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

  Does anyone act more like an overserious senior citizen with time running out on their chance for immortality than someone in their twenties?

  So I finished my first week of shooting Down Periscope, somehow ended up in the Valley, and plunked down to watch Apollo 13. And I left that screening with Clint Howard’s line reading pinging around my skull and my path clear. I knew what I had to do.

  “There’s a call for you, sir. Admiral Graham.”

  There was a period at the end of each of those sentences. That was crucial. Here’s why. Almost exactly one year before, I’d filmed my first-ever TV appearance. The “Couch” episode of Seinfeld. Jason Alexander is trying to rent Breakfast at Tiffany’s, so he can avoid having to read the book for a book club he’s joined. I play the video store clerk who tells him the movie’s been rented. He asks if he can see who rented the movie. I say, “Sorry, sir. It doesn’t work that way.”

  I was crashing at a house full of comedians at the time, for the week I was in Los Angeles auditioning. I was going over my sides for the part—when you’re starting, a single-­line day player part gets more scrutiny and sweat than Hickey’s monologue at the end of The Iceman Cometh.

  One of the comedians, a veteran of a punishing audition-­a-day regimen that was just starting to pay off in day parts on sitcoms, told me, “See that period? Every period’s the beginning of a new thought.” I took that into my Seinfeld audition and got the part.

  And now here I was, back on the Down Periscope set for my second week of filming. I’d written on the MADtv pilot two months earlier and they were waiting to hear whether or not they’d get picked up. For now, I was logically in the movie until the end—sitting in the background in the main cabin, which is where the bulk of the film’s action took place. My background actor “ploy” of slinging a little over-the-top not-enjoying-my-coffee pantomime hadn’t paid off. But I was fresh from seeing Clint Howard perfectly nail that scene in Apollo 13 with his sublime line reading. And I’d remembered the “every period is a new thought” suggestion from my actor friend.

  And this was the week I’d be filming my line.

  “There’s a call for you, sir. Admiral Graham.”

  I rolled those words around in my head. What new direction would I zing the line in after that period? Would I say, very matter-of-factly and professionally, that there was, indeed, a call coming in, and then drip a little acid onto the words Admiral Graham? Make it seem like I shared Kelsey’s distaste for Bruce Dern’s taciturn, petty antagonist? Or maybe I’d say it with a touch of ominous warning, like, “Hey, I bet this guy’s gonna be pissed.” Did I risk saying the whole line flat and unaffected, the way a real radioman with a hundred other tiny details he’s got to be on top of and thinking about would deliver it? That would be more Method, I thought. More Meisner.

  Rest assured that every movie you see where an actor delivers just one line? They’ve put this kind of thought into it. Sometimes you can see it. Sometimes they can hide it. But everyone who gets in front of that lens has this inner conversation. I was having mine now. I was about to speak on film.

  The morning I was supposed to say my line I got a phone call. MADtv had been picked up. They were going to series. How much longer was I going to be on Down Periscope? They appreciated my work on the pilot, but they needed to nail the staff down. Should they look for someone else? We needed to start writing in a week.

  Oh shit. I was slated for at least another two weeks’ work on Down Periscope. Two weeks of pretty good pay, too—but not staff writer pay. The pay I was getting on Down Periscope was enough to get me into SAG and then pay a month’s rent. A steady staff writing gig could pay off all of my running-across-the-collapsing-log-bridge-of-stand-up-comedy debts.

  I stepped onto the submarine set for another day’s filming. It was bifurcated, just the left interior, with the cameras now set to pan down from me, at the radio, to Kelsey, receiving my message and taking Admiral Graham’s call.

  The director called action, the camera swooped by me and I said, “There’sacallcominginforyousir­Ahhhhhhhhhh . . . ,” and my mouth went dry.

  Oh Jesus. It tumbled out in one big, moist pile of verbs. I sounded like a nineteenth-century automaton, standing in a Paris laboratory, trying to fit a four-second sentence into half a second of wax cylinder recording time. And I hadn’t anticipated how hearing the word action and knowing that, for the first time, it actually referred to my acting would send all the saliva in my mouth into an adjacent dimension where people had mouths that were properly hydrated.

