David Mamet | JCCSF

thank you for the introduction and thank you all for being here it's a pleasure to be back with David Mamet and I say back because we've been on the air together a couple times we've been on stage a couple of times and it's always a real pleasure and a privilege for me to be interviewing him as was mentioned he has a new novel out there is the first novel in a couple of decades and I thought maybe we begin this conversation by talking about why a novel and why this particular period of time we're talking about prohibition and right after the first world war you're going back to your roots a little bit with the underworld from the days of Capone and the like but certainly you've been identified to a great extent with movie scripts with play writing with all kinds of literature and other genres other than the novel why the novel for this book it occurred to me thank you all for coming by the way it occurred to me a long time ago that I would be foolish not to have adopted a bunch of pseudonyms because I write much much much too much for for anyone except myself to appreciate all of it so I I thought a long time ago I should have adopted pseudonyms because um there was a fellow who I just found one of his books at a flea market yesterday who wrote the Hardy Boys Ellen Drew Tom Swift the rover boy he wrote every series from at the end of the victim of the Edwardians until world war ii under different names he wrote a book every day and so i write every day too and sometimes it takes 20 years for it to become something and sometimes they become something immediately but the Beavers as we know are driven mad by the sound of running water so they chop down trees to stop the itching in their teeth and then they look at the trees and say what the hell shall I do with this oh I get it I don't like the running water I'll stop it so that's why they build so similarly right in fact much too similarly being a crazy Jew you know with note that you know although I might have a you know a teacher you're comparing yourself to a beaver that's right again so how do you get this the sound of running water to stop right kind of don't deal with my teeth but I write stuff down so some it piles up so there's all these piles of a play here here at play there are playdough or play play right and and I do a lot of cartooning I do a lot of joke writing and sometimes I in the midst of hating myself for being unproductive I'll pick up something and say what the hell is this oh maybe I'll work on that for a while and I think that's what happened with this with this book well you once said the novel is something that there's kind of content that has to find form I think you were quoted as saying you this is a passage that I happen to read where you said you were talking about different genres distinctly you're saying a play is poetry with different voices I recall this as my memory still working and the novel was described more characterizes as form finding its content or content finding the right form but in this novel you're so immersed in the in this in this particular era for one thing I mean a lot of the detail as just a reader I came across the team of cigarettes and Sheik of Araby and first woman who was executed at sing sing burma-shave all of these kinds of details that really put us there and I thought he must have done some research through this beaver collecting in terms of really trying to recreate detail of the era didn't you no no I never do any I read like mad I read all the time and I love novels and I've never never been able to read short stories I mean there's some there's some great ones and I appreciate them but there's something about the periodicity of them you know to help out you're done you say wait a second so the bigger of the longer the novel is the more the more I love it and so I read old models all the time I love reading novels and so your question was about oh yeah so similarly to the there's something in human consciousness that was as of course as we all know approached a little bit by Rudolf Arnheim in film as art always talking about the 50 millimeter lens being the closest that the the photographic form comes toward the way the eye sees so I thought the closest to my understanding the way the world works is in this incredible jumble of narrative and plot what's called a novel and I think a lot about form because I write a lot of drama and it seems to me that the dramatic form about a two-hour play corresponds to something in human consciousness and a long after dinner discussion right the time between dinner and bedtime the story around the campfire the movie the play is all two hours but two hours and the the after-dinner speech a good one is certainly no longer than about 25 minutes which is the time of a half-hour episode of TV a comedy episode of TV and it used to be the dramatic episode of TV is kind of pleasing but the our form of TV and I did a lot of it is basically impossible because it corresponds to nothing in human experience so it has to be full it takes a lot of a lot of forcing but a novel both in reading and in writing you can expand she ate you can put it you can say oh my god this is interesting let me write about fathers Ashima you know all them other commies you know and Dostoevsky is so much three or four really you say well in many ways a much freer form I mean you've got a larger canvas to work on basically yeah it's a lot of fun because it's great fun writing writing a drama but it's it's extraordinarily exacting you know so you have the great exuberance of you know like a love affair with the idea and then you as Paul Simon once said to me once a he said it's in my head are they really gonna make me write at well our two main characters in this novel Mike and Paltrow are essentially hard-nosed journalists reporters and kind of cynics philosophers really in many ways I just wondered you know like in Glengarry Glen Ross there was a sense of people who say boy ma'am it really knows what it's like these guys who could sell cancer you know they had that as a product that they were selling it's almost as if you're hearing voices out of the past in the newsroom of these kind of hard-boiled reporters you're bringing them alive again what would what's the genesis of that for you is writer well I grew up I grew up in Chicago I mean you know my dad was a depression kid and grew up in Chicago and those were the stories that I grew up with and the guy who knew Al Capone or the people who lived across the street whose actual name had been Leopold and they changed their name because of the Leopold and Loeb case but this guy got jammed up and went downstate and then I ran away from home as it were you know instead of working in every job known to man had a great time and fell in with a whole bunch of thieves and con people and semi con people and carpet salesman and car salesman and I got I got to live in that world so that it was it was it was fun these are the people who have become sort of your bread and butter in many ways for a lot of you a lot of the work I'd be bringing up to life on a stage or bringing them to bear as you do in this novel but a lot of people ask this question I'm gonna ask him trying to frame it in a way that's particularly to your work there's often the the comparison to Harold Pinter you know the original kind of voices that you hear that are essentially voices trying to ascertain power or voices that have a whole subtext to them or in your case more of an idiom I mean