David Mamet – When He Was Red-Hot

April 26, 2020 110 Comments

October 1999 By Philip Berk
When it comes to naming the great American playwright of the Millennium, David Mamet is without peer.
His acclaim in the U.S. is matched only by the adulation with which he is greeted in England.
Dissatisfied with the manuscript of Glengarry Glen Ross, he sent the manuscript to playwright Harold Pinter asking for advice. Pinter sent back a message, “Don’t change a thing. It’s perfect. I want to direct it.”
He later went on to win a Pulitzer Prize for that play. But before that there was American Buffalo, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and A Life in the Theatre.
On his way to theatre immortality he has worked as a writer in Hollywood (much like Raymond Chandler and William Faulkner) but unlike them, he steeped himself in filmmaking and has directed a number of films, including last year’s Spanish Prisoner, the provocative Oleana, and his first, House of Games.
He was in Los Angeles recently for his latest, an adaptation of the British play The Winslow Boy, and I had a chance to talk to him and his charming wife Rebecca Pidgeon who costars in the film.
Although consciously Jewish, Mamet has dealt only once ostensively with a Jewish character in his work. That was in the film Homicide about a Jewish cop. Last year he returned to his roots and wrote a much acclaimed play The Old Neighborhood about a Jewish family.
Because I had read that his wife not only converted to Judaism, but after marrying him, she had been Bat Mitzvahed, I asked her why?
Unhesitantly she replied, “Well I think it’s a religion about action rather than belief. It’s not about what you believe — you can’t help what you believe. You can have all sorts of wacky and wild thoughts and you can’t control them. You can accept that they’re there. With Judaism what’s important is how you act on them. And because my husband is Jewish, I wanted to have coherence in our family. We happen to have a great rabbi whom I adore — who’s very inspiring for us — and it’s a good way of life for us.”
Mamet too seems to live a Jewish life.
Not only does he study the Torah, he has learned to read it in Hebrew.
“I always read the Bible,” he told me. “I used to read it in English. Now I’m learning to read The Torah in Hebrew. I can get through it with the help of a dictionary.”
Has it influenced his writing?
“It hasn’t yet, but it will because the language is so magnificent, so magnificently simple, so blunt and simple and straightforward.”
The Winslow Boy has biblical references even though they are the playwright’s and not his. One of the central ideas of the play questions to what degree we pursue the truth? At what cost?
“It’s a question that keeps getting repeated throughout human history. It’s the story of Job, it’s the story of St. Joan. It’s the story of Queen Esther. Queen Esther doesn’t want to speak up against the king because the king doesn’t know she’s Jewish. It is Mordecai, her advisor, who tells her, ‘How do you know this isn’t what you were born for? If it (persecution of the Jews) is going to happen to everyone else, eventually it’s going to happen to you. This is exactly why you were born.”
“The same with Emile Zola, who wasn’t even Jewish. Why is he standing up for Alfred Dreyfuss? And then there’s Theodore Herzl, a completely assimilated Jew who was covering the Dreyfuss trial for his paper in Vienna. All of a sudden, his life changes, and he becomes the founder of the State of Israel?
“It would be easy to suffer if God or someone gave you a card and said ‘This is what I want you to do.’ But one doesn’t get that card when one is put to the test.”
In The Winslow Boy, Sir Robert Morton, a respected attorney agrees to defend a boy who’s been accused of stealing a postal order for which act he has been expelled from the naval academy. Well into the proceedings he is advised by friends and supporters to drop the case against the Admiralty. Instead of heading their advice, he invokes the Book of Proverbs that tells him not to side with the great against the powerless.
Mamet explains: “The prophet Micah was asked, What must we do? and he replied, There are only three things you have to do: Do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God.”
The boy’s father almost sacrifices everything to see that justice done.
Mamet cautions, “Many times when we find ourselves enthused with the spirit of righteousness, we’re probably doing wrong.”
What inspired his liberalism?
“I guess my background had something to do with it. My father – may he rest in peace – was a labor lawyer. He worked his whole life for the rights of working people. I was exposed at a very young age to these traditions of social justice.”
Why did he become a writer?
“When I started out, I was a kid actor in television and radio in Chicago. Later I went to acting school but quickly realized I wasn’t any good. But I was always making up jokes when I was a kid. I used to make up jokes and stories all the time. I’m naturally very curious — I’ve been doing it for more than thirty years — and it’s always exciting.”
What is a typical day?
