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

by Patton Oswalt

  At least I’ve kept the painful memory of every self-­serving, lazy argument I made while I was at MADtv, to remind me to work on the execution as hard as the conception hit me. But that’s another book.

  Because my other routine—my lunar routine, my nocturnal gauntlet—was this:

  1) Wet my hair, wash my face, brush my teeth in the men’s room at Ren-Mar around seven thirty, which is usually when my day ended unless it was a Friday night taping. 2) Grab dinner. Two plastic trays of sushi from Ralph’s and a big Evian was a reliable favorite. I could eat it in my car without spilling anything on my shirt as I drove to either 3a) the New Beverly, or some other rep theater to catch a movie, or 3b) a comedy stage, somewhere.

  But a new wrinkle had been thrown into my routine. An insane one, a magical-thinking one, a baseball-player-wearing-the-same-pair-of-socks-through-a-pennant-series superstitious one.

  Remember how, after that first double feature at the New Beverly, I went back to my apartment and checked off—in my Film Noir Encyclopedia and first volume of Cult Movies and The Psychotronic Encyclopedia—the date and place that I’d actually seen those movies? Well, I went and did it again with The Nutty Professor and then, a week later, with Touch of Evil and Kiss of Death (June 7 and 8, respectively, at the New Beverly).

  And in between all of that—in between the Billy Wilder double feature and The Nutty Professor and then the two classic film noirs, I did a set at the UnCabaret at Luna Park.

  The UnCabaret was a Sunday night show started by Beth Lapides in 1993 as an alternative to a lot of the mainstream clubs in Los Angeles. Enough has been written about it elsewhere, so let me boil it down here: ­Lapides’s creation was a crucial offshoot of spaces like the Holy City Zoo and, by the time I started doing sets there in 1994, one of the best places for a comedian to get seen, advance their career, gain new followers and grow beyond their limits.

  It was also nerve-wracking, going in there to do sets. I was suddenly sharing the stage with idols of mine, like David Cross, Dana Gould and Laura Kightlinger. And the crowd was packed with not only rabid comedy fans but celebrities who were even bigger idols to me. I descended the stairs one night to do my set and realized, in an ass-clinching moment after I’d passed them, that the goddamned motherfucking oh-my-fucking-Christ Beastie Boys were the three guys I’d pushed past to make my way to the stage.

  I had a great set that night. Killer. I’d only rarely connected like that with an audience, making even my moments of silence and fumbling into laughs. And in front of the guys who crafted Paul’s Boutique, a hip-hop album as dense as one of Gabriel García Márquez’s phantasmal libraries!

  Where did that sudden surge come from? Why did I suddenly feel like I had a nitrous tank strapped to a part of me, like Mad Max’s V8 Interceptor in The Road Warrior?

  Maybe, I thought, back in my apartment that night, it was the Five Books. The checking off of classic films, after actually going to watch them on-screen. As I filled in each hole in my movie buff’s incomplete knowledge, perhaps I was unlocking some secret level of skill I had as a comedian.

  Before you start in on me, yes, I realize now this was superstition and ritual and illogical voodoo-mind. Salt tossed over your shoulder. Always saying “the Scottish play” and not . . . you know. Hats on beds.

  Movies checked off in books. That was to become my ritual. My secret spell, my wards and glyphs and incantations, aiding me in my pursuit as a comedian. And—I seemed to keep forgetting—my goal to become a filmmaker. That would happen, right?

  So after that night at the UnCabaret, I wasn’t merely going out to see movies. I was seeking magical assistance. Anywhere I could find it, often at the risk of career, life or relationships. A late matinee of Last Tango in Paris (Cult Movies, volume 2) on a Sunday in San Francisco, which made me almost miss getting to my show at Cobb’s that evening. Bloodsucking Freaks (The Psychotronic Encyclopedia) at midnight at the Sunset 5, sneaking out of an amazing rooftop party downtown and racing across the city to make it on time. If I missed even a second of the film, it didn’t count. I was an obsessive sorcerer with a jealous, sentient spellbook.

  Jesus—oh God, I’m just now remembering this; holy moley was I an asshole—I even made a girl I’d been going out with for six years walk to her car by herself at two o’clock in the morning because I was in the middle of an all-night horror-thon at the Cinerama Dome. I Married a Monster from Outer Space had just ended, and Mr. Sardonicus was about to start.