people think where didn't get that ear as it is it from you know the world of Chicago for the most part that's the roots of it the the way people talk the rhythm of the way people talk particularly outlaws and low lives and proletarian people well I'm doing two things I'm listening to and I'm making it up because the great contribution of Pinter to to drama which really comes to a large extent out of his love severence for Beckett is the reinvention of dramas poetry rather than as rational or naturalistic drama so that's what Pinter did he was a great poet in many ways you aspire to poetry especially in your early drama don't you yeah and I was thinking today about April right and of course about TS Eliot right he says April is the cruelest month right and TS Eliot was very very important to me in high school because I learned in an English class not from the teacher one of the students the most important thing about TS Eliot was if you take the S out of his name and spell it backwards it spells toilet so and that's true and so I was thinking you know the the actual line is April is the cruelest month breeding lilacs out of the dead land I said yeah okay but if I could go back and I'd say TS you know jazz it up a little bit what about this April is the cruelest month dude dude I catch a child so I imagine you from what I know about you is someone who didn't spend that much time in the world of academia or studying literature in a formal way the way that say I was given to teaching someone like TS Eliot lo these many years in fact you kind of got your education outside of the classroom not only in terms of the streets but in libraries and books that you would simply take in and absorb well yeah I applied to all these universities but he didn't take me and they were correct quite right because I never opened a school book in my life but then I went to this hippie dippie school with a and kind of majored in poker and ping-pong and sex and drugs and and so I never opened a school book in my life there too but I later had a great experience with of academia teaching as an adjunct professor or visiting scholar a blahblah at the great universities of of this country and I was gratified to find there was as completely full of as anything that ever found but not as interesting as the people that I met on the southside of Chicago yeah let's talk about the people in this novel particularly one of the most fascinating characters and you've probably heard this by many who have read the novel it's peekaboo yes oh yeah the character of pique I love that character character peekaboo is this woman she's in a madam of a black whorehouse black woman matter madam of a black whorehouse in Chicago on the stroll Ace of Spades Ace of Spades so the stroll was the black Broadway the southside of Chicago I think of State Street between 32nd 34th Street and just like the one of the characters in the book the white characters he says he would do anything to be a part of that life but he can't because he's white and I would do anything to be a part of that life because it's gone I'm white and it's never coming back again but there's a character in the whorehouses it was the old piano player his old black man is sitting over there you know drinking his bourbon and smoking his cigar and it's three o'clock in the morning and he's batting out the blues and I I always thought that was how I was going to end in my life right being a piano playing a horn or something I was kind of looked forward to it but well she comes across also as someone who embodies a certain modicum of wisdom which I really like oh yeah okay she's she is the the wisdom character or is Alex Haley woulda said the griot or you know or as Malia would have said the Rays owners of the piece she's the person who's the repository of all wisdom and whom the the main character of what Mike Hodges goes to for solace and understanding when his life falls apart let's talk about Mike because I mean there's there's a couple of murder mysteries going on in here but there's also a love affair and he falls madly in love with a young Irish girl by the name of Annie Walsh and I don't want to give away too much as a plot but this is actually one of the things it would probably make people buy the book the fact that he thinks somebody's after him but they wind up shooting her to death and thus we have one of the main trajectories of plot and the story what why would she murder why was he not and so forth but his loss and the grieving that he goes through I mean literally tries to drink himself to death and he's become suicidal and I'm just wondering to what extent you know that follows a certain kind of I don't know you've ever dealt with that kind of depression before well sure you know I mean I was very fortunate to be a beast to study for many years with the great rabbi Larry Kushner who once said I never been able to spend more than half an hour with anybody whose life hadn't gone completely to pieces at one time so as the or you know differently you can't sing the blues if you ain't had the Blues well there's this old saying about with plots you can get your character up a tree and then you got to get them out you kind of did that with Mike in terms of his depression really well that's the problem with the plot I mean the old theatrical wisdom is anybody could write a first act questions what do I do now yeah and all these pieces just came together through the years including the whole trajectory of the the murder mystery the romance and so forth well you you gotta write it you know Anthony Trollope once somebody some young actor writer said what's the most important thing a writer should have and he says some cobblers wax he said put it on top of your seat that's actually a perfect metaphor many ways isn't it yeah yeah there's an Isaac Bashevis singer story about cobbling and he's really talking about writing I think in disguise in some ways you mentioned rabbi Kushner let me ask you something about the way that ethnicities play a role in this new novel of yours you've got a remark made about the Irish who loved to fight and the Italians who stay generations with grudges and then there are the Jews and the Jews seem to play a particularly specific role in some ways in this novel as they doing a lot of your work now I know that you have a great deal of a strong identity as being a Jew you have you wrote a book on the Talmud I think and you wrote a book on forever Christian I wrote a commentary on that's right I'm Hamas and if you also write a book about Leo for a novel about Leo Frank did you I wrote a novel about legal in Georgia for and I wrote a book that that really got me in the soup called this called the wicked Sun anti-semitism self-loathing in the Jews it's it's a page-turner and a laugh riot he also David it's also a skill Jewish joke teller and you know I'm speaking as a source of someone who's thank you but I have to quote with the print of the questions Christian Science monitor's that have bought the book said not enough pictures how do you see the different ethnicity so especially being a Chicago boy because you know I was thinking back even in a play like some of the early work thinking about Levine in Glengarry Glen Ross or even teach talks about the Holocaust in American Buffalo and here we've got Weiss and Teitelbaum and they're pretty wicked characters just want to get you to sort of lay out how did you see the ethnicities and how they operate in your mind well I mean Weiss and Teitelbaum the