Silver Screen Fiend by Patton Oswalt

The greatest filmmakers have been influenced by all the films that have proceeded them, but to create art one must do more than consume. During the late 90s, Patton Oswalt deluded himself into thinking that if he kept watching as many "great" movies as possible, he would someday become a great screenwriter and director. Somehow, he never got around to that goal.

Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life From an Addiction to Film is the followup to Oswalt's Zombie Spaceship Wasteland. While Wasteland was a fairly free-form memoir, jumping around to different parts of his life, Fiend is more focused as it describes four years in the comedian's life during which he saw way more movies than should be considered healthy. He wrote the movie titles in his calendar and checked them off in five film connoisseur books, though he only counted ones he saw on theater screens, not home video or TV broadcasts. The theater he sat in the most was the New Beverly in Los Angeles, where he got to know the proprietor Sherman Togan so well that Oswalt attended his funeral.

During those four years, Oswalt worked as a staff writer on MADtv, performed stand-up around LA and the country at large, and began his film career as a background actor with one trivial line of dialogue in Down Periscope. But his self proclaimed addiction to film prevented him from having a social life, unless someone agreed to attend the movies with him. At one point he sat through an entire weekend marathon of old horror movies, and the fact that he couldn't remember what happened in any of them was a wakeup call that he likens to overdosing.

Throughout the book, Oswalt refers to certain formative moments in his life as being "Night Cafe"s. He explains that he's referring to a painting by Vincent Van Gogh called The Night Cafe (seen at right) which was the first time the artist tried to paint from memory. This painting changed Van Gogh's perspective on life completely, and Oswalt says that there have been a few places that have affected him that greatly. There was the comedy club in DC that helped him decide to try standup, the Largo in LA where he honed the craft, and of course the New Beverly theater where his love of movies began to overtake his life.

Silver Screen Fiend is a very funny and personal book, self-deprecating throughout. Film addiction may not be as harmful as drugs or alcohol, but when he overcame it, Oswalt gained a better appreciation for the using his own creativity rather than simply absorbing the art of others. He has gone on to become a prolific film and TV actor and a headlining comedian, and I'd be surprised if he doesn't someday get to write and direct a film of his own that rivals the ones by which he was so entranced.

Visit Patton Oswalt's website to learn more or to purchase Silver Screen Fiend.