  “So, I’m really going to walk out there, two in the morning, by myself? You’re okay with that?” I can still see her half-exasperated, half-pitying face in the semi-darkness.

  “Well, I’ve never, uh, seen the . . . uh . . . the beginning of . . .”

  She justifiably broke up with me shortly after that.

  So that was my push-pull, that first year as a sprocket fiend and born-again stage ghoul, all through the rest of 1995 and into 1996. Devouring movies, checking off, and convincing myself that my improving fortunes onstage came from expanding this alternate movie world inside my head.

  I did something that night, watching Beauty and the Beast (listed in both The Psychotronic Encyclopedia and Cult Movies volume 1—bonus!), that I’d only done rarely up to that point. I tried to think about what the actors and directors had gone through to make it. I’d read about that movie, knew the struggle that Cocteau had, what with the postwar shortages in film stock at the time. And poor Jean Marais, his skin cracked and burning from the animal fur glued to it for five hours every morning. Cocteau himself, his stress and inner turmoil erupting onto his skin, checking into a hospital and turning the reins of his masterpiece over to another director. These people had struggled against even more than the usual odds against making a movie.II They’d done it in spite of the hostility of the world to the mere act of filmmaking, the indifference of the public to gauzy fantasy in the face of exhausted, war-ravaged reality.

  I’d think of Beauty and the Beast every time I’d do a set in some small, out-of-the-way coffeehouse, often one I’d booked myself or helped promote with my friends. A lot of times we’d end up performing for each other. I did an afternoon at Highland Grounds—me and Sarah Silverman and Tenacious D—in front of fifteen people, half of whom slammed their laptops shut or scooped up their coffee and scones to find a quieter place away from these fucking clowns. I’d do the tiny, stark, overlit Onyx Café on Vermont, milling around with three or four other comedians while a pre–“Loser” Beck would pack up his guitar and his audience of eight would head for the door. The Creativity Bookstore, out at the beach, a usually empty space with the occasional tanned, gorgeous homeless guy and his dog.III

  The show at the Onyx Café moved across the street to Pedro’s Grille, and as 1995 turned to 1996, it caught on. Bigger crowds, bigger comedians—Bobcat Goldthwait and Jon Stewart would drop in. Something was beginning to gel. No one could say what it was, exactly, but my group of friends were starting to come into their own. Tenacious D and Mr. Show came out of the Diamond Club—another usually half-empty showcase theater, on Hollywood Boulevard. Stand-up comedians mixed with characters and sketches. Will Ferrell performed with his group Simpatico. Jeff Hatz staged his elaborate “Assembly North Gym,” a brilliant mock-up of a high school assembly, with various comedians exorcising whatever angst they carried from teachers, administrators, or dismissive fellow students.

  Then Margaret Cho got a sitcom. Jack Black became a movie star. Was it our time? I remember watching Psych-Out and The Trip and Head at the New Beverly, seeing Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper getting to act in movies only because they also wrote and produced them. Me and my friends got to go onstage only because we asked a bookstore or coffee shop manager to let us do a show. Then Easy Rider came along and pulled Nicholson and Hopper and, if they were close enough to their jetwash, everyone else in their crew into the establishment.

  And then came the Largo.

 
; The Largo had opened in August of 1996—formerly a dodgy, mocking attempt at a French bistro called the Café Largo. An Irish music promoter named Mark Flan­agan had bought the place, planning on showcasing the music acts he liked, in the fashion he thought they should be seen. Like Sherman over at the New Beverly with his idiosyncratic pairing of movies, Flanagan saw connective tissue between, say, Aimee Mann and Colin Hay and an audience that might actually like to sit down and relax with a glass of wine and let the musicians take their time. A relief from the knee-and-eardrum-destroying, standing-­room-only rock club model. The way the New Beverly was a relief from the multiplex. There were plenty of multiplexes in L.A. in which to see Con Air or Broken ArrowIV or Eddie Murphy’s remake of The Nutty Professor. Nothing wrong with those movies. If people need bread and circuses, better it be bread from the best flour and springwater, and circuses under the cleanest canvas tents with the healthiest animals. Also nothing wrong with standing crotch-to-ass in a screaming throng while a band sends sonic boulders of aggression out of monolith speakers and blasts the dust off your skin. Regular doses of Spectacle and Subtle enhance your life.

