“The dramatist as analyst, unfortunately, cannot punch out and go home,” writes David Mamet in his new memoir, Everywhere an Oink Oink. He continues: “The dramatist has no off button.” In recent years, Mamet fans (and Mamet-haters) have probably wished that this particular dramatist did have one. The Pulitzer Prize–winning writer of Glengarry Glen Ross and Wag the Dog has become notorious for treatises such as “Why I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’” and weighing in on Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill.
Life as a freelance pundit hasn’t served Mamet especially well, and his critics won’t be soothed by his latest, Everywhere an Oink Oink, subtitled An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood. Not because of the Hollywood tell-alls, but because of … the other stuff.
The jacket copy laments “a world gone by … washed away by digital media and the woke brigade”—a catchphrase that Mamet, incidentally, doesn’t dwell on. But anyone who has ever sat at a tense Thanksgiving table will recognize the book for what it is: pure Bad Grandpa fuel. Everywhere an Oink Oink is a free-associative, selectively offensive monologue bristling with what Mamet calls “salacious gossip posing as information” and “reminiscences that may astound and disturb.”
Only this grandpa is a theater-and-film legend. So TCM-ready trivia about classic Hollywood stars—Sylvia Sidney, Frances Farmer, Veronica Lake—rubs shoulders with callouts of thieving and pervy producers (like one who auctioned the underwear of actress Rebecca Pidgeon, Mamet’s wife, on eBay after their film wrapped). Go-fug-yourself defenses of artistic prerogative are punctuated with cringe-inducing indictments of “Diversity Capos.” And then there are the cartoons. (Caption: “Who was the most fetching female in film history?” Drawing: Lassie the dog.)
To some extent, Everywhere an Oink Oink is simply a mash-up of Mamet’s back catalogue. His books have shifted from the filmmaking dictums and studio takedowns of Bambi vs. Godzilla to the world-on-fire left-bashing of Recessional.
The results can be bewildering.
Consider the 10-page chapter “Joe and Don.” It starts with the delightful bromance between Don Ameche and Joe Mantegna in the Mob comedy Things Change, which Mamet directed and co-wrote. Then it’s time for dirty jokes from Shel Silverstein and Eric Idle, asides about Henry Fonda and wrestling (“I am a devotee of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu”), and nods to the mastery of Sidney Lumet and Billy Wilder.
A tribute to Sue Mengers and other Jewish European refugees to Hollywood follows, then piano-playing with Randy Newman, mentions of Alan King, a footnote about Whoopi Goldberg, and a cartoon about Harvey Weinstein. The finale: a truly unhinged juxtaposition of African enslavement and the casting couch, right next to a sweetly proud mention of daughter Zosia Mamet (Shoshanna on Girls).
You see what we’re dealing with here. The connections can be cryptic, and the style staccato (appropriately for Mamet), but among the eye-rolling opinions is the currency of stories and jokes shared for their uniqueness, with apologies for “twice-told tales.” Sean Connery rings up Mamet’s sister in Ohio to cheer her up. Mamet swoons over golden-era star Myrna Loy in 1980. “One of the Head Dogs” at the Golden Globes gropes Mamet. (Shades of Brendan Fraser?)
From the screenwriting trenches, there’s the usual strain of “I was right” stories. Replaced as screenwriter on The Verdict, Mamet saw Lumet opt for his script anyway. He turns down Scorsese’s offer to write Raging Bull, and tells The Crying Game director Neil Jordan to go screw himself. Steven Soderbergh commissions a Dillinger screenplay, but instead makes, in Mamet’s judgment, “a piece of crap.”
These tidbits evoke a less stage-managed Hollywood, with Mamet invariably cast as the last man standing with a clue. His passions run to praise as well—for Barbara Loden over her husband Elia Kazan; for prince of a man Danny DeVito, who starred alongside Gene Hackman in Mamet’s typically sharp thriller Heist; for the brilliance of film crews; for Ukrainian-Soviet filmmaker Larisa Shepitko, above all; or just for trawling YouTube in search of old movies.
And, as with any Hollywood memoir, there are the could-have-beens. We missed a Chicago-set TV pilot with James Gandolfini, and an Oscar-heist script written with buddy Ricky Jay, the magician and unforgettable Mamet regular.
The films that were made are well worth recommending for their mousetrap plotting, hard-boiled ethos, and bracingly compressed dialogue. The Criterion Collection has enshrined Mamet’s House of Games, starring Lindsay Crouse as a shrink courting a con; The Spanish Prisoner and Spartan, with Val Kilmer, remain twisty pleasures of a sort scarce today. And Mamet can still distill the laws of narrative physics on the page here: “The Joke is the perfect paradigm for a dramatic plot.... The solution to each must surprise and delight as it is revealed as inevitable.”
But the book’s political screeds feel unfortunate, to say the least, and tedious. Mamet seems to believe that efforts toward diversity are nothing but “do good” flimflam. He yearns for the freedom to cause offense like court “jesters” of old, instead of suffering under McCarthy-like threats of denunciation. Et cetera. That’s a well-told tale, a stale routine, and perhaps the least interesting character Mamet has written.
Nicolas Rapold is a New York–based writer and the former editor of Film Comment magazine
