Jerry Stahl: ‘I Write to Keep From Going Completely Insane’

Put Jerry Stahl in the pantheon of culture commentators who know where the proverbial bodies are buried in this industry.

A journalist, novelist and screenwriter, he’s written for everything from ’80s television hits ALF and Moonlighting to Bad Boys II and the Emmy-winning Escape at Dannemora. He turned his own heroin addiction into the memoir Permanent Midnight, later made into the Ben Stiller movie, and has somehow kept publishing books throughout it all. His latest is the collection Gonzo Neurotic: The Best (and Not So Best) of Jerry Stahl.

Anthony Bourdain once supplied perhaps the perfect Stahl blurb: “Jerry Stahl should either get the Pulitzer Prize or be shot down in the street like a dog.”

“You know, I’m just writing as fast as I can at this point — that’s pretty much what occupies my day,” Jerry, now 73 and living in Los Angeles, tells me on this week’s Rushfield Lunch. “Some writers, at some point — or this writer at any rate — you’re sort of like a hamster. If they don’t chew something, their teeth grow through their jaws, and they can’t eat, and they die a grisly death. It’s sort of the same way with writing. At this point, I just write to keep from going completely insane.”

We talked about the strange sweep of that career — from the mainstream breakthrough of Permanent Midnight back to the cult 1982 post-apocalyptic porn film Café Flesh.

But some of the most fascinating stories involve the movies that didn’t happen. There was Stahl’s script about Oscar Levant, the famously tortured pianist, actor and author of Memoirs of an Amnesiac, which he hoped Natasha Lyonne might direct. And then there was I, Fatty, Stahl’s novel about famed silent-film star Roscoe “Fatty” Arbuckle, whose career was ruined after he was charged with the rape and murder of actress Virginia Rappe. (He was eventually acquitted of all charges.) Johnny Depp optioned I, Fatty with the idea that it could star Philip Seymour Hoffman.

“When Philip Seymour Hoffman was scheduled to do it before his unfortunate end, he said that, unlike Permanent Midnight, which he wasn’t that fond of, I, Fatty ‘is your real memoir; you were hiding behind this layer of fat that you applied to him.’ Make of that what you will, but it still haunts me,” Jerry says. “I just connected with the story.”