Quick Review: Silver Screen Fiend

Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film, by Patton Oswalt.

"How can you be alive and not have seen Sunset Boulevard?"

If that question needs asking, no need to go any further, darling.  This book's not for you.  (And unless you recently escaped from North Korea or a FLDS compound -- in which case the question would be cruel -- I can't imagine having any conversation with an adult that would necessitate it, but there we are.  It happens.)

The question occurs in an imaginary conversation from the first chapter of Patton Oswalt's new book, Silver Screen Fiend.  Chapter One is titled, "Movie Freaks and Sprocket Fiends: The New Beverly Cinema, May 20, 1995."  Let that  sentence serve as something of a summary of the whole, or, if that doesn't make you want to pick up this wry and delightful memoir, let me offer the footnote attached to that question:

"This same conversation is happening, simultaneously, across every 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."

That made me laugh, but then, I love me some Patton Oswalt.  As a writer and a stand-up comedian, his style is dense with that kind of reference. It's smart, self-deprecating, and fast.  Keep up.  (Worth noting that I myself have never heard of Love's Forever Changes, or read Charles Portis's Masters of Atlantis, never had the fries at the Apple Pan, "encountered" Michael C. McMillen's anything, or been to Joshua Tree.  Nevertheless, I get what he's saying and it makes me smile.  Moreover, the above at least makes me wonder why I don't know about any of that stuff, without making me blush with even the slightest embarrassment.  There's a certain magic in that.)

Movies I know from.  It may be worth asking how anyone born in the United States in the 20th Century doesn't.  (That's got to be an interesting story.)  Silver Screen Fiend is the interesting story of how not to be become an auteur, but not for want of study.  Basically, Patton Oswalt, already an established stand-up, spent the mid-nineties breaking into TV and movies -- Down Periscope?  Anyone?  No? -- while dreaming away his every other waking hour in a repertory movie theater in Los Angeles.  His idea was to see every interesting and or important movie ever made and thus acquire the sentimental film education that would one day make him a great director.  Spoiler Alert: hasn't happened -- yet.

Along the way, the reader is treated to some truly hilarious set-pieces I won't spoil by paraphrasing here.  Suffice it to say, I will never be able hereafter to watch Citizen Kane without hearing Lawrence Tierney's commentary in my head.  Call that a teaser.  (And if you want to laugh out loud, go ahead and go straight to Chapter Eight, The Day the Clown Didn't Cry: The Powerhouse Theatre, January 27, 1997.  I cried, I laughed so hard.  Honest.)

This isn't just another comedian putting his best routines between covers however.  Nor is it just a diary of one clever fellow's obsession with cinema, yet another "film book" in the long tradition of that weirdly subjective, yet pedantically specific sub-genre of criticism. Though, to give this dear cineaste his due, there are two "Epilogues", pithy thumbnail reviews and lists, and that comes very near to being a satire of every other film book on the bookstore's shelves, rather than just a way to pad this slim book out to something like 200 pages.  That would be a very cynical reading indeed.  Besides, it's all fun, even the lists.  Oswalt might blush at the word, but this is ultimately a book about making and appreciating art and how best to go about it, or not.  More importantly, it is a book in which the reader, if a devoted moviegoer him or herself, will find not only a kindred soul, but the friend we all rather wish we might take to the movies with us, despite his protests that he talks too much.

Almost worth a trip to LA and a ticket to the New Beverly, on the off-chance.  (Don't think even Patton Oswalt could get me to Joshua Tree, come to that, but then, he hasn't asked.)