Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Disappointed, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood
By David Mamet
(Simon & Schuster, 256 pages, $28)
A couple of years ago I raved about David Mamet’s delightful, cocksure collection of essays, Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch, in which the veteran playwright, screenwriter, and movie director celebrated America, defended Donald Trump, and registered his dissent from the latest varieties of political correctness. A longtime lockstep leftist who came out as something of a conservative in a 2008 article for the Village Voice, Mamet, in Recessional, took on current politics, most of the seven lively arts, and la comédie humaine in general, and had irreverent, entertaining things to say about everything he touched on.
In his view, “acting schools load the actor with analyses that clarify nothing” and Stanislavski’s books on the topic are “a bunch of drivel.
Now he’s back with another chatty grab-bag of bracing commentary, although in Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Disappointed, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood he’s restricted his topic, as the title suggests, to the movie business — the result being a book with an even higher fun quotient than its immediate predecessor. Consistently engaging and wonderfully rambling (with numerous long footnotes that could easily have been incorporated into the main text, but who cares?), it made me laugh out loud five times even before the prologue was over. (READ MORE from Bruce Bawer: The Whole Ugly Hustle of Globalism: Itxu Díaz’s I Will Not Eat Crickets)
Now 76, Mamet started his career with off-Broadway hits like American Buffalo (1976) and moved on to write Broadway classics like Glengarry Glen Ross (1983). Inevitably, Tinseltown came calling. “I began my career in Hollywood at the top,” he jokes in Everywhere an Oink Oink, calling his embrace by the Dream Factory “a demotion” after years of success on the Great White Way. His screenplays for the 1981 remake of The Postman Always Rings Twice and the 1982 Paul Newman courtroom drama The Verdict were followed by such triumphs as The Untouchables (1987), Hoffa (1992), Wag the Dog (1997), and Hannibal (2001).
Mamet loves the theater. Hollywood? Not so much. He respects film crews and actors but despises producers and studio execs. Like others who’ve labored in both vineyards, he draws interesting distinctions between them — for example, theater is dialogue; cinema is plot. And he serves up a blizzard of opinions about pretty much every aspect of cinema. His top two movie actresses? You’d never guess: Frances Farmer (1913-70) and Jeanne Eagels (1890-1929). His favorite directors? Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges, Vittorio De Sica, Masaki Kobayashi, Yasujiro Ozu, Mario Monicelli, the team of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger, and Stanley Kubrick. He calls Sullivan’s Travels (1941), written and directed by Sturges, “the greatest of American comedies” and Wilder’s Love in the Afternoon (1957) “the perfect Viennese bedroom farce.”
The best movie scene ever? Mamet picks a low-key exchange in the nuclear-war drama Fail Safe (1964) between U.S. president Henry Fonda — who’s about to have the most crucial telephone conversation in human history with the Soviet premier — and his Russian translator, Larry Hagman. Amazing choice: as it happens, that chilling little scene, featuring exactly two characters and set in a small, featureless, windowless room, has haunted me ever since I first saw it as a kid. And then there’s Mamet’s memory of the last time he cried (as far as he can remember): it was “at Random Harvest, starring Ronald Colman and Greer Garson. (Filmed 1942, tears 1970.)” Which also happens to be (by far) my own #1 weepie. You’d think a guy like Mamet would hate all agents (“if you’re hot,” he sneers, “you don’t need an agent; and if you’re not, the agent doesn’t need you”), but he’s full of surprises, and he names the legendary rep Sue Mengers (1932-2011) as, in his experience, “the most interesting person in Hollywood.”
Mamet doesn’t pull punches. In his view, “acting schools load the actor with analyses that clarify nothing” and Stanislavski’s books on the topic are “a bunch of drivel, leading not only to the self-absorption of James Dean but to the beatification of Brando.” He opines that F. Scott Fitzgerald “wasn’t fit to puke into the same toilet as Hemingway.” About two of the leading comics of their era, he writes: “Red Skelton was not funny. Neither was Jerry Lewis.” I’ll agree on Skelton, whose humor, on his weekly variety show, utterly baffled me as a kid.