  Flanagan wanted to bring some Subtle. Once he bought the place he tried to change its name to the Establishment, after Peter Cook’s London club in the sixties, where Marty Feldman and the Goons and eventually Monty Python sprung from. But the previous owners, for murky legal reasons, had a say in the matter. And they said no. So Flanagan said fuck it and just changed its name to the Largo.

  It wasn’t long before Flanagan got the idea to make Monday night a comedy night. Or maybe it wasn’t his idea—maybe he was approached by Josh di Donato, who’d started the Onyx show and taken it to Pedro’s and now, with a rabid weekly audience, was looking for a nicer venue.V

  What mattered to me, and to every other comedian who started doing those Monday nights, was that, even more than the UnCabaret, the Largo was truly a place to change your career. A good set could literally change the path of your life. I walked back into the kitchen one night, and there was Paul Thomas Anderson, inviting me to be in Magnolia. Another night the Farrelly brothers came, and I started punching up their movies.

  And that was just me. There were suddenly other faces, other amazing talents. Paul F. Tompkins, dapper and razor witted, who, on most Mondays, did what another comedian described to me as “structural damage” to the room. Here came people I remembered from San ­Francisco—Greg Behrendt, Greg Proops, Karen Kilgariff. Mary Lynn Rajskub, whom I’d first seen in San Francisco doing poetry at the Albion, was now bringing the same off inflection, broken iambic attack and startling shifts up onto the stage. The Largo audience went anywhere, shifted gears effortlessly. None of us had ever seen anything like it. Sarah Silverman, David Cross and Louis CK would go up and destroy like they were playing the video game Doom in “God mode.”VI Zach Galifianakis would be up there, be-scarved and banging on a piano, peppering the silences with surreal one-liners. Mitch Hedberg went on one night and, in the middle of a set of even more surreal one-liners, said one of the wisest and truest things I’ve ever heard about comedy, and especially about a comedian’s hubris: “Beware of any comedian who writes for half an hour and then tells you they have thirty minutes of new material.”

  But that was the lure and danger of the Largo. You could go onstage totally unprepared, and if the crowd was in the right mood, you could actually do a solid half hour of off-the-top-of-your-head material that would vibrate the walls and lift you into an ego cloud you had no business floating in.

  That was what Monday nights at the Largo were. And for the first time, the outside world started to notice. Spin magazine, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair—journalists were starting to write about it. Casting people and directors and producers would come to the shows. Again—and in opposition to everything I’d ever learned about being a comedian and everything I say now when giving advice—you could change your career with a single set.

  And keep in mind, for the most part, you can’t change your career with a single set. Can’t do it. Don’t try. Get that thought out of your head, now. The ones who make it, I still say, are the ones who go up, night after night, honing their craft, focusing more on the moment and blah blah blah. But there’s a gigantic exception to that rule, and it’s an exception that comes when time, place and venue line up. That convergence doesn’t last long, but when it happens, the “you can’t change your career with one set” rule goes right out the window.

  It’s happened before. The Ed Sullivan Show. The Tonight Show—if Carson called you over to the couch after your set. The Comedy Store in the early eighties, I suppose. It’s happened for other creative professions as well. The Grand Ole Opry. CBGB.

  And it happened, for a time, at the Largo. And when it did, we started to eat each other alive.

  Never in overt ways. More subtle, seventh-grade-­cafeteria-pecking-order ways. Like jostling for the closing spot ’cause you were the alpha and believed no one could follow you. Or hanging out every single Monday, even if you weren’t booked, on the off chance someone wouldn’t show and you’d go up in their place. Comedians, addicted to the crack cocaine response of the Largo audience, would wear out their welcome, either in terms of multiple Monday nights in a row or, once they got onstage, hogging time. Twenty-minute closing sets became half hours became forty-five minutes. I know this because I was one of the worst offenders.