  I coughed and cleared my throat, and David asked, Zen-like, “Would you like to do it again?” Yes, thank you, I would, please, yes.

  I took a swig from the water bottle I’d hidden under the radio console as they tracked the camera back to its starting position.

  “Action!”

  “There’s a call coming in for you, sir. Admiral Graham.” Clipped, businesslike, unemotional. A submarine radioman doing his job.

  “Aaaand moving on! Next setup!”

  That was it. Two takes. Of course, the minute I did the second one it hit me how I might actually have done it better. I could have added even more lilt, more obliviousness to the “There’s a call coming in for you, sir” line. Tee up Kelsey even better, like I’m unaware that Admiral Graham meant bad news. Would that have served the scene?

  But I didn’t dare ask for a third take. I’d done it in two takes, been efficient, hadn’t gummed up the works. And since I was about to seriously gum up the works at lunchtime, I went back to my background silence. A gray-­uniformed wraith.

  Oh man, he’s going to be so pissed. I am fucked.

  I was approaching David, the director, midway through lunch. He’d finished his sandwich and was chatting with the producers. My mind was racing. I was terrified.

  I was about to ask to be let off of a film—a film I’d signed on to for the duration. I didn’t have my agent call in and do the asking for me. That’s because, at that point, I didn’t have one. And I thought managers only handled club bookings and the occasional TV spot. This was the movies, damn it. In my mind, I had to man up and handle this myself.

  “Um, David?”

  David said, “Oh hey, Patton. What’s up?”

  “Well, there’s a . . . the thing is . . .” I was stammering. Big throat-clear, and then I started again. “I wrote on a TV pilot that just got picked up. And they want me on as a staff writer. And they start next week so, uh . . . if I want the job, and I kinda need the job, y’know . . .”

  David said, “It’s no problem, seriously. We can fix this in just two more scenes.”

  “Really?” I was halfway thinking he’d blow up at me, or refer me to someone else who would say No can do, you’re fucked.

  Instead, this. A breezy “It’s no problem” and a genuine, concerned and understanding smile.

  “Um . . .” I was trying to think of something to say.

  “We can fix it next setup. You’ll see. Really, it’s not a problem.” Then he went back to his conversation. The whole thing was a cheery shoulder-shrug.

  I went back to the hangout area near the trailers. I told everyone the next shot would be my last.

  “Dude, you didn’t get fired, did you?” asked Toby Huss. He and Harlan were playing a complicated hand of night baseball with some of the other actors.

  I said, “No, it’s just I have this staff writing job, and it starts next week, and if I want to keep it, I’ve got to wrap things up here.”

  “How’re you going to ‘wrap things up’?” asked Harlan. “We’re on a submarine, aren’t we?”

  I hadn’t thought of that. Wait, how was I going to leave a submarine?

  Lunch was over and we headed back to set. I took my seat in front of the radio console. David was talking to Kelsey. This was a major scene in the movie—Kelsey’s character wins the war game with a genu
inely brilliant tactical move, and we were about to shoot the obligatory “everyone cheers and celebrates” scene when we receive the news.

  David looked over at me. “Patton. So, once everyone starts cheering, you get up, and clap Ken on the shoulder there, and head on down the passage toward the stern.”

  “I just walk away?”

  David said, “Yep. Toby, take his seat at the radio for the rest of the shoot.”

  “Aren’t people going to think it’s weird?” asked Harlan. “The radioman just walking away?”

  “It’ll puzzle the shit out of them,” laughed David. “Why not?”

  Down Periscope was released on March 1, 1996. My film debut. Earned my SAG card. I went to see it at the Sherman Oaks Galleria on Saturday, March 2. I saw Harold and Maude the night before, at the New Beverly. The next day I spent a gloomy Sunday afternoon back inside the New Beverly, getting tit-punched by The Girl Can’t Help It and Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. Then I grabbed egg rolls across the street and spent a rainy evening around the corner, inside Tales Café, watching Girls Town. The weekend of seeing myself for the first time on the big screen was preceded by Hal Ashby’s gorgeous, early seventies song fragment about love and sex in the face of annihilation and death. And then followed by the bosom-and-­cartoon-obsessed celluloid limericks of Frank Tashlin, Russ MeyerIII and Charles F. Haas. Ruth Gordon in Harold and Maude, aged and battered but clattering with hilarious life. Jayne Mansfield, Cynthia Meyers and Mamie Van Doren in Girl, Beyond and Girls, respectively—bulbous fuck dolls with glittering shark eyes.