character to Jewish gangsters you know and I knew a lot of them when I was coming up because the Jews is every immigrant wave one of the original things they went into was crime and there was still a lot of that residue in Chicago well as grounding the purple game when you were growing up with those guys those guys who were those guys who were the criminals and I grew up knowing a lot of those guys on the on the outskirts you know the the used-car salesman and the crooked land dealers and the pawn brokers and so forth and that was the area that I grew up in and so as I went out into the world and I started to hear the the then contemporary and since worse in the Jewish mantra of basically Jewish assimilation and and passivity and a weakness I found it shocking because I didn't know any weak Jews right on the only Jews in it was strong Jews they had to be you know they they came from Eastern Europe and they grew up in the depression everybody hated him and yet they had to make a make a living and those those are the Jews that I know is it true that you're writing a script now about Harvey Weinstein well let me put it this way yes it's not really about Harvey once it's about a guy of a similar name in a similar in a similar situation what about that situation you want to comment on it I mean the whole meat to movement and so forth I recently interviewed Sean Penn and he was rather pejorative in his remarks about the me tubule and he said I'm tired of movements even though he likes the idea of young people bringing gun control or at least some kind of reckoning with the gun problems we have now I think gun control was a spectacular spectacular thing for people to get involved in because somebody breaks into your house you should give him up definitely give him a leaflet but there may be many things in life which an empirically proven statement there may be a lot of things in life which are not sexual politics but I have yet to find any of them did you want to say something about this so-called conversion that many have ballyhooed about David Mamet is now a conservative and wasn't before or whatever no okay we don't have to go there I just I just the thing it's just I woke up one morning and remember that I knew how to add which you had before I say you woke up and you hadn't before no no I think I had I remembered that I knew her oh you remember okay a little amnesia for a while let me get back though to the characters the aftercare because you got Jake guzik doing kind of a cameo walk-on in here who is Capone's one of his henchmen and his accountant and I wondered the idea that and we associated mostly with somebody like dr. o of putting actual historical figures in you didn't do a lot of that here but there's some of it here and it's not well there's a little bit of an L Alfred Hitchcock right a famous Jewish director once said if you're gonna make a movie about Paris for God's sakes show them the Eiffel Tower so we're talking about Alcatraz you know if you're gonna make a movie about San Francisco you better show them a cable car or Alcatraz so I thought well you know wise up if you're gonna make a a book about the Al Capone era why not put in Al Capone but I heard a great story the guy told me about Jake guzik and he says Wars was true that they were auctioning off the Aleut on Yom Kippur which is a I don't know if they do that anymore they do it in Europe I've seen it but they don't it was an old deal where they would say how much for the first Aliyah how much for the second earlier and then people would buy the aleeah's right the the the ability to come up to the the Bema and bless the Torah and then they would award it to someone else so it was a great way to pass on favor and a great way to raise money for the show so raising off oxygen of the first Aliyah yom kippur and one guy says 100 bucks 200 bucks bla bla bla and Jake guzik stands up and he lets his coat fall over he's got two 45 automatics he says $1,000 and I'm coming up I thought well god bless you Jake well there's a lot of as one might expect with some of your work a lot of gangsterism here and I was I don't know maybe surprised in many ways fascinated by some of the things that you wove into the I mean the IRA for example comes into this story yeah we exposed it all in Chicago to the IRA no I wasn't exposed to the IRA but I was very much exposed as it became clear to me as I grew older to the operations of people pre statehood in Chicago and in Cleveland in hagen on the air goon helping out the the the fight for Israeli Independence you know when a of the the carpet dealer who was actually a gunrunner and Vidal Sassoon who actually went to fight and Hank Hank Greenberg etc etc etc so that's another another reason I found rather incomprehensible the the notion of of week of week Jews so you didn't go into a study mode about like O'Bannon and Capone you picked all this up pretty much by osmosis growing up in Chicago you grow up with that that's the history of Chicago you know where the Metropole Hotel and Marshall Field's son getting shot in a whorehouse and there's word they've run down Dion O'Bannion and there's where they shot Jake Morton in his ha and his horse him because horse threw him in central parks have a machine gun the horse to death and I went to high school or place was across the street from with the st. Valentine's Day Massacre had taken place and so you know we said oh you know the kids in those days actually heard the shots who knew but that's that's the history of of Chicago you heard a lot growing up about Leopold lo2 I presume because they come into the novel - well Leopold and Loeb Leopold and Loeb where these two psycho psycho psychopathic kills and very very wealthy Jewish kids in Chicago and 1925 they were arrested for murder kidnapping brutalizing disfiguring and killing one of their school chums another wealthy young Jewish kid and there was the crime of the century and the kid's name was Bobby Frank I'd see what kid's name was Bobby Frank I believed Frank's yeah and when I was a kid we first lived in Hyde Park right down around the corner from what had been the Franks mansion him it was then it was all caught up into a flats I guess they used to New York they say tenements and and my dad used to say be careful because you know what happened to Bobby Franks and I don't want to give away anything as I said but you have a kind of a different interpretation especially about Clarence Darrow role in the murders and the bringing to justice of well Clarence Darrow was hired to defend Leopold and Loeb who were just stoned guilty and had he gone had he pleaded that he gone to trial and pleaded them not guilty they would have they would have been they would have been executed and he couldn't plead them guilty because if he pled them guilty he would have to say not guilty by reason of insanity and the and the Headshrinkers would have come and he probably would have said no the he's good enough they're good enough to stand trial so he could calm política this phony-baloney thing not guilty with extenuating circumstances and the extenuating circumstances were they're nuts but they aren't that nuts so there were two questions in my mind one of which is why the judge would have accepted that plea because the cons the prosecution legitimately screamed bloody murder and foul they said if you're saying not guilty by reason of insanity we got in panel a jury right and if you're saying guilty sentenced him to death go ahead and so I was reading a book by Adela Rogers