David Mamet Would Like to Share Some Choice Tidbits

We ring each other up at night and trade our horror stories.

The movie star called and said he had to meet me. We made a date for the Ivy at 1. He showed up at 1:45. “Had trouble finding a parking space,” he said. His hair was wet. We talked for 20 minutes about everything other than the project. The check came. There was a long, long pause. “I’ll get it,” I said. We got up to go. “They validate parking here?” he said. “I’m sure I don’t know,” I said. Asked the waiter. The waiter said no. “Left my wallet at home,” the movie star said. Another long pause. “Do you need to borrow some money?” I said. “Yes,” he said. I lent him 20 bucks. Went to the audition. Did a great job. I thought. Fellow’s eyes glaze over. “Is there something else you’d like me to do?” I said, “or that you’d like me to do differently?” “No,” he said. “Not at all.”

”. . . yes. . . ?”

“It’s . . . you’re too real,” he said.

“Too real . . . ?” I said.

“Yes,” he said.

“What does that mean?” I said.

“We need . . .” he said. “We need a real babe for this part.” “What does that mean?” I said.

“You’re not pretty enough.”

*

A producer calls up. “What a script!” he says. “You have written a script--we had the first reading today, I wish you’d been there. If we’d video’d it, we could have released that. The hell with the film. The electricity in the room, your words . . . .” He paused. “Yes?” I said.

“There’s only one problem,” he said.

“What?” I said.

“Jack doesn’t like the plot.”

*

It is of course, what hell must be like, if hell has valet parking.

But here is the rub--what about their homes?

In Chicago, “Come by for dinner” meant come by at 6, we’ll all eat at the Formica kitchen table, the kids’ll be running around and so on.

I went to New York, and “Come for dinner” meant dress up, the invitation is for 9, we’ll start drinking, the drinks will be passed around by caterers, we’ll eat at 11, a sit-down affair with place cards, care. You’ll be drunk, the dining room will be tastefully overdecorated, you won’t notice. In L.A., they say “Come by,” and the dinner is served, at the top of the food chain, by a wonderfully informal and correct staff. The food isn’t bad, but the kicker is the house is lovely.

What are these savages doing in these lovely homes, I wonder?

In Chicago, we referred to the charge de decor as the “dreckerator”; and I was pleased, both for myself and for the prescience of my Race, to discover that Frank Lloyd Wright referred to the metier as “desecrater,” and that, with few exceptions, has been my experience--but those L.A. houses, well, they are swell--the abodes of the Studio Heads and the hotshot producers--they showed, and one felt, what Edith Wharton referred to as “the demoralizing simplicity of great wealth.” There one was--in the Greene and Greene bungalow, the Craftsman Gothic, the Japanese bungalow--the most charming, trig, airy and light houses.

How dare they?

How dare these Visigoths who use terms like “moral dilemma” and “flavor-of-the-month”; who demand that various young women strip to the buff to audition for a voice-over; who go white-water rafting down the Colorado with their ilk to “bond,” who say, “ecksetera,” how dare they have a home in which one finds American Art Pottery? I had a very famous director call me and ask if I’d be interested in writing a new screenplay of “Moby Dick.” “Sure thing,” I said.

“One change,” he said. “We want you to write it from the point of view of the whale.”

And yet, this race of Vandals does not find itself incapable of hanging on the wall the Charlie Russell watercolor, or the odd run of Grueby Tiles, of employing decorators who’ve revived the taste for Stickley and Elbert Hubbard, who did not found Dianetics or whatever it’s called.

These folks, who greenlit or greenlighted blah blah blah part eye vee should have the proverbial moose-on-satin with the eyes that follow one about. These people should, by rights, have the bullfight poster with one’s name upon it hanging in the john, instead of which we find the pure, unscented handmade soap from some off-brand country, lying, pristine, in the small, green Hampshire soap dish. Meredith Willson said it best: “Make your blood boil? Well I should say.” Now, friends, let me tell you what I mean. How dare these anti-literate traffic cops at the roadside crash which is our culture, how dare they dare to have anything around them that is lovely?

I have seen a room of perfect proportions, with the pickled floor and the requisite French country table on which were three Teco jugs. This in the house of a producer, who, in any sane land, would be doing Community Service in an urn.

I have seen an Ellsworth Kelley in the kitchen of a man who said of my script on the Spanish Civil War, “not enough Spaniards.”

I know these folk, the beloved thugs of the ongoing aesthetic Morality Tale which, to us in the Arts, is our Hero-Journey, I know these Mamelukes of Mammon have only gone out and bought a decorator. I know that.

And I know Hitler hired Leni Riefenstahl, and she made a couple of compelling flicks, but hey!

But how dare they, once again? And what can it do to my sensitive soul to see examples of both the Saturday Evening Girls and Newcomb College on the sideboard of a man who watched the dailies of my films in his limo, while talking on the phone--to see a wheat-tangerine Heriz on the floor of the man who said of my (rejected) script for “Lolita”: “You made him look like a pedophile?”

A black year on Columbus.

The cars are tasteful, the food is tasteful, the homes are tasteful, the clothing is tasteful, I suppose, and you wouldn’t spend a weekend with these folks to save Eleanor Roosevelt.

What would one talk about? And what could be worse than discovering that the purveyor of Entertainment so wholesome as to be proof against criticism of anything up to but not including its content, knew and could compare and contrast the slip glaze on a Rookwood vase with the foliated decoration (by Ruth Erikson) on one by Grueby Faience. It would be like Martin Borman chanting Talmud.

It’s not right.

It’s too tasteful for me. There is no seam in it.

It will be like the day when we’re told Martha Stewart’s found the AIDS cure.

The dog-of-the-day: the Golden or the English-bred Lab, the German Draathaar or the Italian Spinetti; the Range Rover or ‘60s Ford pickup; the Yoji jacket, the quarter-sawn oak, the yellow Formica breakfast table and chairs in the kitchen which (e pi se muove) could have been at my aunt’s house. And as I write, it occurs to me, as it occurs to you, the rejoinder of the bloke discovered at the whorehouse: “You couldn’t have seen me if you weren’t there yourself.” And, of course, I was, and looked on the pottery and the car, and the jacket and the dog with longing born of a desire for the End of Strife. Yes, you might say, here is a fellow we have caught in the whorehouse.

He has too much time on his hands and is envying the neighbor’s bric-a-brac and trying to denominate its outraged aestheticism.

What a sell!

*

So I reveal myself. I do it for a living, and perhaps it is the most elastic application of chaos theory to blame CAA for the unpalatable increase in the price of McCoy pottery, but, in the words of Marlene Dietrich, “Caaaahhhhn’t help it.”

Finally, Hollywood is, of course, a Company Town.

And any company town is designed like a boat--except we find the ballast at the top. And so we may say the beacon blanket, the attendant Grenfell rug, the fugitive-green quilt, the Traulsen fridge, the early Mennonite Pine Tables of Santa Monica are the anomalous equivalent of the fabled white plastic belt and glass drinks-cart of Grosse Pointe, Mich.--that’s just the way it is, that’s just the way These People Live, and, when they die, they’ll probably, things being what they are, go straight to heaven, and it will be the lounge of the Admiral’s Club, and they’ll like that just fine, too.