David Mamet

It’s a lot of fun. It’s like making a movie constantly.

I’ve got a lot to learn from Shawn. He’s running two shows and he looks like he’s half asleep all the time. I’m in awe of him sometimes. I have a shitload to learn from him. He’s great. In addition to being a wonderful administrator and a terrific producer, he’s got a terrific story sense. The hardest thing about dramaturgy is of course the plot. They say anybody can write a good first act and that’s true. So a lot of times we’d be sitting around in the room and I or someone else will be jacked up and he’ll say “Instead of the guy, what if it was the girl? What if you took scene three first and put it first?” The other good part is that he loves going into the editing room, which is another form of storytelling. It is taking the finished product and saying, “Okay, I get it. My good ideas don’t make sense. I’m going to reshuffle them and make them make sense.” To answer your question, it’s great working with him.

I don’t know. I know I had the chance to make television before. I wrote a couple episodes of Hill Street Blues back in the dark ages. That was before sound had come to television. It was silent. But it just happened. I was just mucking about. I had directed a couple of episodes of The Shield for Shawn and I just finished a movie called Spartan with Eric Haney who had written a book called Inside Delta Force, about his years in Delta Force. Shawn, Eric and I were having sushi and the idea came out of the woodwork to do a TV show based on Eric’s book so there you have it.

Yeah, that’s right.

I think they’re very much connected. I’ve always counted myself really fortunate to be in show business. It was either that or crime because other than show business I don’t think I have any skills. So I’ve always loved the business and the craft end of it. As a dramatist you don’t have to spend much time with the business side of it. You write the plays, you put them on, the people come, you make some money. The people don’t come, you write another play and put that on. It’s fairly straightforward. So since getting more and more involved in Hollywood I’ve been more involved in the business side of the equation and it’s fascinating.

I don’t know that I’d call them out. I certainly don’t name any names nor would I. That’s not my place. I’m not there to invite individualism. I’m there to support the system for good or ill. What I’m talking about is that show business is absolute, unfettered free market capitalism. I’ve never thought about economics before so to look at it that way has been very interesting.

Yeah because if I don’t reconcile it for myself, my grocer ain’t going to. I’m very fortunate. I grew up in Chicago in the golden age of Chicago Theater. Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey had just written Grease in a garage. Dennis Franz and Joe Mantegna were doing work over at the Organic Theater and I was doing American Buffalo with Billy Macy and Mike Nussbaum in our little garage theater. Then John Malkovich, Gary Sinise and Laurie Metcalf came down, took over the little garage theater and they started doing all the Sam Shepherd plays. There was nothing between us and the poorhouse except putting the asses in the seats. That’s all there was. So we never drew a distinction between art and commerce. Here we were putting on plays for the fun of it, but if the people didn’t come we didn’t eat. That was a wonderful salutary experience in the essence of show business. Which is, if they didn’t laugh, it ain’t funny.

Well, I’ve had two experiences, one was notes in television and the other was notes in the movies. In television I haven’t gotten any notes. Shawn may have gotten a couple notes because he’s, quite graciously, much closer to the networks and the studio than I am. But as far as I can see we haven’t gotten many notes. The only notes that we’ve gotten are about clarity. In the movies when you’re working as a writer for hire, you get an incredible amount of notes and they’re almost always bad and stupid. The problem is, you’re getting paid to put up with stupidness and once in a while somebody has a good idea. So one is constantly wearing one’s artist’s hat and exchanging it for one’s whore hat and sometimes your head gets chafed.

I’ll tell you what my dear friend Shel Silverstein, may he rest in peace, said. I was bitching and moaning about screenwriting and he said, “Dave, I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like you’re the greatest cabinetmaker in the world. People come to you and say I want you to make a perfect example of a Biedermeier table and we’ll pay you whatever you want. You say, okay. You work on it you’re so proud of it and they take it and they set fire to it. You say, You said you’d pay for it and you set fire to it. They say Oh no, we just wanted to do it for a movie effect. So they come back next year and say, We want you to make another one of those Biedermeier tables. We’ll pay you even more money than we paid you last year. You say, Ok, I’m a craftsman. It’s all about craft. I need the money because my girlfriend and my kids like it. So you build the Biedermeier table even better than before and they take it and set fire to it. By the third or fourth year you aren’t going to be making that table quite as well anymore because you know they’re going to fucking set fire to it.” The problem with writing movies for hire is that you’re constantly saying to yourself “What difference does it make? They’re going to ruin it anyway.” Of course you can’t say that because then you are a whore. So you say, “No, I will not go down that road. I’m going to write the best goddamn script I can.” Then they hate it. So you say, “What’s the problem?” The problem is not with the people who are paying you because what they do is perfectly clear. The problem is with yourself. Not that you’re writing a less good script, but that you know that you’re getting paid to write a script that no one is ever going to fucking understand.

Destroyed, but the idea is that it ain’t your work. It’s somebody else’s. The law calls it writer for hire because that’s what you are.

It’s actually Aristotle, right out of the Poetics. But it took me a long time to realize, “Duh, that’s what it’s all about.” Part of it is I’ve been working very closely with the writers on the TV show and trying to impart to them the few things that I know that might be helpful to younger writers.

