Silver Screen Fiend
Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $16.99
Publisher Description
The instant New York Times bestseller from author, comedian and actor Patton Oswalt, a “heartfelt and hilarious” (USA TODAY) memoir about coming of age as a performer during the late 1990s while obsessively watching classic films at a legendary theater in Los Angeles. “[Oswalt has] a set of synapses like a pinball machine and a prose style to match” (The New York Times).
Between 1995 and 1999, Patton Oswalt lived with an unshakable addiction. It wasn’t drugs, alcohol, or sex: it was film. After moving to Los Angeles, Oswalt became a huge film buff (or as he calls it, a sprocket fiend), absorbing classics, cult hits, and new releases at the famous New Beverly Cinema. Silver screen celluloid became Patton’s life schoolbook, informing his notion of acting, writing, comedy, and relationships.
Set in the nascent days of LA’s alternative comedy scene, Silver Screen Fiend chronicles Oswalt’s journey from fledgling stand-up comedian to self-assured sitcom actor, with the colorful New Beverly collective and a cast of now-notable young comedians supporting him all along the way. “Clever and readable...Oswalt’s encyclopedic knowledge and frothing enthusiasm for films (from sleek noir classics, to gory B movies, to cliché-riddled independents, to big empty blockbusters) is relentlessly present, whirring in the background like a projector” (The Boston Globe). More than a memoir, this is “a love song to the silver screen” (Paste Magazine).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this dynamic memoir, comedian and author Patton Oswald writes of his obsessive four-year love affair with film. Arriving in LA to chase his dream of standup stardom, Oswalt was seduced by films, from classic to contemporary, and spent four years racing from theater to theater to catch everything from latest blockbuster to Hammer retrospective. Oswalt's celluloid odyssey provides a framework for his education as an artist and human being. A brash suburbanite when he arrives on the West Coast, Oswalt endures one humiliation after another bombing onstage in San Francisco, getting fired from MADtv on his way to success, and still manages to keep his soul. Silver Screen Fiend serves as a sort-of a sequel to a previous memoir (Zombie Spaceship Wasteland). Two memoirs in quick succession from a, relatively, young man might raise doubts but Oswalt's unique voice and offbeat conceits save him from any danger of a sophomore slump. While he does indulge in the typical Hollywood smoke blowing every peer is a genius! Prodigy! Seventh Wonder! his sardonic self-awareness and fascination with the minutiae of film history are seductive. Oswalt's sentences crackle with energy and humor; this stand-up comic is also a sit-down one.
