Word: mamet
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With something of the same method and intent, Mamet writes about Hollywood. His plays, films and essays contain many scalding observations on mainstream filmmaking. Yet from 1981's The Postman Always Rings Twice through The Verdict, The Untouchables, Hoffa and The Edge, Mamet has written solid, burly movies for top producers and stars while pursuing a parallel career with the modestly budgeted films he writes and directs himself. "I'm really fortunate," he says. "I have some good friends and supporters in Hollywood." And he knows that part of his job as a filmmaker is "shaking money out of those...
...Mamet's fictive world was distinctive from the get-go. His plays, beginning with the 1974 Sexual Perversity in Chicago, wrapped Pinteresque menace in comically precise diction, like a gamier Damon Runyon. It was Jewish guys talking like Italian guys about life, death and, always, a poignant memory of the perfect woman, long ago or never. ("Bobby," says the dying cop in Homicide, "you remember that girl that time?") But at 50, Mamet has other concerns. The overtly serious work tends to be about Jewishness (in his play The Old Neighborhood and novel The Old Religion); the nastily comic, about...
...hour 50 minutes, The Spanish Prisoner clocks in as one of Mamet's longest works. Yet there are ellipses aplenty, in plot and dialogue, to tantalize and mystify the viewer. "I'm always trying to keep it spare," Mamet says. "Trudy Ship, the editor on my first films, said in editing, 'You start with a scalpel, and you end with a chainsaw.' I think that's true of writing too. For me the real division between a serious writer and an unserious one is whether they're willing...
...Mamet shoot isn't solemn. "There's a great atmosphere on the set," says Martin, whom Mamet wanted to work with ever since seeing him in a 1988 revival of Waiting for Godot, and who seamlessly joins such Mamet familiars as Pidgeon (the author's wife) and Jay. "You can make a great movie having fun as easily as you can make a great movie having angst." Mamet loves devising practical jokes, keeping the actors loose, writing gags just for the joy of it. He's written 20 or so plays, five original screenplays he's directed, seven scripts...
...works so hard, and he cites Noel Coward: "Work is more fun than fun." Or, as con artiste Joe Mantegna says in House of Games, "What's more fun than human nature?" Like all those purring predators in The Spanish Prisoner, David Mamet devotes much of his working life to nothing more or less complicated than playing artful games...