  And that Saturday, in a Sherman Oaks multiplex—Down Periscope.

  Here comes my scene. Camera pans by me. I’m a gray mini-golem in my navy uniform.

  “There’s a call coming in for you—”

  And the camera’s already off of me.

  “—sir. Admiral Graham.” Kelsey nods and the scene proceeds with his verbally sparring with Bruce Dern on submarine radio.

  A few scenes and several resolved character conflicts later Kelsey and his crew have won the war game. The bad guys have been shown up, the good guys have proved themselves and everyone’s cheering. And, in the background, only visible if you’re actually looking for it, is me. Heaving myself up from my radioman’s chair, clapping a crewmate on the back, and then walking off, down the oval passageway and into the diesel guts of the submarine. It’s not quite John Wayne at the end of The Searchers, or Robert De Niro in the middle of Taxi Driver, but it’s memorable all the same. In my film debut, I walk off of a submerged submarine. And I’m going to let that sentence simply end, instead of torturing a metaphor out of it.

  I was happy. For better or worse, I’d made my first step to the other side of the screen. And, in the months since I’d wrapped Down Periscope to now, watching it with a mouthful of cineplex popcorn, I’d had an encounter that made the prospect of simply being in movies not entirely disappointing to me. I mean, I still wanted to be a director, but if that never happened . . .

  Four months prior to watching myself for the first time on a movie screen I’d been, as usual, inside the New Beverly. Thursday, December 28. Three days left in 1995. Post-Christmas, empty L.A. Rain and comfortable cold. Paradise for a movie-freak moleman like myself.

  I’d seen Toy Story earlier that day. I’d just witnessed the beginning of the Pixar revolution. Tom Hanks and Tim Allen voicing a computer-animated story about toys that also, sneakily, managed to touch on parenthood, obsolescence, and the hidden wires that run the universe and that we’ll never understand. If you’d told me that twelve years and fifty pounds farther in my life I’d be the voice in a Pixar film, I’d have gently pointed out that you probably thought you were talking to Jack Black.

  Now it was the evening, and I was watching Citizen Kane for what had to have been the tenth time (so far). The first time I’d seen it was on a tiny TV screen in a college dorm room. Now I was in a comfortably neglected, sad-spring seat near the back row of the New Beverly, watching Orson Welles’s debut and, in a way, swan song unfold. Citizen Kane is more panoramic than most wide-screen movies, in its literal and figurative depths. I was teasing out more of its riddles, the way people will return again and again to Ulysses or the Rach 2.

  Or The Night Café.

  So we were fifteen minutes into the movie. Citizen Kane is structured in so many interdependent flashbacks that even now, having seen it close to twenty times, I couldn’t tell you what was happening at that point in its story. All I know is I was rapt. The theater and world around me were gone, and I was watching Charles Foster Kane chew and bully his way to the top of a mountain he was about to go tumbling down the other side of. And he was going to drain so much love and patience and charity out of everyone he knew in the ascent that none of them would have the energy to run around the other side of that mountain to catch him when he plummeted. You know what’s going to happen every single time you see it but it’s such a sweet ride—like bodysurfing a wave that you know is going to send you belly-first into abrasive sand; still, you can never resist the swell when you feel it rise.

  But there was noise behind me—a rumbling, human-but-maybe-not-human gurgle and bark. Someone was sitting down, fifteen minutes into Citizen Kane, and they were talking to no one. Out loud. Goddamn it. I turned around to shush whoever was pulling me out of Welles’s cinematic gravity.IV

  It was Lawrence Tierney. Reservoir Dogs Lawrence Tierney. Bar-brawling, knife-wound-surviving, battling bruiser T-shirted human tank Lawrence Tierney. Sitting alone in the dark behind me, watching Citizen Kane.

  I didn’t shush him.