st. John who was a one of the first female screenwriters and a gossip columnist and a crime writer for Hearst and she was her dad was a guy called burl Rodgers who was a I believe in San Francisco and was the the contemporary of Darrow and in fact defended Darrow when Darrow was accused correctly of bribing the jury in the bombing of the LA Times whatever the hell do you that was and so she writes a lot about Darrow and she says Darrow was known as the champion of lost causes in lost cases and he unashamedly bribed people because he said that's what the government's doing that's what I should do so anyway one of the people involved in the case the Leopold and Loeb case was a young man named Elmer Gertz who was a contemporary of Leopold and Loeb was at school with them curiously in the same class were will Gere remember will gear I was a wonderful actor and I guess he was famous at the end of his life he was on the Waltons and another one was Meyer Levin who eventually wrote the book compulsion anyway my dad got out of law school left after the war and went to work for Elmer Kurtz and I was talking to Elmer Koretz a few years ago with his late 90s and I said Elmer Elmer was going close to the case and actually when Nathan Leopold got out of prison Nathan Leopold sued Meyer Levin who wrote listen I know this goes on forever but you're gonna be gratified to know that the punchline is not any more interesting okay so Nathan Leopold serves he serves 33 years in prison he gets up mayerly 11 writes a book about the Leopold and Loeb case called compulsion and Nathan Leopold sued him and Elmer goods defended him so Elmer Kurtz was a very oh c'mon with the whole story so he's talking on the phone with Elmer I said there's two things that puzzle me about the Leopold and Loeb trial one why did the judge accept the phoney baloney plea and two why did the family's refused to pay Darrow because they stiffed him on the fee eventually they settled for a fraction of what they they just wouldn't pay him so he starts to laugh he says you want to know the whole story said yeah I said the whole story was Darrow said give me $100,000 I'll give it to the judge and he'll sentence them to Switzerland it'll say they're yeah they're up settle and the NGO spent five years in a sanatorium playing shuffleboard and he'll come home so they give him a hundred thousand dollars but he stiffs the judge right he gives the judge like ten thousand dollars that's that's as high as they'd go right and so the judge sentences them to life plus ninety nine years and and that would that was that was the story that explained both things which you bring in really sort of toward the end of the novel and I thought in some ways this was just a kind of capstone about the corruption and bribery they're so identified with the title of your book in Chicago well it's all over it's not Chicago I mean it's it's not your cargo and it's not democracy it's the human condition and why is it that people always I mean the jokes about Chicago even when Barack Obama had political ties there all the governors of Illinois who have wound up in a penitentiary I mean the jokes are legion and the jokes I think are very revelatory of the fact that Chicago has identified dailies fixing of the supposedly are trying to fix the Kennedy inauguration presidency I mean there's so much that is associated with Chicago and corruption wouldn't you say yeah that's that's true and actually when you mentioned your father I was inclined to ask you your father was a labor lawyer so he probably came in contact with I presume maybe a little not Hoffa he might have no Inhofe I don't know but a lot of those kind of characters or those folks didn't he that's completely possible in fact when I was writing Hoffa I went to my dad he knew Hoffa and he said at one point the Teamsters came to him and he said he turned him down he said I can't do that but I grew up I mean the people who were in my dad's office as he represented the motion picture camera man the electrical workers the heart carriers that can write so everybody I grew up around was saying DS them and those the whole time you know just like me they were actually working people and so Chicago's always been a working persons town and my dad used to say in New York's the biggest hick town in the world which is true but Chicago was all DS demand those and who do you have to know around here to fix a parking ticket right which is of course the way that I end it as I understand the world works is that some of us award ourselves credit for not noticing but even when you go back and I do sometimes to Carl Sandburg's poem about Chicago it's you still got you know prostitutes and thugs and bad people and so forth corruption as kind of a hallmark and yet actually let me get you coming on because there's a great tradition of novel writing in Chicago goes all the way back to Dreiser and really forward to figures like Nelson Algren Saul Bellow Richard Wright I mean there's but it's a kind of a harsh often grim realism that's associated well yeah because Jamey Farrell yeah yeah sure and the the Chicago literary tradition which has really forgive me the hit the history of mid 20th century American literature is all Chicago on it comes out of the out of journalism right I mean dry it dries it was a journalist you know Hemingway wrote like a journalist it comes out of the tradition of tell the story and get on with it you know I went back and I reread a couple of weeks ago two books that drove me crazy in high school and one of them was the Great Gatsby and the other one was The Catcher in the Rye and everybody had to read them in high school in those days maybe they still do they aren't very good you know they're very they're written is what they are talking about the two most lionize probably works of American yeah but go I mean you know big deal you know I'd refer my bourbon straight you know if I want you know if I want to think later you'll ask for it you know you're an HL Mencken said of other Great Gatsby HL Mencken said about the Great Gatsby it's an anecdote oh good for him yeah good for him yeah he's absolutely right he's absolutely right I mean compare it to you know you mentioned I mean if this couple of good writers who came out of New York in that period namely Edith Wharton but I mean go read Thomas Wolfe for Christ's sake oh you know who cares but if you read that there's a Dreiser and Willa Cather and you mentioned a Richard Wright and nella Larsen and and a knockin Emily door come on who wrote knock on any door Walter what no it's gonna come to me in a second don't let no man read my opinion and then and then elgran came in a little bit later on but they're all very very rough and most important to me really as a dramatist was the front page which i think is the best american play was written by two drunk newspaper men right Hecht and MacArthur and back Ben Hecht I believe worked for the Daily News wrote a column called though it was originally a gathered as 1,001 afternoons in Chicago and it's the most magnificent 700 words every day for three years you ever read in your life check out out 1001 afternoons in Chicago and he was of course even preceded by that Philly Peter Dunne and and mr. Dooley you know chose Irish Irish bartender it's just such great harsh stuff and I was as I said I was talking to Saul Scott Simon and then he sent me several books he's a spectacular novelist and one of his books is about the Chicago City Council it's a novel of Phileas funny novel