Some years back, when I was still doing the Great Library Project, I came across the movie Stephen Tobolowsky’s Birthday Party. I put it on hold, then hesitated about actually watching it. I wasn’t sure. What could possibly be interesting about some guy—and, sure, now I looked it up I did know who he was, but I know who a lot of people are—having a birthday party? My birthday parties are fun to me, I grant you, but I had someone actually attend one of my parties once and find it boring because she couldn’t get in on the jokes and so forth of the rest of the group, and how was it going to be better to watch it?

Well. I have been recommending this movie to people ever since, because what it taught me was that Stephen Tobolowsky is a national treasure. (I am disappointed to announce that he wasn’t in it, though.) We do not use the word “raconteur” very often these days, but the definition of that word is Stephen Tobolowsky. Anyone who’s been puttering around Hollywood as long as he has is bound to have a wealth of stories, but the thing that makes him so wonderful is how skilled he is at telling them. Yes, in fact, two hours of him just sitting around with an audience, telling stories, is one of the best movies I’ve ever seen.

To the point that I made my mother buy me The Dangerous Animals Club, his autobiography, and I still wonder what she thought that book was about. (The title comes from a club he and a couple of kids down the block had in the slightly rural Dallas of his childhood. They were seeking out and capturing wild animals, and the way he tells those stories will make you laugh if you have any sense of humour at all.) There’s some overlap in stories—if I had a chance to tell about the time I talked down an armed standoff, I’d tell that every change I had—but there are more than enough stories to make each one distinct.

After all, we are talking about a man who grew up Jewish in ’50s Dallas. Who went to drama school in the ’60s. Who came to Hollywood in the ’70s—his mother’s last advice on dropping him off was “Stephen, don’t do porno.” For forty years now, he’s been a Hey It’s That Guy, to the extent that he was once on location in Vancouver and the hotel TV got three channels. He was on all of them.

But I think one of the reasons he’s so good at telling stories is that he remembers the details. There are lots of people who don’t—I do, and friends are constantly surprised when I mention things that they were there for and have absolutely no memory of. I strongly suspect that, if you talked to the people that come up in these stories, they would themselves be surprised by events they were a part of. And not just because several stories, in the book at least, are the kind of thing where Dave Barry would refer to “illegal hallucinogenic substances.”

The other reason is that he seems to like people. He talks to them. He tells in Dangerous Animals Club about his early Davy Crockett obsession—like so many children of the ’50s, he had a coonskin cap, and he even had the official licensed Disney Davy Crockett rifle. Then one day, when he was filming Wild Hogs, he was talking to a cowgirl involved with a scene involving bulls on the set, and she mentioned that she’d been taught to ride by her grandfather. No, he wasn’t a cowboy; he was an actor perhaps Tobolowsky had heard of named Fess Parker?

Now, that story was there for any number of people, but it’s Tobolowsky’s story because he actually talked to her. A lot of his stories come from actually having talked to people and learned about them. Yes, his gift for words is important to that as well, but the reason he has the stories to figure out how to word is that he talked to people enough to get the stories. After all, he did talk down that gunman in a grocery store once.

Most of his roles don’t require a lot in the way of acting, I’ll admit. Not just because a lot of his movies are frankly terrible, as he’d be the first to admit. (The stories he tells make it clear that he knows that, but hey—he’s working.) But his work in Memento makes it quite clear that, yes, he can act if he is called upon to do so. Likewise, in my opinion at least, his work in One Day At a Time. He’s a delight. He’s a fine actor. And my goodness but the man can tell a story.

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