Patton Oswalt's 6 favorite books about movies and moviemaking

The Ghastly One: The Sex-Gore Netherworld of Filmmaker Andy Milligan by Jimmy McDonough (out of print). Andy Milligan, a below Z-grade exploitation filmmaker, filmed a shadow autobiography of his life and hid it in the disposable, grind-house trash he churned out in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. John Waters once talked about Milligan and The Ghastly One in this same space, asking the disturbing question, "Can a genius be untalented, too?"

Out of the Past: Adventures in Film Noir by Barry Gifford (University Press of Mississippi, $22). Gifford's 1988 collection of seemingly random reviews of movies from the film noir era is the best example of how films affect you personally — both in how you perceive them and how they make you look at your life.

Suspects by David Thomson (Oldcastle, $24). The mansion that Norma Desmond inhabits in Sunset Boulevard was purchased for her by Noah Cross from Chinatown. And Suspects offers a hundred other offscreen connections that exist solely in the imagination of David Thomson. The film critic's 1985 story collection is haunting and, when you discover the identity of the book's narrator, tragic.

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The Kid Stays in the Picture by Robert Evans (It Books, $18). Is this the best, bitchiest Hollywood memoir ever written? You bet it is. The audiobook, narrated by the former Paramount studio chief himself, is an acidic epic.

Roger Ebert's Video Companion (out of print). I'd recommend any edition of the Video Companion books, which were released annually from 1986 through 1998. But especially the later ones, which included appendixes and essays about The Great Films, Ebert's Movie Glossary, and other goodies. They made me a smarter, happier film buff.

The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film by Michael Weldon (out of print). Published in 1983, Weldon's exhausting, no-stone-unturned history of fringe cinema was the internet in paper form before the internet existed. Did you know Francis Ford Coppola got his start in 3-D nudie films? The Psychotronic Encyclopedia does. It knows everything.

—Patton Oswalt's new memoir, Silver Screen Fiend, chronicles a period in his life when his love of watching movies threatened to become pathological.