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david mamet

The Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright
trashes the Internet, denounces "Schindler's List" and
praises summer movies as the reappearance
of ancient mystery cults.

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BY RICHARD COVINGTON | Seething with impeccably timed profanity, David Mamet's play "Glengarry Glen Ross" won him the Pulitzer Prize in 1984. But in an interview, hardly a swear word escapes the playwright's lips. With his close-cropped beard and inscrutable poker face behind clear Lucite-framed eyeglasses, Mamet is the epitome of self-control, rarely cracking a smile, yet he spins out discourse on everything from aesthetics to Hollywood producers and what he sees as gratuitous sex in movies, false grief over the death of Princess Diana and the pernicious exploitation of Jews in "Schindler's List" with bitingly dry wit. The 49-year-old Chicagoan made his name with "Sexual Perversity in Chicago" (1974) and "American Buffalo" (1977), spare, dark dramas whose incisive characterizations and brilliant dialogue (like James M. Cain channeling Harold Pinter) built enormous dramatic tension. His stories, often involving the plight of small-time grifters, dubious real estate salesmen and other marginal types, explore a desperate, obsessed landscape that is deeply American. Since then Mamet has turned his caustic gaze upon Hollywood (Madonna played the aspiring actress in 1989's "Speed-the-Plow") and sexual harassment (in 1993's subversive "Oleanna"). Another play, "The Old Neighborhood," opens this November on Broadway. Despite being an outspoken critic of the American film industry, Mamet has written some of the best-crafted film scripts of the past two decades, including "The Postman Always Rings Twice," "The Verdict," "The Untouchables" and this year's "The Edge." "House of Games" and "Things Change," two films he wrote and directed, are jewels of the confidence man's art. His latest film, "The Spanish Prisoner," is another hall of mirrors, with Steve Martin as trickster-in-chief. (He was also one of several screenwriters on Adrian Lyne's controversial version of "Lolita.") Mamet is also the author of numerous works of nonfiction, including "Writing in Restaurants" and his latest, "True and False: Heresy and Common Sense for the Actor," as well as two works of fiction. Mamet lives in Vermont and Cambridge, Mass., with his wife, actress Rebecca Pidgeon. Salon interviewed him earlier this month at the festival of American film in Deauville, France, following the European premiere of "The Spanish Prisoner." - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - How did you get the idea for the film of "The Spanish Prisoner?" My wife and I were sitting around in the Caribbean on a vacation and it pissed down rain the whole time. I was looking at this little lagoon from our porch and there was this huge 130-foot motor yacht, a vast ocean-going yacht that had a helicopter on the fantail. God knows how much the whole thing cost, $50 million anyway with the yacht. And I wondered what someone would be like who came off that yacht. Then I started wondering, what if someone came off the yacht and you weren't sure if they came off the yacht. That was the inception of the story. Is the idea of the con game something that appears in all your films? Yeah, it appears in most of them. I think that film, as opposed to theater, is intrinsically a melodramatic medium. And one of the wonderful categories of melodrama is the confidence thriller. Elsewhere you mentioned the "light thriller." What is that? I contrasted the light thriller and film noir. The light thriller is much closer to the tradition of comedy. The film of comedy is such that in every scene, the hero makes a misstep and yet is rescued at the end by the forces of good, or by God, or by a deus ex machina. Tragedy is exactly the opposite. At each step, the hero seems to be doing the correct thing, but at the end of the movie ends up consigned to perdition, or death, or disgrace, because of some internal flaw. So film noir is much closer to tragedy and the light or Hitchcockian thriller is much closer to comedy. And "The Spanish Prisoner" is a light thriller? That's right. Are your films a reflection of the way you look at life? Is all of life a con game of some sort? No, I don't think that all of life is, but I certainly think that all of commerce is. In the United States, it's our pleasure and joy to consider life as a commercial enterprise. That's our national character. When do we get out of that mode? I think that's part of our national problem, how to extricate ourselves sufficiently to be able to take a look at the life we lead and perhaps have a better time. You said in your recent book of essays, "Make Believe Town," that Theodore Dreiser's "An American Tragedy" was your favorite American novel and that the story shows how violence takes precedence over love in America. Could you explain that a bit? If you look at "An American Tragedy," which I've always considered the great American novel, the reason it's specifically an American tragedy is that the problem with the hero is that he sees love as basically a commercial endeavor. He wants to trade up. He finds this perfectly nice girl who wants to sleep with him and who loves him and whom he's very fond of and then he finds someone he likes better. And the only way he can get rid of the first girl is to kill her. That's the American tragedy. How has that changed over time? I don't think it has. It's still a problem of the national character. I don't think any country has it better than any other country. For example, in Scandinavia, they have to eat very, very salty fish. One wouldn't want to live like that either. But in America, our problem is we're a consumer culture and there's nothing we won't do if someone tells us -- or we intuit -- that it's going to make money, or it's going to make us happy through consumerism. That's our American problem. It's the American equivalent of the salty fish. We're constantly buying crap we don't need and devoting ourselves to endeavors which, perhaps on reflection, with a little bit of distance, would reveal themselves to be contrary to our own best interests. How do films feed into this? We have our own film tradition which has created some extraordinary works of film, some masterpieces. Nonetheless, the American tradition of film overall is that it's a commercial medium. That's not necessarily bad. The films of William Wyler came out of that and the films of Orson Welles and Stanley Kubrick happened in spite of that. Nonetheless, we don't have a tradition of film as art. As the media gets more and more powerful, film as mass entertainment, which is to say solely as marketing of the consumer product, that tradition gets much, much stronger. The job of mass entertainment is exactly the opposite of the job of art. The job of the artist gets more difficult. On the other hand, maybe that's always been the case. Why is the job of the artist the exact opposite of mass entertainment? I like mass entertainment. I've written mass entertainment. But it's the opposite of art because the job of mass entertainment is to cajole, seduce and flatter consumers to let them know that what they thought was right is right, and that their tastes and their immediate gratification are of the utmost concern of the purveyor. The job of the artist, on the other hand, is to say, wait a second, to the contrary, everything that we have thought is wrong. Let's reexamine it. You've mentioned "Schindler's List" as an example of a movie that fit into the audience's need to applaud itself. I think it did. I don't think that's why Steven Spielberg made the movie. I think he made it from the best possible motives and it was a subject close to his heart. It just happened to be a movie the premise of which I disagree with. N E X T+P A G E+| Exploiting the Jews

ILLUSTRATION BY ZACH TRENHOLM