‘Lakeboat’ Drifts to Release

“Lakeboat” drifted quietly into a single theater on Friday, a year and a half after its premiere and with virtually no advance hype.

This, despite the fact that it is based on a play by David Mamet; the cast consists largely of familiar names; and its director, actor Joe Mantegna, has long been associated with the playwright’s work (winning a 1984 Tony for his work in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” subsequent acclaim for “Speed-the-Plow” and leading roles in such films as “House of Games” and “Homicide”).

Mantegna describes the here-and-there release pattern for “Lakeboat” as “like a shotgun, scattered across the country, opening in this city and that city.” It’s the opposite of the kind of 4,000-screen, media-driven marketing campaigns for the opening weekends of big studio films.

“If my career was totally based on films that got a lot of hoopla, I wouldn’t be in this house,” Mantegna quipped last week in the living room of his elegant Toluca Lake home. “I’d be in a tent somewhere, because 90% of everything I’ve done [in film] has been like, ‘Oh, you were in that? I loved that. It’s like a cult film now.’ Blockbusters and I just do not go together.”

Tony Mamet, the playwright’s half-brother who produced and also acts in the film, echoes a common lament in the indie film world: “It’s hard to get a theatrical release for a small movie.”

Mamet spent five years trying to arrange financing for the film, which cost less than $5 million. It’s based on one of David Mamet’s earliest works on the tough characters that inhabit a freighter on the Great Lakes.

The cast includes Charles Durning, Peter Falk, Robert Forster, Denis Leary and George Wendt. Tony Mamet plays a college student spending his summer aboard the ship, the Seaway Queen, and Andy Garcia appears unbilled in multiple flashbacks as a sailor who meets with foul play on shore.

The picture originally opened the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival in April 2000. It didn’t play New York until a year later, and has had brief runs in Chicago, Philadelphia and other cities. This is its first appearance for a paying public in L.A. The distributor, Panorama Entertainment, is “very small,” Tony Mamet adds.

Mantegna felt burned by his experience with “Jerry and Tom,” a film he starred in that was picked up at Sundance by Miramax and wound up going straight to cable two years ago. “That was a prime example of a film that, had it gone another way, maybe would have gotten some special treatment,” he says.

The long odyssey of “Lakeboat” actually stretches back to 1975, when Mantegna--then an actor at Chicago’s Organic Theatre company--was looking at material for an actors’ showcase for himself and fellow actor Jack Wallace (who also appears in the movie version of “Lakeboat”).

He contacted David Mamet, then an aspiring playwright, who “sent over these typewritten pages,” that form the basis of “Lakeboat,” Mantegna recalls.

“There is no play. Basically it’s a collection of scenes in script form. Each little vignette has a title, but that’s it. They are complete unto themselves. There’s no thread, no through line. They’re almost like little essays.”

Ten years later, Mantegna was doing David Mamet’s “Glengarry Glen Ross” in Chicago with Wallace and another actor, J.J. Johnston (who is also in “Lakeboat”), when “Dave’s kid brother” Tony stopped backstage. According to Mantegna, Johnston remarked about doing “Lakeboat” one day with Tony as Dale, the central character.

Flash-forward another nine years. Mantegna got a phone call from Tony Mamet who had funding to do “Lakeboat” onstage with Johnston and Wallace, asking if Mantegna would like to be involved. Coming off a long movie shoot, Mantegna said fine, but as the play’s director, not as an actor.

Their 1994 Tiffany Theater production in West Hollywood was a sold-out success. Familiar television faces Wendt (“Cheers”) and Ed O’Neill (“Married With Children”) joined Johnston, Wallace and Mamet. “Joe directed it in a kind of cinematic way,” Tony recalls. “That, combined with the audience reaction, we said, ‘We’ve got something. This could make a really good film.”’

Tony asked Mantegna to direct the film version. But the young actor-producer’s insistence that the ensemble cast include Johnston and Wallace--two old cronies from the Chicago theater days who were unknowns in film--helped derail potential deals.

“Once we did the play, I think I could have gotten the movie financed overnight with the right cast, and David himself writing the screenplay for us,” says Mantegna. “But the play had pretty much been Tony’s inspiration. I wanted him to be totally involved, and he always stuck to Jack and J.J. It took us five years to get our funding as opposed to five months, but I’ve got to say, I respected that.”

Tony Mamet explains: “When my brother was a struggling actor, he was hanging out with these guys. He would soak up their dialogue, a particular kind of South Side Chicago-guy [talk]. So when these guys do his dialogue, it’s kind of chicken-and-egg: He was doing them, they’re not doing him. That, for me, was the inspiration to do this piece.”

While he is disappointed the Tiffany cast could not remain intact for the film, Tony Mamet says, “I thought it was better to make this with a couple of us than to never make it.” Mantegna filled the rest of the cast with friends. “I was a first-time director,” he adds, “so I wanted to surround myself with people who weren’t going to beat me up, people that I trusted and had some history with.”

The story is loosely based on a summer that David Mamet spent aboard a freighter as a graduate student. The veteran shipmates engage in salty monologues about life, drinking, gambling and women. “It’s ‘Jurassic Park’ of the Great Lakes,” says Mantegna. “These guys are dinosaurs. These are guys from another world, another generation, set in their ways. They’re not bad people. They’re not politically incorrect to be politically incorrect. This is what they are. And it’s a dying breed.”

Tony Mamet, who is also a rock singer-songwriter (with an appearance scheduled Saturday at the Viper Room), enlisted another brother, Bob, to compose the jazz score.

Mantegna says he’s just glad the movie got made. Subsequent video and cable airings will ensure that “somebody can pop it into a VCR or see it on late-night cable and say, ‘Oh, I really liked that. It was an hour and a half well spent.’ That’s all you can hope for.”