  For about fifteen minutes he sat there, talking to the screen as if he were just out of view to the other characters, admonishing Kane. “Don’t clap for that squawking bitch, she can’t sing. Siddown, ya chump!” “Aw Jesus, what’s he staring at? You gonna cry, fancy man?” It was the best DVD commentary I’ve ever heard.

  Suddenly there was a younger man behind him. His handler, I found out later from Sherman. A young kid who’d landed the exhausting, unenviable job of attempting to guide a driverless tractor of a human being like Lawrence Tierney through his remaining days.

  “Larry! How long you been in here? We gotta go!”

  Lawrence said, “We do? Yeah?”

  “Yeah. They’re waiting.”

  Lawrence stood up. He considered the screen one last time.

  “I ain’t never seen this cocksucker,” he said. “ ’S not half bad.”

  And then he was gone.

  This was a professional actor, a noir icon who’d end up with a more-than-fifty-year career. And he’d never seen Citizen Kane. But the fifteen out-of-context minutes he’s just watched—after missing the first fifteen—weren’t “half bad.”

  I’d just started working in movies. One vaporous bit part. I’d tried to make it count. But I forgot something.

  It’s the doing it, over and over again, exactly like stand-up comedy. You did it until your mouth didn’t dry up in front of a camera and you forgot the lens was there and you kept on doing it. The career and the bigger roles (and maybe the directing?) would happen without your thinking about it. No matter how deeply a movie pulled you into its orbit, there was always someone else—whether they were a screen lifer like Lawrence Tierney or a happy businessman with no desire to live on celluloid—who would merely be happy for the momentary distraction. That was the best I could hope for, at the beginning. The swooping and gliding and changing people’s lives, like I’d grandiosely imagined when I watched Sunset Boulevard and Ace in the Hole? That would be partially up to me, partially up to the audience, and partially up to time itself. Lawrence Tierney giving Citizen Kane a “not half bad” in the New Beverly on a rainy December night was something I took with me when I watched Down Periscope three months later.

  Not half bad. A start.

  * * *

  I. Oh man. This was six y
ears before the September 11 attacks. I hope this film doesn’t become prophecy.

  II. A Klansman!

  III. And yeah, Roger Ebert—one of my no-fail guides out of the suburban gray, along with Harlan Ellison, William S. Burroughs and H. L. Mencken—squeezed Beyond the Valley of the Dolls from his typewriter, loins and fever dreams.

  IV. The New Beverly—like all rep theaters—had its usual cast of jabbering weirdos. It also had the occasional clueless Very Successful Interloper who’d end up being even more infuriating than the half-broken sprocket fiends who’d mutter along with Warren Beatty in McCabe and Mrs. Miller or sing along with Eugene Pallette as he descended the stairs near the end of The Lady Eve. One particularly smug, self-satisfied, midnineties sitcom megastar decided to grace a screening of Albert Brooks’s near-perfect Modern Romance, and proceeded to talk over the movie, full volume, adding brilliant shadings and observations like “Nice jacket” and “His record collection sucks.” When I finally leaned forward and asked him to Shut. The. Fuck. Up, he looked back at me with open pity and a sad shake of his head, as if to say, “This poor bastard doesn’t even know how lucky he is to hear me talking over this movie.” I’m proud to say I’ve never watched a single episode of his zeitgeist-grabbing ensemble show and I’ll say proudly, on my deathbed, “I made it all the way through the flesh carnival without seeing a second of that thing. But I’ve seen Modern Romance ten times, three of them probably to spite him and his friends.” Glorious.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Meat and Potatoes

  Los Angeles,

  August 1995

  By August of 1995 I was firmly inserted into an office chair at Ren-Mar Studios (formerly Desilu, home of both I Love Lucy and Star Trek), writing sketches for MADtv. I was also beginning to expand myself, physically, from relying on craft service snacks and endless sessions playing Doom and Quake to relieve the tension and boredom of writer’s block. The days of pacing back and forth on comedy club stages plus working out in hotel gyms on the road were over. The lean was turning into small shelves of flab, which would solidify into the bureau of drawers I currently have perched on my chest and abdomen. Maybe I needed to learn that I only needed the “sock drawer” equivalent of food to get through a day.