about the Chicago City Council he just rips it to shreds it's so it's so one and his grandfather was a cop it's so essentially Chicago you know there's nothing writerly about it well there's also this link that you're innovating which i think is real between journalists and novelists and in fact your two main characters are pretty literary guys I mean you know there are no slouches when it comes to not only their insights and their wisdom in general but their literary sense well you know I as a as a proud and pompous autodidact my close friends have always been people like me who have devoured anything to read they could get their hands on and if you mentioned something they hadn't read will have read all of it by the next time so that gives you a fairly wide vocabulary and a fairly wide acquaintanceship with human thought which you ain't going to get at college although there are some instances in your novel about news that's being reported that again ties in with corruption or news that I guess we call it fake news by today's standards and these reporters try to get behind the mystery and they try to get certainly solving many of the things that occurs particularly some of the brutal things that occur but they're right up there right up there close to it and everything journalism's changed in ways I'd like to get you to comment on that just in the sense of what reporters do like used to do for the Tribune like Mike and his partner and what they do today yeah well I think the only thing wrong with with print journalism today is it's all over said yeah you know Thomas Jefferson said given a choice of a newspapers or the government and the government without newspapers I would rather have newspapers a lot of government and now we don't have either one of them and yet there are those who continue to say thank heavens for the Fourth Estate particularly today in terms of what they see is a lot of the prevaricate that's coming out of Washington and so forth well one has it ever been different that's I think a very telling and generated question has it ever been different I don't think so I think that that what we're talking about is the human condition that anyone you know difficult you've gone on a you've you've you've done publicity might in both sides right so imagine you're in a life where from the age of 18 to the age of 60 you're on a book tour right and you're on a book tour 14 hours a day seven days a week from fifty years and your job is to smile at people for whom you know you can have nothing but contempt you're doing this novel the force now are you getting into that whole world so what the novel the force you aren't you writing a screenplay of that oh yeah yeah yeah and so are you getting into the world of cops now in New York I got into the world of cops in New York I there's a frickin book called the force by a guy called Don Winslow's and so this director james mangold came to me so you wanted to turn it into a movie I said sure but I got to tell you my deal he said what's your deal I said you'd pay me a bunch of money I do the best job I can and you hate it so he said ok how do we work on the collaborative process I said we're done so he said ok so when I wrote the screenplay I liked it I've moved on I'm very happy with it and he has to I think's gonna make a good movie yeah what about you you're in general let's just talk about your work for the theater what continues to give you the most pride or happiness in terms of the place that you've given to the world well you know I I often said in a and a charmingly but indictable a fit of self-congratulation that I'm basically a gag writer because writing for the theater is really it's subtle it's it's it's writing jokes that's all it's doing one joke follows another than one joke follows another just like you don't want to overload the punchline you don't want to give more information and the punchline thens needed to understand the punchline the punchline has got to pay off the joke so you say I get it now I understood something that I didn't understand before I was willing to suspend my anybody here the suspension of disbelief remember that we grew up with that people thought was color it what it's color rich yeah it says here's how you can understand it do walruses go into a bar right so we hit you're spending a disbelief two walruses go into a bar and you say yeah that means that means tell me oh here's a joke you're gonna like I made it up ready and to write a lot of jokes okay any Jews in the audience also know right so okay so these two these two manatees okay these two manatees they go up to their rabbi they say rabbi we have a couple of ideas about a different way to say the Kaddish right wherever I says dugongs don't make a right thank you sir so a joke is I'm going to suspect you're gonna you're gonna give me a premise and I'm going to accept it expecting that you're going to give me a reward at the end that you're going to pay off the premise in a way that I didn't expect right my son says my son is a great humorist right I said he said dad tell me in one of the old jokes when you were kid I say okay two guys one guy says The Invisible Man is here the other guy says tell him I can't see him so my son calls me back the next day he says I've been proved under joke I say let's good let's hear it he says okay two guys one guy says The Invisible Man is here the other guy says tell me go ourselves so that's all a drama is is a succession of interchanges that logically lead one to the next each containing both the set up for which we suspend our disbelief and a punch line which becomes the setup for the successive interchange right they build up into a scene that concludes and a surprising in an ever double way one again morning to you making you say yes I've heard enough so far but you left me with a sufficiently problem sufficiently provoked that want to help find out what happens on the next scene and do one scene after the next and you end up with a play so I know you're teaching writing online now got a little enterprise going is this a kind of paradigm or pattern you know you start out with I mean because it can apply to any genre and you've worked in all the genres you start out with a commitment and you set up in such a way that you there's a payoff there's a no this is what I'm talking about is it has to do with the book specifically with drama I mean it help it helps to be you know as what you call it helps to be able to write good but drama who requires you'd be able to write well and it requires you to have a complete understanding of plot which can only be gained from the audience so that's why it's so difficult for people to learn how to write because something may make a lot of sense to you but until you put it into an audience you're not gonna learn whether it works or not and until you get humiliated but your failures you aren't gonna have sufficient Drive to get over your my one's own inevitable egoistic lump of one's own creation and say jeez I thought it worked but it doesn't have better figure this out you believe in these old classic notions you know like Aristotle and the poetics you got a arouse fear you have to her out or terror you have to arouse pity those kinds of emotions particularly especially if you're working in tragedy well yeah I mean there's a you were a very good book really the only one of the only two books written good books about a dramatic structure the poetics and what he's saying at the end is not that what he's saying is not