Page 1 of 4 The first time I spoke with Jerry Stahl was as a fan. I mustered up the courage to approach him at a Silverlake cantina to tell him how much I enjoyed a live reading he had recently given from his then-unpublished novel Perv. He was gracious, self-effacing, and very, very funny. The next time we met was when we shared a stage together at another spoken word event. I did a piece dramatizing a recent real-life humiliation; he shared one of his. Again, he had me in stitches. I gushed and got an autographed copy of Permanent Midnight in return. Now, having read Perv, I am again reassured that I'm not the only freak in town. "It's all research," Jerry repeatedly reminds me whenever I relay yet another no-one-would-believe-it-if-I-wrote-about-it misadventure in Hollywoodland. Needless to say, I jumped at the chance to interview him for Tin House about those strange bedfellows, movies and books. Ann Magnuson: What did you think of the film they made of Permanent Midnight? Jerry Stahl: Well, like I always say, you haven't lived till you've seen the worst moments of your life reenacted by celebrities nine feet high. It's like being a fly on the wall and having your wings plucked at the same time. That said, I think Ben Stiller was beyond brilliant, as was Owen Wilson as "my best friend"—a character, oddly enough, that didn't exist in real life. (Being a junkie, I didn't have friends, I just had people I could be nice to long enough to rifle their wallets.) Maria Bello, who played my girlfriend, was also great. Strangely enough, she looked exactly like the original, which cranked things up to a whole new level of existential weirdness: there I am, watching some guy, as me, rolling around in bed with a woman I loved, but whom I can't actually touch, because she's really just an actress. I was in the surreally odd position of being jealous of myself. AM: That brings up the idea of novelization, when people write the book after the movie. With the twist that your book is a memoir. Has there been any public confusion? About character identity, fact versus fiction? JS: Funny you should bring that up. I think at this point my book has become a novelization. I think that just happens. It flips on you. Because a lot of people haven't read the book before seeing the film, or they didn't even know there was a book. That's when you know you've really arrived. When people think you've written the novelization of your own life based on a movie. AM: I was in a coloring book for Small Soldiers. JS: Beautiful. You must be so proud. AM: Was the movie a lot different from the book? JS: Let's just say, in some ways, I was a different kind of asshole on-screen than I was in print. David Veloz, the director, who also wrote the screenplay, took things in directions I might not necessarily have gone, but that's why they hired him. He was one of the original writers of Natural Born Killers, which is one of the few movies I've actually watched nine times. So he seemed like a great choice. And the producers, Jane Hampsher and Don Murphy, produced NBK with Oliver Stone. But it is, as they say, a process. In the first draft of the script, for example, the writer had me tying off with toilet paper, which was slightly problematic. Apparently, they don't teach the dos and don'ts of heroin abuse at USC Film School. I ended up as kind of an on-set needle wrangler, teaching Ben how to find a vein, get a register, cook up Mexican tar, and vomit like a man. Thank God I'd done the research. AM: I think Ben did a good job. I enjoyed his drug-addled pitch to the TV execs. JS: His pitch was good. Yeah, I was never that smooth, actually. What I strived to communicate to all involved, though, was that the book wasn't really about drugs. It was about being a stranger in your own skin, about fear of sunlight, mailman-dread, slow-motion suicide, and that soul-deep need to simultaneously obliterate awareness of what you're doing and yet be constantly aware so you can keep on doing it… But don't get me going. There's a flavor of solitary desolation inherent in addiction that can't be described, only experienced. And in some ways film was a better medium for that. There's one moment in Permanent Midnight when the camera zeroes in on Ben's eyes after he's fixed in his neck. He's sitting in the front seat on some shit street in downtown L.A. with his baby wailing beside him and the night whirling around outside and Tony Robbins babbling out of the car radio. For me, that scene embodied the mundane trauma inherent to junkiedom. I mean, Tony Robbins! Perfect! Because, you have to understand, this was normal behavior. You reach a point where geezing speedballs and spraying bloody tulips on the ceiling of a Burger King bathroom while the cops pound on the door and you're hearing dogs bark in Guatemala is totally ho-hum. But sitting down to chicken à la king with your wife and child seems more extreme than leaping out of a burning 747...This was the quotidian surrealism the film needed to capture. The addict's reality stands out as the negative image of everybody else's. Happily, the director was gracious enough to let me put my own stamp on Ben's dialogue and character (i.e., me), so that by the time we got to a final cut, Big-Screen Jerry became more recognizable to the off-screen version. While the specifics diverge hugely from those of my book—not to mention my life—the emotional reality, at certain moments, was spot on. And that's what ultimately matters. AM: What's that line from Hemingway? That anyone who sells their book to the movies should just stop at the border of Hollywood, throw the manuscript as hard as he can, and run like hell in the other direction? JS: My line would be slightly different. I'd say, once you take the money, you should just shut the fuck up. AM: But you are happy with how it turned out? JS: I'll tell you a story. The first day of shooting interiors, I walk through the studio door, and one of these tool-belt-and-donut guys kind of puts out his hand and tries to stop me. He wants to know who I am, and I say something genius like "Oh, I'm, uh, the guy the movie's about." To which he replies, with this creepy smile, "Oh, man, you must feel so lucky. They don't usually make movies about losers!" So why wouldn't I be happy? Who knew that ending up an ass-to-the-curb dope fiend, destroying my liver, trashing ten years of my life, and carpet bombing the lives of friends and family would be such a great career move? I think there's a lesson here for all of us. Click to continue