Not so much with Shawn because we’re co-producers on the show. It’s like any good marriage, automatically one person’s going to do one thing and the other person is going to do the other and you help the other guy out. In a bad marriage you say “Okay, listen, I took the garbage out Wednesday, you take the garbage out Thursday.” “I fed the cat yesterday now you have to feed the cat,” In a good marriage you do it automatically, so I think we’ve got a pretty good marriage as producers. But it’s the nature of television, one cannot direct every one. When you finish your show on Monday, someone else has been prepping to shoot a new show on Tuesday so you can’t be both prepping and directing. You can’t do them all. Also, you can’t write them all. Theoretically you could, if you were younger and had a lot of chemical aid. But you would go insane if you had to write a 46 minute movie, basically half a movie, every eight days. You might be able to do it for a couple of weeks but after that you’re going to start to go insane because it’s very taxing. So when you’re doing a television show, you have to delegate responsibility to the other writers and directors.

The greatest document of Western Civilization in, my estimation, is Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. They put the two guys into the cage. Remember what the guy said?

Yeah, but what does he say after that?

We know you won’t break the rules, there aren’t any.

Nobody knows anything. Both of those lines are spectacular.

I don’t teach classes in writing. I’ve tried. I can’t do it. I do teach classes in acting. Bill Macy and I started an acting company 21 years ago in New York called The Atlantic Theater. It’s still thriving in New York and I just started an outpost branch in LA so we’re going to be teaching acting a little bit out here. The rules for acting and the rules for writing are the same. Who wants what? What happens if I don’t get it and Why now?

I adore actors.

That’s not because he was an actor. It’s because he was an asshole. Many of the most successful writers in the history of the world were either actors or failed actors or in love with actors. That’s because the way you learn how to write a play is not by sitting in your chair, it’s by watching actors and especially by watching actors around an audience. It helps to try to figure out what’s the actor actually doing. What is it that the audience perceives about what the actor’s doing? I’ve been an actor, Harold Pinter was an actor and Chekhov was in love with actors. You’ve got to watch what the actor’s doing if you want to learn how to write a play.

Well, you don’t need dialogue. If somebody’s making a movie out of my plays, there’s a self-regulating mechanism that regulates the rhythm of the performance and of the audience. There’s a feedback loop between the actors and the audience. In a movie that’s not true. So sometimes in a movie one has to alter the pace because the pace is the pace of the shots not the pace of the performance. Therefore sometimes you’re going to make cuts in a movie.

I finished the screenplay but I didn’t shoot it. It’s sitting on the shelf.

I don’t know. I’ve got several of things. Sony Classics asked me to do a movie version of The Voysey Inheritance, which is a 1905 play I adapted. It’s currently on at The Atlantic Theatre in New York. I’ve got this other project I may do about the martial arts community in LA.

There’s this subterranean community that’s cross-pollinated between cage fighters and cops and boxers and stuntmen and Navy Seals. It’s a really interesting community. It is sort of a samurai film. It is about a guy who’s the world’s greatest fighter but he doesn’t compete. He just trains people because he says, “I’ll train you to walk out of the alley alive but I won’t train you to get points from a referee.” The movie is about how he gets seduced away from his path and becomes commercialized.

I wrote it already. I think I may do that in the next year or so.

Yeah, I’ve been working on a secret play. I don’t know how good it is. But it’s a play about a political issue I think concerns us all. It’s about the President of the United States and whether or not he’s going to pardon a couple of turkeys for Thanksgiving.

Yeah.

Oh yeah. Do you know about the Toynbee tiles?

This is the weirdest thing that ever happened. I wrote this play [called 4 am] about a million years ago that was an homage to Larry King when he was late night talk show host on radio in the 70’s. A guy calls in and he’s talking about the film 2001 based on the writings of Arnold Toynbee. The Larry King character says, “I think you’ll find that 2001 is based on the writings of Arthur C. Clarke.” The guy says, “No, Larry. I believe that you’re wrong there. 2001 based on the writing of Arnold Toynbee tells us that all human life will be reconstituted on the planet Jupiter.” They had this rather silly conversation for ten minutes. It turns out that now you can go on the internet and look up Toynbee tiles. There are these tiles that are showing up all over the country that say in mosaic “Toynbee says all life reconstituted on Jupiter.” You can go to these links and they’ll tell you how to make these tiles and where to put them up.

It’s great.

I’ll tell you another weird thing. A guy sent me this in the mail. Apparently, one of the Iraqi ministers, like the minister of electricity or something like that, got kidnapped and they held him for a while. I don’t know what they did; they probably whacked him on his knuckles. He got away and the Times asked him how he escaped and he said and I quote, “I did the Chicago way.” Which is an idea that I made up for Sean Connery in The Untouchables. I thought it was nice this guy was quoting from that.

I don’t know if it’s true or not but I do mention the Eisenstein sequence in Bambi vs. Godzilla. I describe it as a prescient adumbration of Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables.

No, not really but I suggested to Brian that he do a sequel and call it The Retouchables.

He didn’t think it was funny.

by Daniel Robert Epstein

SG Username: AndersWolleck