The American Spectator

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(Page 6 of 9)

Or:

"Is he cool?"

"My motherf---er is so cool, when he goes to bed sheep count him."

The system, in other words, has treated Mamet well. "Movies are a huge conglomerate, which is elected by the -- if you want to take the Darwinian view, it's elected by the country at large to talk to the country at large," Mamet told Jim Lehrer in 1987 shortly after the release of his first film, House of Games. "Every time we buy a ticket, we cast our vote in a very, very real way for the people we want to see next."

These votes have hardly benefited Mamet alone, who has been able to surround himself with a stable of talent as idiosyncratically brilliant as himself, from sleight-of-hand expert Ricky Jay and his beguiling wife, Rebecca Pidgeon, to swaggering muse Joe Mantegna and film editor Barbara Tulliver (to whom Bambi vs. Godzilla is dedicated). "People who were twenty when I was twenty are now forty when I'm forty, and it's tough to assemble a cast of friends of your to work cheaply and quickly, because they're all paying off mortgages just like I am," Mamet explained to Lehrer. "One of the reasons I'm excited about movies is they give me an opportunity" -- and the cash necessary -- "to get together and work time after time with people who I'd been working with before."

The happy family, which otherwise would have been torn asunder, existing only as a memory of youth's halcyon days, catapulted, united, into the future thanks to the free market.

As the title of Mamet's sweetest, most underappreciated film suggests, Things Change. In 1977 Mamet told an interviewer television would never supersede theater because it was "like masturbation, if you do it, you do it by yourself in a dark room." In 2007 Mamet was producing, writing, and directing episodes of the successful television series The Unit. And as things kept changing, as Mamet's artistic and financial success continued to build upon itself, the man was bound to become more amenable to the idea that perhaps his success was not at the failure of another. A market that nurtures niche audiences for iconoclasts cannot be all bad.

*****

p> The Rabbi had said that as one studies the Torah, as one reads the same portions at the same times of the year, year after year, one sees in them a change; but, as they do not change, it must be we who change. br> -- David Mamet's 1997 novel, The Old Religion /p> p>During a 1998 BBC interview, Mamet described his upbringing in a family of "semi-observant Jews," one generation removed from Polish/Russian immigrants who had fled the 20th century's first wretchedly foreshadowing pogroms: br>

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