Film freak
Like so many of the surviving repertory movie theaters around the country, the New Beverly Cinema in Los Angeles went digital not long ago. For three decades, Sherman Torgan programmed a nightly double bill of Hollywood classics and Z-movie cult oddities
Now, however, longtime supporter Quentin Tarantino has taken over the operation, and as his first order of business, he has dumped the digital projector. The New Beverly is once again screening all of its films in 35mm prints.
Back in the mid-1990s, it was the subtle clatter of those old 35mm projectors that gave actor, comedian and hard-core film buff Patton Oswalt a name for his own particular brand of cinematic obsession: He was a hopelessly addicted “sprocket fiend.”
Devouring an education in film history guided by the late Torgan, Oswalt came to crave the clack of the machine: “the defiant, twentyfour-frames-per-second mechanical heartbeat that says, at least for the duration of whatever movie you’re watching, the world’s time doesn’t apply to you,” as he writes in his new book, “Silver Screen Fiend.” “You are given the space of a film to steal time.”
For a four-year period beginning in 1995, having been lured away from a brief stint in San Francisco by the Hollywood sign, Oswalt stole an awful lot of time in the New Beverly and L.A.’s other revival houses. On a whim, he began marking up his copies of film reference books such as “The Film Noir Encyclopedia” and “The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film” with the dates and theaters identifying each conquest. Soon, he was compulsively racing to movie screenings from his day job as a writer on “MADtv,” then hustling home to check off his viewing accomplishments in the margins.
Oswalt, known as a key player in the “alternative” comedy movement that grew out of the L.A. nightclub Largo, has a fussy, withering, hyper-referential style, both onstage and on the page. At one point, he calls his film fanaticism “Asperger’s-y.”
But he’s well aware of his own tendency to be insufferable, and his self-deprecation provides some of the new book’s most amusing moments. “I’m a boxing glove with a horseshoe inside of it, conversationally,” he writes. “I speak at you. I speak through you. You’ve got the queasy feeling you might not even need to be here right now, and I’d still spit Facts About Billy Wilder into the afternoon air.”
Oswalt’s first book, the best-seller “Zombie Spaceship Wasteland,” was a grab bag of comic essays, some autobiographical, some conceptual, some disposable. “Silver Screen Fiend” has a throughline of sorts, but it bends around some wide detours, mostly involving the comedian’s formative years onstage.
A long description of his theory of his personal “Night Cafes” — the real-life episodes that permanently altered his perspective, as Van Gogh’s painting of the same name did for the artist — threatens to carve up the reader’s ear before he’s had a chance to tune it to the author’s easily distracted voice.
Eventually, Oswalt begins to question the mental health of his deep immersion in the movies. There’s a brief, poignant mention of an acquaintance who helped him see that he was avoiding real human contact while he sat in the dark of the theater.
Dana, a fellow moviegoer, was a schoolteacher who’d lost an arm to cancer. “Being the film freak I was, I never bothered to ask about it further,” Oswalt writes. “Or even what his last name was.”
In hindsight, he realizes, Dana was “probably full of more stories and personality than the electric fables being projected above us.”
Still, he can’t resist. The first half of the night’s double bill had just ended; still to come was “Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed,” from the U.K. horror studio Hammer Films.
“Peter Cushing is extraordinary in that movie,” delivering a “sharp-edged, misanthropic tour-de-force,” he writes. Once again, he’s sliding a fist into the boxing glove with the horseshoe inside. And he still doesn’t know Dana’s last name.