wide. “She never offers people the doorman spot on their first set!”

  I suddenly saw the group of open-mikers not as a bunch of comedians, but as the doomed, alternate set of survivors in The Poseidon Adventure—the ones walking the wrong way, deeper into the sinking ship, exhorting Gene Hackman to follow them, insisting that he’s the one going the wrong way. I had to get out of there.

  “Dice used to be the doorman here, too!” Another of the comedians spat this at me as I pushed through the glass door, as if I were making a career-killing mistake.

  That’s the moment the Largo truly became a Night Café for me—when I realized that the extreme perfection of the Largo was, for me as a comedian, as dangerous as the extreme shittiness of the Comedy Store was for the clutch of open-mikers huddled in the back of its black-on-black-on-black, hauntedXI showroom. I saw the two choices in front of me, out on the Sunset Strip sidewalk, as I walked back to my car. Stay exclusive to the Largo and a hundred other alternative comedy rooms all over the city, and turn into a hothouse flower that could only perform in front of crowds that were just so. Or only do the mainstream rooms, and toughen my hide, and have my moments of humanity and transcendence leak through my pores randomly, the way Dice had just done, on weeknights when I wasn’t getting paid, wasn’t winning over new fans, was sweating resentment with the honesty.

  I look at my calendars from after that night, as 1997 wound to a close and 1998 started up, and there it was—my solution. Still did Monday nights at the Largo—and other nights, opening for Aimee Mann and Michael Penn’s Acoustic Vaudeville shows. Opening for Tenacious D. And Colin Hay. And 2 Headed Dog. And White Trash Wins Lotto. And the Naked Trucker and T-Bones and a dozen of the other precious, unforgettable, near-perfect evenings that transpired in the Cocteau/Beauty and the Beast fortress of the Largo. The other comedians were still there, but the alliances and enmities weren’t as strong. It felt like we’d all graduated high school and were looking back at some of the more passionate couplings and ruptures with the amusement and discomfort that you get flipping through an old yearbook. I hated that guy so much I wished him dead? She broke my heart? Wow.

  One night Paul F. Tompkins and I found ourselves at the bar. We’d had our share of tension and competition and passive-aggressive jousting. I said something about how now most of us finished our set and either watched the rest of the show, contentedly, or simply left.

  Paul took a gentlemanly sip of scotch and said, “Well, we all got to know each other, didn’t we?”

  A perfect song lyric as elegy, smuggled into conversation.

  But as much as I still loved the Largo, I made it a point to go out on the road—to the less receptive cities, where I still had to win people over. And I made sure to do a night at the Improv—where I could still count on having a shitty set once in a while. Or the Laugh Factory, where I first auditioned for Late Night with Conan O’Brien, on a weekday “Latino Comedy Riot.” Carlos Mencia was emceeing and brought me up by saying, verbatim, “Okay, this next comedian’s a white guy, but [over the rising boos] give him a chance, motherfuckers!” I didn’t get booked on Late Night ’til years later. Looking back, I appreciate the struggle.

  The Largo moved locations in 2008. Now it’s in the much bigger, much grander Coronet. The Coronet is haunted by even more history than the Comedy Store could ever dream of. I still do shows at the new Largo at least once every two months. I’ll never give up the nirvana of that stage or that crowd. But I’ve made it sweeter by always making sure that when I step foot onto it, I’m shaking off a weekend on the road or a night in front of cranky tourists at the Improv. I saw too many comedians acclimate to the Largo, to the point where any other environment shredded them like a Chihuahua in a dogfighting pit.

  Even Cocteau’s impossible castle, glowing up on the New Beverly screen, was a place that needed to be left behind before it had any value. The Largo was the only Night Café that changed me after I left but was still there for me to return to when I needed it. Besides, I was finally starting to take my first baby steps toward making films. Not as a director, mind you. It was as an actor—an extra, really—but that was a start, wasn’t it?

  Sure it was. Here, I’ll show you.

  * * *

  I.It was always weirdly comforting to hear the female voice on their in-house trailers put that Britpop, lilting rise on the last syllable of theatre.

  II.And I was still two years away from seeing Les Enfants du Paradis—for which I took a punishing early flight back from the Toronto Sketch Comedy Festival so I’d land in Los Angeles in time to get to the New Beverly to see it.

  III.I don’t know where else to put this story, but it needs to be told.

  One night, at the Onyx, a bunch of us were doing sets. I remember Bobcat Goldthwait being there, and Greg Behrendt, and Laura Kightlinger, and a few others. We were, essentially, performing for each other. The Onyx was a white, featureless space with harsh lighting and a big picture window that opened up out to Vermont. Passersby could peer inside and see a life-sized terrarium of a poorly attended open mike.

  Halfway throug
h the show, an older, African American man came in and sat down in one of the white plastic folding chairs. The chairs were in a sloppy half-circle around the “stage,” which was really just a space on the floor with a microphone in a stand. I think Laura was onstage when this happened.

  Laura finished her set. We laughed and applauded—all eight of us. The older, African American man slowly raised his hand. The emcee, midway through introducing the next act, stopped and said, “Sir? You have a comment?”

  The man said, “Yes. I want to get sober, too.”

  Everyone was silent. The emcee’s mouth dropped half-open but he didn’t say anything.

  “I need to get sober,” said the man. More silence.

  Then the older man laughed and said, “If that’s how it is then fuck y’all. I knew this was a scam.”

  And then he rose, dignified, from his chair and strode out into the night.

  It took a few more seconds of silence and then Bobcat said, “Oh Jesus, he thought this was an AA meeting. And we didn’t help him.”

  A couple of us ran out onto Vermont, trying to catch him, maybe lead him to some help with his drinking. But he’d vanished. Probably to a bar, for some righteous drinking.