Review by Booklist Review
David Mamet is many things: playwright, screenwriter, film director, Tony and Pulitzer winner. The dialogue he writes is so distinctive, it has its own appellation: Mamet speak. And, by the way, he is a heck of an essayist. This latest collection is a gimlet-eyed look back at his four decades in show business. Is it "embittered" and "dyspeptic," as the book's subtitle implies? Yep. Two pages in, he is saying things like "in Hollywood there is no organization--it has always been the war of each against all." Or that Jerry Lewis "was only funny to the French, who themselves are not funny." A newcomer to Mamet's work might wonder: is he okay? Should I call someone? No. He's always been like this. "I suspect that [film schools are] useless, because I've had experience with drama schools, and have found them to be useless," he wrote in On Directing Film in 1991. The new book includes drawings by Mamet, which are forgettable and are probably meant to be. Not so with his words, which, as usual, are trenchant, scorching, and unputdownable.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer Prize--winning playwright Mamet (Recessional) documents his four decades working "bit by bit, much like a Missionary among cannibals" in Hollywood in this acerbic and entertaining series of anecdotes and sketches accentuated by his bitingly witty cartoons. Arriving in 1980 as a hotshot playwright commissioned to write a screenplay for Bob Rafelson's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), Mamet witnessed the entertainment industry evolve from "an adventure" ("any next moment" could bring "love, sex, money, fame, artistic challenge, or an encounter with the highwaymen") into a business ravaged by "corporate degeneracy" and policed by "Diversity Commissars." Interspersed throughout are accounts of meeting such greats as Billy Wilder, Sue Mengers, and Bob Evans, as well as contemporary stars including Alec Baldwin, Denzel Washington, and Steve Martin. Elsewhere, Mamet dissects the inner workings of the movie biz, from on-set politics ("Executives have no place.... They don't know what they're looking at") to the ills of filmmaking by committee, which "carries and transmits the age-old immutable lessons of bureaucratic survival." The in-depth commentary on the nuts and bolts of screenwriting are among the most insightful (and least cynical) parts of the book ("the dialogue is of as little concern to a skilled screenwriter as the paint is to the mechanic. When the machine is correctly assembled, the thing can be painted whatever damn color pleases the money guy"). Cineastes will find this irresistible. Illus. (Dec.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
The frequently misbegotten experiences of a playwright in Hollywood. "I did ten features as a director, the world's best job; and wrote forty or so filmscripts, half of which got made," reports Mamet. His directing credits include House of Games and Oleanna, and he wrote screenplays for Wag the Dog, The Verdict, and the film version of his Pulitzer-winning play, Glengarry Glen Ross. He has rubbed elbows with several generations of Hollywood stars, from Myrna Loy and Billy Wilder to Denzel Washington and Val Kilmer, along with off-screen figures like David Geffen and Mike Nichols. The author's anecdotes and ruminations on filmcraft are peppered with a constant fire of jokes and one-liners, many of them dated. Early on, Mamet offers a cold assessment of his memoir: "My life form, having succeeded in Hollywood and then aged out, scavenges some benefit from tell-alls, cartoons and captions." The cartoons, the most endearing parts of the book, include posters and storyboards for Hollywood brainstorms like "The Little Engine That Could Meets Anna Karenina"; a sequel to Titanic ("but this time, it's not the Titanic that sinks, but the iceberg--so: the story centers around two penguins!"); and a film called "Mutton for Punishment," which "raises the baa on the sheep-action genre." Mamet characterizes his book as "a descendant of the Movie Mag," but if it is, it's one with quite a bit more attitude than its predecessors: Audrey Hepburn was "the sole actress more beautiful than Gary Cooper"; and F. Scott Fitzgerald, "who wanted to be liked by rich people," also "wasn't fit to puke into the same toilet as Hemingway." In general, a lot of Mistakes Were Made, some of which, the author acknowledges, were his own fault. Cantankerous, scattershot, and often funny. Come for the celebrity anecdotes; stay for the cartoons. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
