Word: salesmen
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...decades ago, between acting jobs, David Mamet worked in a real estate & office. There, the playwright later recalled, salesmen peddled "tracts of undeveloped land in Arizona and Florida to gullible Chicagoans." It was a chance to observe up close these dinosaurs of capitalism ("An idea," Mamet said, "whose time has come and gone") working their cold-blooded performance art on people too nice to say no. Mamet dramatized the experience in the 1983 play Glengarry Glen Ross, which won a Pulitzer Prize, and has now brought it, intact and enhanced, to the screen...
...title refers to two parcels of Florida land: Glen Ross Farms, where the salesmen once made a killing, and Glengarry Highlands, the current stake, up for grabs. The past perfect tense gives way to the present imperative now -- because there's a dogfight among the four middle-aged men whose tough job it is to cozen the consumer. The top salesman will win a Cadillac; runner-up gets a set of steak knives. And third prize? Ask the cool executive (Alec Baldwin), himself a human steak knife, who has dropped by to explain the competition. "Third prize...
Mamet's men talk for a living, and they talk to keep from telling the truth. In their four-letter world, lying comes with the territory. As the Old Man says in Strindberg's Ghost Sonata: "Silence hides nothing. Words conceal." Two of the salesmen, Moss (Ed Harris) and Aaronow (Alan Arkin), sit in a bar, grousing about the real estate company. It is as much a part of their job as sounding stardusted with sweet reason while on a pitch. Moss sketches an idea for a theft of the office, and later tells Aaronow he is implicated...
...TIME has tracked down more than 20 former IBM salesmen and managers, most now in their 60s and 70s, who worked closely with Perot in those early years. Some of their memories are fading, a number of key players are dead, and documents are virtually nonexistent. But the picture the retirees paint, while sometimes sketchy, shows Perot to have been more ruthless and petty in his early business dealings than is commonly known...
...good idea, but that, 'Let's face it, you and I are so different, it wouldn't last six months,' " recalls Volding, now 68. "He got upset that I turned him down." Volding, meanwhile, had been promoted to marketing manager in Dallas, and was responsible for helping IBM salesmen protect their accounts from rivals like Perot...