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

Movies, to him and the majority of the planet, are an enhancement to a life. The way a glass of wine complements a dinner. I’m the other way around. I’m the kind of person who eats a few bites of food so that my stomach can handle the full bottle of wine I’m about to drink.

I've been very lucky in my life in terms of people who are able to tolerate me.

Take what you need from [films] and get out of the dark once in a while. You’re going to have more of the dark than you can handle, sooner than you think. The thing about the dark is it can never get enough of you.

Imitation leads to exhilaration when you follow it back to its source.

Vincent van Gogh was a “tormented genius” the way Jimi Hendrix was a “guitar player.” I

Part of being in your twenties is not knowing an ally when you see one.

The man is clear in his mind. But his soul is mad.

Even if you know nothing about the process of filmmaking…you can sense the fear, excitement, and risk that went into a scene like that. For the writer to conceive it, for the director to facilitate it, for the actors to execute it, and for the editor to hinge it to the flow of a thousand other moments with as much gambled on them.

...I’m a stone-cold atheist who’s grateful religion exists. All religions. I look at them as a testament to the human race’s imagination, to our ability to invent stories that explain away—or at least make manageable—the nameless terrors, horrific randomness, and utter, galactic meaninglessness of the universe. Is there anything more defiant and beautiful than, when faced with a roaring void, to say “I know a story that fits this quite nicely. And I’m going to use it, pitiless universe, to give meaning and poetry and hope to my days inside this maelstrom into which I’ve, in Joseph Condrad’s words, ‘blundered unbidden’”?

Dana had one arm. He'd lost the other one to cancer. Being the film freak I was, I never bothered to ask about it further. Or even what his last name was. Not enough time before or between the films. A one-armed schoolteacher, teaching kids in the shitty L.A. school district, probably full of more stories and personality than the electric fables being projected above us. But I was more focused on the mummies and vampires and dinosaurs and aliens to take a deeper interest in an actual, unique human being sitting right next to me. Such was my addiction, at that point. Cut off from the world. A ghost, but breathing and jacketed with flesh.

It's the kind of movie that makes you realize that each person you glance at, interact with or ignore is an epic film or thrilling novel you'll never get to experience. Makes you bless the grandeur of life and curse it at the same time for being to painfully narrow and brief.

Van Gogh’s paintbrush captured, like a Q-tip swabbing a germ-filled throat culture, a sample of the dirty darkness loose in the air at the end of 1888.

…some of us had built whole careers - pointing out how unfair and whimsical and chaotic the entertainment business was, how it rarely rewarded the truly talented. None of us could see how it never rewarded the inert

Sprocket fiend is the name I have for the subterranean dimension to my film addiction. The subtle, beneath-the-sound-track sound of the clattering projector in those old rep theaters, especially the New Beverly. The defiant, twenty-four-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. You're safe in whatever chronal flow the director chooses to take you through. Real time, or a span of months or years, or backward and forward through a life. You are given the space of a film to steal time. And the projector is your only clock. And the need for that subtle, clicking sprocket time makes you - made me - a sprocket fiend.

seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.