Word: mamet
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Madonna says her role in Speed-the-Plow stemmed indirectly from a letter she wrote to Mamet in September 1987, praising House of Games. "It was the first movie I had seen in a long time that had stimulating language," she says. "I didn't feel it had been written for the masses. So I wrote my first fan letter." A few months later, she heard about Mamet's play through veteran Director Mike Nichols, and contacted Mosher, with whom she and Penn had worked in a nonpublic, workshop staging of David Rabe's play Goose...
That led to two multi-hour auditions and, later, what Mosher calls "small but significant rewrites during rehearsal" to accommodate the part to her. Adds Mosher: "Madonna brings a backbone of steel. Mamet made the character, rather than a poor soul who is battered to the ground, someone about whom there is an element of doubt." Indeed, the play's pivotal question is the true nature of her role, the smallest of the three but the engine of the plot. Says Mosher: "The audience is meant to go out asking one another: Is she an angel? Is she a whore...
...Mamet has said that his screenwriting, beginning with The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) and including his Oscar-nominated script for The Verdict (1982), "forced on me the issue of plot." He acknowledged to friends that Glengarry was the first of his plays to have anything resembling a workable second act. But Speed-the-Plow has two huge holes in its narrative. First, the effort to persuade Mantegna's character to believe in the book takes place almost entirely offstage. Second, right up to the end it is impossible to tell whether the book is brilliance or bilge...
...Mamet fans, Speed-the-Plow will recall many of the pleasures of Glengarry. Both center on salesmen who have no skill except persuasion, no talent but for heightened, theatrical speech and naked yet manipulative emotional outbursts. Although Mamet is highly literary -- he reads widely, and the script for Speed-the-Plow has an epigraph from Thackeray's Pendennis -- few of his witticisms translate well into print, because he does not write rounded, formal speeches. The movie men in Speed-the-Plow, much like the thugs in American Buffalo (1975), the actors in A Life in the Theater...
...authority of history to invent a fictitiously murderous Eliot Ness and, worse, a guilty plea made for Al Capone by his attorney against the mobster's will. That is something that could not happen in any court still observing the fundamentals of the Constitution. In Speed-the-Plow Mamet makes the unastonishing revelation that movie moguls are venal and pandering. Perhaps he means to prick spectators' consciences by holding them responsible for the box-office triumph of trivia over moral concern...