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

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 %E2%80%93 bombing onstage in San Francisco, getting fired from MADtv %E2%80%93 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 %E2%80%93 every peer is a genius! Prodigy! Seventh Wonder! %E2%80%93 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. (Jan.)