“The randy, drunk, doped, crazed-by-greed, and be-fantasized movie folk took to Communism then as today they ‘fight global warming.’”
There’s more. Mamet calls movie executives “Village Idiots” and says that they “have no place on the set. They have no idea what they’re looking at.” He denies that there’s any “correlation between audience testing and box office,” and tells us about an unnamed top director — whom he obviously considers a fool — who read every idiotic comment from a test screening and had his picture re-edited on the basis thereof. “Few films,” Mamet states, “are better than the first draft … A committee cannot improve a work of art.” And he mocks film credits that include long lists of producers: “Would we read a poem announcing a score of creators?”
Nor does he hesitate to open up about his own career gripes. There’s plenty of teeth-gnashing here about big names who’ve turned down purportedly boffo scripts of his in order to make some piece of crap. Indeed, he claims that no one on the Coast ever liked his scripts — aside from “five directors, the actors, and the audience” — and that he’s still “baffled by the inability of producers, studio executives, managers, and agents to read a script.” Although Mamet got screen credit for Hannibal (2001), it was, he says, made from someone else’s script and he pronounces the picture — which I’ve watched with immense pleasure dozens of times — a “pile of shit.” Then there are the vignettes in which he pulls back the curtain on — how to put it? — a lack of self-awareness of a sort that seems endemic in Tinseltown. (READ MORE: All Hail Cate Blanchett)
He recalls, for instance, a conversation with producer Scott Rudin and director Mike Nichols in which their complaint about his script for some never-made film was that he failed to punish the millionaire hero for his greed, a sin that Rudin and Nichols both took for granted given the hero’s immense wealth — this, mind you, from two uber-rich guys who, at the moment, were meeting in Nichols’s luxurious Fifth Avenue penthouse. Mamet also remembers producer Richard Zanuck chiding him for his (ultimately unused) script for the 1997 Lolita remake: “You made him seem like a pedophile.”
The best parts of Everywhere an Oink Oink are those in which Mamet, however funny and self-absorbed he’s being, is also making a serious point about the creation of art or the politics of art. He explains exactly how he solved third-act plot problems in a couple of scripts — fascinating stuff. (In this connection, he criticizes Hitchcock’s 1941 thriller Suspicion, the ending of which, as he quite rightly complains, just doesn’t work.) He points out that Golden Age Hollywood decision-makers didn’t worry about offending minorities by “casting a Swede as Charlie Chan or Paul Muni as Juarez or Mickey Rooney as a Japanese photographer in Breakfast at Tiffany’s or Natalie Wood as a Puerto Rican in West Side Story,” but worried rather “about offending the great American majority.” Those times, he notes with regret, are long over.
He asks an interesting question: two 1964 films, Sidney Lumet’s aforementioned Fail Safe and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove, were both “masterpieces” with “identical” stories; so how can it be that the former film is “horrifying” while the latter is “the funniest film ever made”? He ponders “the universality of Communist thought in Hollywood” back in the day, observing — correctly, of course — that it “was just fashion. The randy, drunk, doped, crazed-by-greed, and be-fantasized movie folk took to Communism then as today they ‘fight global warming.’” Terrific line. And he wittily suggests that the vain, vapid actors who use award ceremonies “to assert the superiority of their political views” are the natural descendants of John Wilkes Booth, who exploited the presence of Abraham Lincoln in that box at Ford’s Theater to make his own opinions very well known indeed. (READ MORE: Bradley Cooper Is Leonard Bernstein — And I Am Marie of Romania)
And there’s much more where that came from. Yes, Mamet can be something of a grating egomaniac: “Was I arrogant in my fifty years in Show Biz?” he asks. “You bet. But only toward my inferiors.” But boy, in these times of lockstep showbiz leftism, is he a breath of fresh air.
