TV REVIEW : Mamet’s ‘Engine’: Smooth Ride

“TNT Screenworks,” a TV-movie series created to showcase the work of stage writers, makes a sharp debut today with the startling adaptation of playwright David Mamet’s “Water Engine” (TNT at 5, 7 and 9 p.m.).

It’s astonishing because Mamet’s 1977 stage version, a radio-play-within-a-play set entirely in a broadcast studio, remains a muddle next to this wide open, riveting screen treatment, also written by Mamet. Screen adaptations frequently compromise or distort a stage play--but not here.

Now Mamet’s Depression-era drama, about the betrayal of a genius inventor who revolutionizes manufacturing technology, explodes the American dream with a force only hinted at in his play.

Proposed to TNT two years ago by Steven Spielberg and created by Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment with Michael Brandman Productions, “Screenworks” looks like a marquee poking through the haze of TV’s Golden Age.

Set between now and mid-1993 are six more productions featuring such playwrights as Arthur Miller (“The American Clock”), Horton Foote (“The Habitation of Dragons”) and Lee Blessing (“Cooperstown”), featuring such stars as Alan Arkin, Hope Lange, Dennis Hopper and Jean Stapleton.

For openers, “Water Engine” is the little engine that could. A reclusive Chicago steel factory worker, secretly tinkering in his homemade lab, invents an engine that can run on water.

Fame and fortune are a breath--and a patent--away. But not being a man of the world, the inventor resorts to the Yellow Pages to find an attorney, a naive move that plunges him into conflict with murderous oil and automotive industry hardballers.

What, do away with gasoline-burning engines? Quickly, the dark forces of American business try to buy off our impoverished inventor, then squeeze him, terrorize him, hang him out to dry. So much for the American dream.

Making the huge stylistic transition from the original Chicago and Broadway stage productions are director Steven Schachter and actress Patti LuPone, who plays the protagonist’s blind sister.

The result, in theme, momentum and period detail, is cuts above most TV movies.

The crackling cast features William H. Macy as the bedeviled scientific wizard, Joe Mantegna as a very cool and deadly lawyer, Treat Williams as a Chicago newspaper reporter straight out of “The Front Page,” John Mahoney as a greedy patent lawyer and Charles Durning as a tour guide.