that you have to arouse fear and pity but that the audience should be left with the fear and pity or the effort to say I followed this all the way through the guy was doing exactly the right thing but he ended up ruining himself and everyone he ever touched poor guy great pity and oh my god I guess I'm I'm flawed too so that's the purpose of drama going back to religion is to free us from a belief in our own rationality and our own goodness which can't be done rationally and that's where Freud got it wrong or you really can't use the mind to fix the mind because it's all over yet Sahara right you can do it through through celebration and so at some point people substituted infant sacrifice and they came up with drama and from then they reverted to the sacrifice of the young which we call the university system when you mentioned before how Becca changed the theater and how Pinter changed the theater I think you've changed the theater too you've made your mark to put it mildly an understatement but the reality is that we have a kind of different mode of theater and and yours is a good example of that some of your theater it's more what could be described and this is true about Beckett two serial comic I mean there's a lot of humor in a lot of your drama there's a lot of drama too obviously but you like to mix them and is it in some ways harder to bring in the comedic elements sometimes or is it more of a challenge I don't know I mean I was thinking about Middle Eastern music right and Irving Berlin he's very much a Jewish composer and jerry karnes are very much the Jewish composers we see Hirschfeld errs one-man production of it of Irving Berlin I thought you might as a brilliant one-man performance he just sits at the piano and does Berlin the whole time and changes to an old man I'm sorry yeah and so the question is what is there in Middle Eastern music and that's that's distinctive what is there in Jewish music in Ashkenazi music that's distinctive and what there's distinctive is that it's the constant modulation between the major in the minor that's what you have and so one point is thinking oh you know let me stretch my knowledge into a theory beyond its its capacity and I thought maybe that had to do with working with with the wind instruments because it's easier to bend a note but in any case Jewish Jew Jewish humor you know we laugh because it's tragic give me quite because it's funny and Mel Brooks said what's the difference between a a comedian or a regular person he says a regular person will laugh at a comedian dressed up like a little old lady falling down stairs but if your comedian it has to be a real little old lady you still stay in touch with and connected to that repertory of actors that you work with so many times as both director and playwright through the years I'm talking about people like William H Macy and so forth yeah sure we talk to each other you know we are we went off on a different ways and a different careers but we get together and we work together than we can the the we I think we I know we all feel very very fortunate to have been together in Chicago New York for a good 20 years off and on before our various careers took us off in different directions so that now you know if I called Billy Macy Felicity Huffman Joe Mantegna or whomever they got commitments that stretching up front of the future as do I so the odds of us getting together one of the of the music of the spheres ending up at you know on adjacent barstool so are less and less what about acting does it ever appeal to you no I can't act I said to Macy once he I said I was at a party something I said I'd be the first person to tell you that I can't act he said no you'd be the second person but I always loved that guy loved being around actors and if you look at people like Stanislavski and people also like Sanford Meisner and Lee Strasberg and Bobby Lewis and Michael check of Rosa they're all these people who theorized about what acting is I may never figure it out because you really can't because there's they're so drawn to it they want to they want to be close to it and they can't do it right the great actors I very few of them that I know Michael Redgrave may be an exception seldom wrote theoretical books about acting remember one of the first interviews we did was when you did this book out Stanislavski I mean how do you look at acting method now or for that matter theory about acting at this patron sure yeah my well I've been working with actors professionally for about 50 years and what it comes down to is as Jimmy Cagney said hit your mark look the other fellow in the eye and tell the truth that's it the things that a young actor could learn there were only things they're not going to teach them in acting schools stand up a stand still speak the line clearly that's it the rest is is with the gods and the great skills of the actor come out of there basically not out of their inventiveness because it's the last thing you want an actor to be it's the playwrights job to be inventive what the act would you need the acted to be is to be courageous when I think of your place I think of certain actors who have really distinguished themselves though who become identified with your dramaturgy I think of someone like Montaigne for example Joe Mantegna there is a certain kind of actor that you work better with could you characterize what that is or is there a kind of secret sauce or ingredients or something along there's any actors that I'm better or worse with I mean I tend to get along with all actors because having listened to a lot of nonsense direction in my life I'm never going to tell ask an actor to do anything that's impossible like feel something more deeply you or used the space over member in act 3 you say something like this or tell me where the guess is all nonsense none of it makes any difference and so I always say that the best thing that any director could do in a rehearsal process is to stay home some playwrights are notorious thinking about Eugene O'Neill and Edward Albee for not wanting the director to take full control and they get in the way they have to be excluded from the production's are you more at ease with just giving control of your playwriting or your screenwriting - another director and saying that's his or her baby now well if I'm not directing it you have to you have to but the good directors just going to say here's what you end up with on stage on opening night you end up with the script and you end up with the cast the best thing that any clip director could do is to array them in a certain manner which is going to make the person speaking stand up stage of the person listening and then not let the cost of director and the scenic designer run off with the show well they probably mentioned Joe Mantegna because I recently saw a house of games again and I made a connection and I wonder if this is seems appropriate in your mind between the way con artists operate and the way actors operate I mean in a sense they're both creating a false persona and they both have to stand behind that false persona make it utterly credible yeah except except I think there's a lot what you say except the actors not creating a false persona what the actor is doing is is living out a fantasy as truthfully as possible and that's what makes the great actor can you teach it No can you can you learn it you hit you have to it's one of those things that that has to be learned and can't be taught and there again though you can't learn it in