  Sometimes I’d be in the room when someone—a friend, a fucking friend—would go onstage and I’d leave, not wanting to see them kill, not liking the curdled butane stink it’d create in my stomach, watching it. I remember one comedian, another San Francisco transplant who ended up spurning the stage for staff writing, strutting around one Monday night after looking at the lineup. “They’ve got me going on last. My first time visiting here, and they’ve got me going on last,” he said with the worst mock humility I’ve ever seen. Turns out his name was simply at the top of the comp list, which made it appear that he was closing. His name had been jotted down on the lineup after the headliner’s name, as a note to the doorman. He convinced himself, for the twenty minutes before someone took him aside and explained the confusion (after which point he fled in embarrassment), that just by appearing in the room, he had been given the prime spot in the lineup. He wasn’t even on the show. Good thing, too—he would have had to follow Todd Glass, who was (and remains) a force of nature. Still, I envied his confidence and delusion.

  That was the effect the Largo—which, at that point, had become industry shorthand for “the alternative elite”—had on a comedian visiting it for the first time. Imagine what it was doing to all of us—the core group who were there every single Monday. We were glowing and crackling with ambition, with the sick radiation of potential fame and riches, swelling and mutating, terminal.

  Other comedians divided off into cliques, treating friends, suddenly, like outsiders. A lot of these cliques were held together only by the energy created from excluding everyone. Once everyone was excluded, they’d turn on each other, and weeks later the members of the clique were enemies. And no, I’m not writing this to name names, settle scores, plant gossip. I was just as bad—if not worse—in my behavior and greed as anyone I’m describing. They’ve all got their stories to tell and I’m sure books will be written, blogs will be posted. The names, alliances and enmities don’t matter. Not to me. It only matters that we were young, and we each handled fame (or the promise of it) and success (or the hint of it) in our own, unique, clumsy and terrible ways. And what also matters, in my wider memory, is seeing firsthand what I’d only read about in places like Warhol’s Factory, and Studio 54, and the Algonquin Round Table before that. Did even Ben Franklin think that life was some transitory, nebulous clique? “I must soon quit this scene . . .” And he would have been saying that to George Washington, who, if he wasn’t the Andy Warhol of the Founding Fathers, certainly shared his hairstyle.

  Oh, and here’s something else that would happen,
every few Mondays. See, once the Largo had been mentioned in, say, Rolling Stone? Suddenly we had big-time, mainstream headliners dropping by, wanting to flex their egos, roll with the new, and deny aging and death.VII

  These sets rarely went well. As one of the Largo regulars pointed out, onstage one Monday after a previous week’s painful sitcom-titan flameout, “Is there anything more entertaining than watching some huge headliner come up here and eat it? And then attack the crowd for eating it? Nervously laughing while saying, ‘Well, I guess this alternative comedy is all about not getting laughs, right? Heh heh heh.’ Sweat sweat sweat.”

  He was right. But the flip side of what he said was also true. The Largo, as amazing and nurturing as it was for the musicians and comedians who played there, could be just as deadly and reality-warped as the castle of wonders and horrors in Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. Because as entertaining as watching a mainstream comedian crash and burn in the Largo was, it was equally as hilarious watching a Largo hothouse flower wither and die in the harsher air of a mainstream club or, worse, on the road. “I went to Blockbuster with my friend Terry, right? And, so, he rents The Pelican Brief, can you believe it? I mean, uh . . . I mean, if you knew Terry. I guess . . . oh shit, you guys don’t know Terry. Great.” No, they didn’t. Nor did they know the significance of referencing Kim Deal or The Fast Show or, as I discovered one night at the Riviera in Las Vegas, movie director Sam Fuller.VIII

  It went back to Hedberg’s warning, back to Cocteau’s castle. Inside the Largo, especially during its heyday, we were all kings and rebels and artists forging the new, and emerging victorious from the jungle every single time. Outside of the Largo? Just like Warhol’s Factory denizens outside of their silver-wallpapered paradise, or Dorothy Parker away from her chair and vodka at the Algonquin, we were still comedians, blinking in the daylight, schlepping onto planes, nervous at auditions. For as much as we made fun of mainstream hack comedians, with their bits about airline food and cats vs. dogs? Alternative comedy soon had its own hack premises. The Shitty Blockbuster Movie We Still Shelled Out Money to See and Were Now Lambasting. The Audition That Didn’t Go Well. The Looking at Our Notes While Working on the Idea We Just Wrote Down and Were Trying to Work Out Onstage. Dozens of others.