“Oh hell, I suppose I get out of the house in the morning, and try to waste as much time as possible. Just before I have to go home, having written nothing, I say to myself, ‘You really want to go home at night having wasted this day? So I say okay, I’m going to write something.”
When did he first decide to direct his plays rather than entrust them to others?
“I always directed my plays until I came to New York in the mid-70’s when I was told that other people have to direct your plays. We had some fairly good experiences, but after a while I realized I was missing out on the fun, so I went back to directing.”
He and his wife Rebecca always collaborate. Is that the best of all possible worlds?
“Absolutely. It’s wonderful working with her because she’s a great actress and a wonderful human being and a lot of fun, which she in everything we do together. She’s just fun to work with.”
Do they take their work home with them?
“Never. Part of the trick in the theatre and especially in the movies is to finish your work before you go home. If something is not working and you have unresolved feelings at the end of the day, you’ve done something wrong, so you need to fix it. You don’t have to take your work home with you.”
How important are critics and awards?
“Well, awards are very very difficult. Virginia Woolf wrote a great, great book called Three Guineas, which is advice to actors, and she says don’t go there. You don’t want to take that award, you don’t want to take that honorary degree because it’s going to be difficult for you. That’s great advice. It’s like give me chastity but not quite yet.”
He had some charming anecdotes about two of his most famous works, and what inspired them?
“Oleana came out of the years I spent working in fairly high-ticket universities as an adjunct professor, a visiting lecturer, or something like that. As I’ve said in a lot of my essays, it was like being in a petting zoo — they would bring me to the university and the students would get to pet me and feed me peanuts. I was really stunned by the state of higher learning. I was given an office almost on the grounds of Harvard University. I always refer to it as the epicenter of world ignorance. I was amazed at what went on there.”
And that’s how he came to write a play about mediocrity and sexual politics.
“American Buffalo began when I had a theatre company with Bill Macy, twenty five years ago. I was driving a cab to make some money. Bill was working as a bartender. We were both very poor, working on our theatre company at night. Neither of us had any money. I went over to his apartment one night and opened the refrigerator looking for something to eat. There was a slab of American cheese that looked like building material, and I cut a very thick piece because I was hungry. And he looked at me and he said, ‘Help yourself!’ I was so hurt by his attitude that I started writing this play with its 15-minute monologue about a character (Peach) who wanted to take a piece of toast off a friend’s plate and the friend said, ‘Help yourself.’ and he’s furious. So out of that came American Buffalo because Macy told me to go to hell.”
Nine years later in a follow up I wrote:
At his press conference for Redbelt, wearing his trademark black berret David Mamet greets me with a surprising admonition.
“How come you walked past me in Vegas and failed to recognize me?”
It was at ShoWest where he first screened Redbelt.
I should have been more observant since I’d interviewed him three times previously.
I made up for it by sharing my enthusiam for the film, easily his best with a superb screenplay that uses his rat a tat dialogue rhythms to stunning effect.
The day before he had renounced his liberal agenda and thrown his lot with American conservatism although his manifesto which he published in the Village Voice is fairly benign.
Not unlike his play November which is playing to half full houses on Broadway only thanks to the lure of its leading actor Broadway darling Nathan Lane.
Before the press conference begins I ask if we could talk about his defection (I hadn’t read his the Village Voice piece, only newspaper accounts of it.) “Later on, if you want to buy me a drink,” he responds.
Redbelt almost arrived unannounced despiite an ecletic cast (Chiwetel Ejiofor, Tim Allen, Emily Mortimer, Rodrigo Santoro) which any self respecting publicist would have turned into a banner headline.
So how did it slip through the radar, I ask him.
“I made serveral movies for Sony Classics so they wanted me to do a movie based on a 1905 Harley Granville Baker play called The Voysey Inheritance which I had adapted for the stage. I said I’ll be glad to do that but would you mind doing this one first and they said Sure so that’s how it happened.”
Unlike Sidney Lumet he doesn’t demand a rehearsal period. Is it something that doesn’t work for him?
“It’s not that it doesn’t work for me. We just don’t have the time if you’re working on a limited budget and using people from all over the world so in order to do a movie like this you have to be working all the time. That’s one of the reasons I work with the same people (Joe Mantegna, Ricky Jay, David Paymer) you don’t have to sit down and explain to them what you think because they’ve read the script and you know they’re going to do great, and they know you’re going to take care of them and off you go.”

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