a school why because the audio it's a corrupt interchange you're you're you are paying people to put you in theater camp in front of an audience which is not paid it's the the it submission because when the audience pays its mission they have a the absolute right and an unappealable right to be diverted and if you can't do them in the real world you're out of a job you say you can't teach it wasn't Strasburg trying to teach it though was not what he was all about Strasburg was completely full of it and you know III know I worked with all of those people who studied with Strasburg and worked with Jean hat when I work with Mamadou who devours more from the player said work with Al Pacino welcome Bobby De Niro and what Strasburg did although he didn't know he was doing it is he had a great auditioning process he said okay you were the best actors in Topeka and Des Moines and Niceville Florida come to New York and audition for me and will wean you down and wean you down and when you're done and picked the best actors in the country you didn't teach him anything which also prompts me to ask you since you're teaching writing on line now what about the idea that writing is a talent that it can't necessarily be taught well you could can be taught and one of the great ways to learn writing is through reading and the other one is is to get a job for example and I think my first paying job was writing sports for the Park Forest star and goes about 13 because if you got a good editor the editors is not going to say be more feeling they're going to say I don't get it or take this word out and so someone that someone opined that one of the great inspirations of Hemingway I don't think it's true but it's cute was the telegraph because every word cost you something they call it cable ease you know he'd send the cables from oh yeah abroad that was had it get paid certain number words it had to be nominal number of words yeah I was also wondering about getting back to Chicago for just a moment if you could say something about the the the sense one gets about reading about especially your growing up in Chicago I was talking about comedy a moment ago second city was a big influence on you wasn't it yeah second city was a great influence on me there's a very very old Ashkenazi tradition of the wedding gesture which is I've heard it called a button and a bad one he was the guy and they were all guys who would be hired to come to the wedding and he would be the first emcee and he would improvise songs and make up almost risque lyrics and weave in everybody's names and he was the first stand-up comic in modern history that I know of and the greatest compliment you could pay him was they'd be laughing so long hard did they say you a murderer you're killing me you're killing me so that tradition came over to the Catskills to the stand-up tradition and morphed through the the conversos at the University of Chicago namely Shelley Berman Elaine May and Mike Nicholson to the compass players which became a second city which is a far as I know the first improvisational theatre troupe and in goes 1960 but there is a precursor in the Chicago tradition which has nothing whatever to do with Judaism called it a fella called Lord Buckley who was the gesture to the Capone mob and played in all of the the nightclubs and you can you could hear him he's recorded he's just so the best thing I ever heard he was doing a routine on Jesus Christ and he called Jesus Christ banaz right and he said everyone said you know we got to sing Rock of Ages here comes the Nass here comes the Nass he said I'm going to Nazz laid it down it stayed down I was struck by that language of comedy and theater we killed it we got murdered we got slaughtered you know it's all really tied in with assassination or death murder is lethal we were going to take some questions from the audience I think we've hit that mark now and I've already got some on cards here so let me let me go to some of these this is a direct question about your novel before World War one and prohibition what was the crime scene and who controlled it in Chicago afterward that's a good question I don't know Chicago's always been a very very rough city who controlled the crime scene I don't know the question is who controls it now and I don't know that either but you know it's somebody um it's the old Chicago question is who do I gotta talk to you know you're gonna step up and see the captain and somebody said you can tell when the cities are dying because you can't fix a parking ticket it might have been me actually if it was I'm very proud of myself mr. Babbitt I've heard that some interpret your work is misogynistic can you comment yeah I don't know who those people I've heard that question for many many years but I don't know who those people aren't to interpret that way but you know what happened the village of what I wrote a play one of my thing my first play in New York was called sexual perversity in Chicago and as early on things and it was yes and it was about these it was a it's about it's about misogyny it's about these couples there's two of them very this a young man is young woman whose lives get ruined by this misogynistic other other man and I thought it was fairly clear from the title perversity that he was acting in a perverse fashion but there was a woman at the Village Voice who said oh my god this is terrible terrible table and I don't think she could have seen the play but in any case that seems to be have become a meme or as we used to say an idea which has become current that somehow am i writing as misogynistic so anybody I say I a it's not and beat tell me what you're talking about rather than in effect of the the the the current all-purpose and to any conversation which is you've been accused of which I we used to say the criminals I think now we say it but we might say to some artists you think Oh Liana exacerbated some of that when I was out and it was causing all this people were supposedly fighting in the aisles after the play was performed in Broadway yeah people were fighting in the aisles over Oh Leon it was great it was absolutely great it was super mean I can't imagine any any higher compliment than people fighting in the aisles I mean there was a guy called trivia to your art so what a tribute to your art oh yeah there's a guy called I think I told the story on NPR this guy called William Hallman who was a b-movie actor and a pretty good actor and he did a movie in the 50s called the hitchhiker where he's this hitchhiker who these two guys are veterans are going fishing and he hits he keeps them at gunpoint it's a wonderful movie the hitchhiker and Talman says he was stopped at a stoplight in santa monica and a guy next to him says are you are you the hitchhiker Talman says yeah the guy got up punched him in the face so he said that was that was better than an Academy Award mr. Babbitt things change is one of my favorite films and has an almost fable esque feel to it unfortunately I feel it gets lost among all of your work and you speak to the writing and filming of it thank you yeah I mean it doesn't get lost if you noticed it thank you so much I really appreciate it I was making I did this movie house games and some thank you and there's some very famous film and then I was a went immediately into the filming of things change and there was a very famous film festival the guy called me up and he said we want you to come in in three weeks and accept the award for best film of whatever the hell your