David Mamet Makes a Play For Hollywood
David Mamet first came to the attention of critics and theatergoers when his play Duck Variations opened in Chicago in 1971. He was twenty-three years old then and has been on quite a roll ever since: he’s written and had produced some twenty plays, including Sexual Perversity in Chicago, A Life in the Theater, The Woods and The Water Engine. He won the Obie Award for Best New Playwright in 1976 and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award the following year for American Buffalo, which was directed by Ulu Grosbard and starred John Savage, Robert Duvall and Kenneth McMillan. Because of his eerie sense of realism and incredible ear for dialogue, Mamet was hailed as “the Great White Hope of the American stage.” Folks just kind of sat back and waited for him to get it all together and write the big one.
Theater aficionados will have to hold their breath awhile longer. David Mamet has — you guessed it — gone to Hollywood and written a screenplay. Well, not Hollywood, actually, but a ways up the coast in Santa Barbara, where the cameras are already rolling on his script for The Postman Always Rings Twice, starring Jack Nicholson and Jessica Lange and directed by Bob Rafelson (The King of Marvin Gardens, Five Easy Pieces).
Mamet’s version will be the fourth conversion of the James M. Cain novel to the screen. There was an obscure French production in the Thirties, Luchino Visconti’s Obsessione a few years later and, of course, the 1946 release starring John Garfield and Lana Turner that caused a good deal of controversy. As one critic said at the time:” ….it is based on adultery, not even slightly apologized for, and murder, which even though paid for in the denouement, is so blatantly presented in detail and planning that it is an open invitation to try your hand at the game yourself.”
According to Mamet there were problems getting the book to work as a movie, problems finally solved after seven months of collaboration among him, Rafelson and Nicholson, whom Mamet credits with important contributions. “The movie is frankly sexual,” says Mamet. “The sadomasochistic elements were not really brought out in the Garfield-Turner version. One thing this movie is about is how people let their sexuality, their desire for fulfillment of some kind, betray them through unfortunate actions.”
Mamet is reluctant to be specific about Postman and the problems he had writing it, explaining. “It’s like when you read the critics — assholes that they are — and they review a comedy and give away the jokes. What’s an audience supposed to do? It ruins it for them.”
He shrugs off the whispers floating up and down the Great White Way about him selling out and going Hollywood. “I’ve always wanted to write movies,” he says. “No one would hire me because they were all scared of New York writers. The perfunctory phrase they use to disqualify New York writers is, ‘He can’t make the transition.'” Mamet’s dark eyes dance behind his little round glasses. “As if having a little acuity and diligence somehow should disqualify you from being able to write a screenplay. Such bullshit.”
The dining room of the El Encanto in Santa Barbara feels more like a fraternity house at Dartmouth than a hotel. The place has been taken over by the Postman‘s cast and crew and it’s jumping. Excited, Mamet orders a Bloody Mary. “I think screenwriting is most definitely an art form; a different art form form the theater, but an art form. And you can be just as corrupted in the theater as in movies.” He smiles. “My experience in the theater is that most of the commercial people are idiots and thieves and I can’t imagine in the motion picture world, where the stakes are so much higher in terms of financial rewards, that human nature will be on vacation. That’s why I feel so fortunate to be working with Bob Rafelson. Some American movies have been art, and Rafelson has made a couple of those films.”
How Mamet came to write The Postman Always Rings Twice is itself a touch Hollywood-esque. About a year ago Mamet and his wife, actress Lindsay Crouse (Slap Shot, Between the Lines), were going or vacation, and Mamet needed some books to read on the beach. At the time he was very much interested in opera, and his brother-in-law, author Timothy Crouse (The Boys on the Bus), suggested he read Serenade, James M. Cain’s novel about an opera singer. Mamet trundled to his neighborhood bookstore and picked up Serenade and five other Cain novels, including The Postman Always Rings Twice. He read them all in one night.
“They were marvelous,” recalls Mamet. “So unlike anything I had ever read. Cain is such a good writer. It’s like he learned to write by reading [Aristotle’s] Poetics. I was struck by his honesty, his frankness about his problems, his personal perceptions of the world. Basically, he wrote the same book eight times, and it was always a wonderful book. And always had the same elements: opera singing, illicit love, incest, insurance companies and people working in restaurants.”
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