In his 2015 book Silver Screen Fiend, comedian and Broad Run High School Class of 1987 graduate Patton Oswalt recalls that he worked at a three-screen cinema at the intersection of Dranesville Road and Route 7 in Sterling, Virginia. That happens to be the theater where my dad took me to see The Running Man, the Arnold Schwarzenegger-headlined adaptation of a 1982 Stephen King novella set in the year 2025, three or four months after Oswalt’s graduation. When I read Oswalt’s book, it occurred to me that Oswalt might’ve been the guy who sold my dad one adult and one kid ticket to The Running Man on a Saturday or Sunday afternoon 38 years ago.
I see now that Oswalt graduated from the College of William & Mary in 1991, so when The Running Man opened in November 1987, he would’ve been down in Williamsburg, most of the way through the first semester of his freshman year. Unless he was coming home to work at the theater on weekends! I don’t recall him saying anything about that in his book.
The subject of Silver Screen Fiend is the way Oswalt’s exploding cinephilia as a Los Angeles resident in his late twenties, aided and abetted by the brilliant every-night-a-double-feature programming of the New Beverly Theater, curdled into something very like addiction. As a guy who used to drive down to the New Beverly a lot during my own late twenties in Southern California, and who is now frequently at one of two Alamo Drafthouse locations within bicycling range of my apartment on the evenings when I’m not attending a critics’ screening of a new release, I think about that a lot.
Anyway, my Washington Post review of director Edgar Wright’s new, more faithful adaptation of King’s novella is here.