that was I said well but the jury the jury hasn't even shown up yet he said let me let me say it again we want you to come through except you I said oh I get it but I I didn't go because I was involved in pre puddin gone I should have just gone on a goddamn planing I regret it but in any case so there we were we were filming with Don Ameche who'd been the most famous star I think two years like 1933 in 1935 is the biggest star in the world and he was then 80 and he showed up to play this old shoeshine guy who gets mistaken for a mafioso we stood up the best time you know about your movies earlier this evening coming over here I was thinking I also like things change very much and love the Spanish prisoner and the verdict I mean but the range now what I wonder about that is especially for original screenplays but even for the ones that you adapt from another work something have to ignite in you because the versatility is really extraordinary so you go from one to one just it ignites and you follow it through as opposed to this novel Chicago which maybe it was a number of years of the making um cuz you have to write out of pressure when you're writing screenplays yeah yeah it's great to write under pressure you know I mean it's I somebody said I might have been Arnold Bennett talking about someone said it like all prolific writers he was incredibly lazy because I mean that's how I always feel you're not going to sit around all day and write a couple words and you know you do it in I've attempts to mount up but it reminds me of the faith the joke about the you know this joke of the screenwriter in the elves honey the and the elves look a night they said is it appropriate it is just a good joke I think it's an adult audience no I'm not concerned about that that's just as its well I gotta tell Jim so there's a screenwriter you see yeah and so what he falls on hard times and he as a cocaine habit habit and he's because of drunk and he has some bad investments and his agent steals his money and he goes broke and his wife leaves him and he's sitting all alone in his house in Malibu he has to leave the next day and all he has is a typewriter his last bottle of scotch and a pistol so he's gonna drink the bottle of scotch and blow his brains out so he drinks the bottle of scotch passes out he wakes up the next morning and next to the typewriter is a script fully typed script and he reads the script and it's the best script he's ever read and he looks at the back of the title page to see whose name is on it and it's his name so he gives it to his age and his agent gets him a deal it's a big hit now he's on top of the world the next year they offer him ten million dollars to write another script he still can't write he goes back to the beach house which he's not brought back got the bottle of scotch thought of thought drinks the thing wakes up the next morning there's another script even better than the first now he's got a house in Bel Air he's got a jet plane so the third year he gets the bottle of scotch but he fills it with tea and he drinks the tea and he doesn't pass on and he wakes up and he sees these two little elves and they're typing and he says that he else my god you've been writing these scripts and they say yeah and he says you've saved my life you I was bigger than I was before what can I do for you and they all say you can't do anything we don't need anything we're gonna we're elves it's what we do with just these a-holes he says oh come on let me do something that please let me attempt to discharge my debt is there anything you'd like one else says he says well we kind of like a screen credit he says why don't you go yourself so I perhaps the reason I brought that up is I I think it was appropriate I think the reason I brought it up is I got this shelf you know like Mortimer Adler the five-foot shelf remember anybody go back that far the great books five-foot shelf of the great books it's just like God said okay you got to spend all of this this flax into gold and you got to fill up the five-foot shelf of books and then I'll let you die so that's that's kind of what I've been trying to do so and I got to put my name on it actually you know we don't have time but you prompted me maybe you want to tell the joke myself you think it's appropriate I'm sure I'll tell it quickly it's a joke some of you may know it's in my book let there be laughter it's about a you know when these typical setups of Frenchmen German and a tough New York to who get captured by a band of cannibals going down the Amazon and they're taken back to the village and there's this huge pot that has all these vegetables in it and obviously they're cooking something guy steps out with a loincloth and he says gentlemen I want to talk to you I'm obviously educated in English and educated in the West we're cannibals we're a tribe we're gonna kill you we're gonna take your skin and we're gonna make it into a canoe for our people which will last for generations but first since we're educated and since we're enlightened we're gonna let you choose the way you want to die and the Frenchman guillotine figuring they don't have a guillotine guy takes out of his loin cloth and a hatchet and chops out the Frenchman's head ask the German how he wants to die the German says a Luger and again they thinks they don't have a Luger but thinks it 22 and just shoots him dead since to the tough New York to how do you want to die talk to your excuses I want a fork so fork yeah give me a fork I have some utensils in my loincloth to hands him a fork tough New York Jew takes it start stabbing so here's your canoe David twisted my arm so I thought all right final question from the audience and you get this a lot but it's still I think a worthy question is your greatest passion writing books plays screenplays or directing movies what is there a greater passion between those add a novel and maybe a joke darling no just joking no my greatest passion is is napping you know what is a great passion of yours I believe what's that poker yeah I haven't played poker for many many years used to be a great passion when one day I just woke up and wasn't interested in any more and hunting two at one time yeah well yeah but you know I mean when I lived in Vermont I did a lot of hunting but I mean now I there's no there's not it you know I live in Santa Monica and I said you know I'd like to contribute something to the to the city right not want to build like a big arch over the entrance to Santa Monica and I'm and then blazing of the arch I wanted to say through these portals pass the stupidest Jews in the world so that's what the current wildlife is where I live you remember Tom lares great lion I'm happy Hannukah in Santa Monica what he said oh yeah yeah I was thinking of Tamla of questions also Jewish and I used to see him in the Harvard Square all the time and he said one of his great lyrics which of course you know he says now it's Fiesta time in Akron Ohio but it's back to old Guadalajara I'm longing to go far away from the strikes of the AF of L and C I think you got to be of a certain age to appreciate that ladies and gentlemen I guess when you bought tickets you had no idea wind up with David Mamet singing but let me let me think of her wonderfully thank you all so much you you

Channel: JCCSF

Views: 20,893

Rating: 4.9285712 out of 5

Keywords: theater, entertainment, David Mamet, arts, actor

Id: aZOT1jCHfhI

Length: 66min 50sec (4010 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 20 2018