Archive for July, 2010

Non-fiction > Essay > Total Theater Magazine

Words to Defend and Deplore the Image: On David Mamet’s Speed the Plow

Style is a funny thing with writers, often portrayed as the opposite of substance, as though the two can’t happily co-exist. One could argue—and one will—that the style of a David Mamet play is its substance; imagine his work without the staccato chatter, the pauses, the repetition, the doubling-back fragments, the New York-infused vulgarity sweetened with a drop of Los Angeles gloss. His characters talk fast, think fast, and invariably all sound the same. A Mamet play remains an exercise in speed; speed, I believe Mamet would say, kills.

Does Speed The Plow kill? Oh, yes. Its two men—Bobby Gould and Charlie Fox (old Hollywood dogs, at least by Hollywood terms, where its denizens age in canine years)—search for a movie that will make them rich/respected/feared. Fox believes he’s found it; a script coveted by big movie star Douglas Brown, some terrible (we assume) story about prison friendship, described by Gould as a “a buddy film, a prison film…” Gould has recently been promoted to head of production, and Fox is now certain he can get this film made with Douglas Brown attached. They convince each other the film is special, it’s something worth making, that it will bring them millions. Do we know this plan is doomed to encounter obstacles? Of course we do. Otherwise it wouldn’t be dramatic. How we get to that doom is unexpected, and therein lies Mamet’s talent. But what is Mamet trying to express with this play? And how does he arrive at this expression?

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Stories about the moviemaking business are an old genre; few things make a writer more happy than the illusion of their singular importance to any given project, and from Nathaniel West to Daniel Fuchs we’ve read enough pages detailing the poor schnook trying to navigate his way through the minefield of Hollywood mediocrity and into those Elysian Fields of “artistic integrity.” Yet Mamet gives us a break from the poor schnook; in Speed The Plow his aspiring artists are C-level producers talking themselves in and out of decisions, uncertain what will work and what won’t. Gould and Fox are both obtuse and cynically brilliant, recognizing the futility of their quest by talking in circles—one could argue Mamet’s view of life in general is a push against futility, hence his characters often struggle to express themselves[1]—but their hope remains because they are members of a fatally ambitious troupe: the Hollywood set.

But discussion of the Brown script is put on hold as Gould details the fool’s errand sent by studio head Richard Ross. Ross has given Gould an “important novel” to courtesy read. Refusal is implicit in the courtesy label; Ross has no intention of ever greenlighting this novel (titled “The Bridge or, Radiation and the Half-Life of Society”). As Gould explains to Karen, his temporary secretary:

Now:  Ross, no dummy, says of course, he’ll read the book. Gives me the book to read, so when he tells the author “how he loved the book but it won’t make a movie,” he can say something intelligent about it. You get it? This, in the business, is called a “courtesy read.”

But a funny thing happened on the way to the rejection pile: Gould likes the novel. It distracts him from the Brown script. Of course his affection for the book is deepened by Karen’s agreement, and inflamed by his lust for her. Her allying with his affinity for “The Bridge” as a work of art and not just a commodity literally turns him on. Gould, we sense, is entering a mid-life crisis. He has just been promoted to head of production, presumably a cause for celebration, yet Karen awakens within him a desire to create art.

Art. A nearly-meaningless word, but in grasping for his job to mean something other than a life spent in pursuit of profit, Gould replaces art with purity, perhaps also meaning authenticity—again, Mamet is being both cynical and painfully earnest—and he tells Karen: “This job corrupts you. You start to think, all the time ‘what do these people want from me?’ And everything becomes a task.” Are we to take Gould at his word? Sure. As Gould insists:

“What about Art?” I’m not an artist. Never said I was, and nobody who sits in this chair can be. I’m a businessman. “Can’t we try to make good films?” Yes. We try. I’m going to try to make a good film of this prison film…There is a way things are. Some people are elected, try to change the world, this job is not that job.

Producers doth protest too much; they want to be the artists, and yet realize they cannot be the artist because they lack the talent for words. So how do they cope? By insisting the opposite, while at the same time uneasily balancing between film as a business vs. film as art, and making a habit of screwing over writers.[2]

Back to the play. Act One ends with Gould asking Karen to read the novel and meet him at his place to discuss. We know what “discuss” means, but we also hope there’s some nobility in Gould’s attempt—that he’s not just chasing young tail, but is searching for someone to agree with him that this ridiculous novel with its apocalyptic visions and forced metaphors of radiation and decay mirroring civilization’s collapse…that this novel is the antidote to the Douglas Brown buddy/prison film.

Act Two is Karen and Gould at Gould’s place, an elongated seduction scene where the audience isn’t quite sure who’s the seducer. At times it seems like Gould manipulates Karen with faux integrity, recognizing her desire to be a part of this novel-not-quite-optioned-for-a-film. He lays it on thick and meaty:

Look: I’m going to pay you the compliment of being frank. I’m going to talk to you. Power, people who are given a slight power, tend to think, they think that they’re the only one that has these ideas, pure ideas, whatever, no matter. And, listen to me. Listen. I’m going to tell you. This book. Your book. On The End of the World which has meant so much to you…My job: my job, my new job…is not even to “make,” it is to “suggest,” to “push,” to champion…good work, I hope…choosing from Those Things Which the Public Will Come In To See.

Gould is suddenly a babe in the woods as Karen—armed with seductive powers—convinces him this novel must be made into a movie, and that Gould’s fear of taking risks is the real reason he invited her over. That, in fact, his attempt to bed her is a cover for what Gould really wants: A reason to be artistically bold. Karen says:

You asked read the book. I read the book. Do you know what it says? It says that you were put here to make stories people need to see. To make them less afraid. It says in spite of our transgressions—that we could do something.

The seduction is reversed; Karen beds Gould, and the second act ends with Karen convincing Gould to forget the buddy/prison movie. His calling is this novel. His calling is helping Karen achieve what most young girls in Mamet stories want: success by climbing atop the backs of powerful men.[3]

Act Three starts with Gould—we imagine him still reeking of sex—telling Fox the Douglas Brown film is off. Instead, Gould says he is going to greenlight the book. Fox, as one would imagine, is livid. The object of his scorn becomes Karen, whom he sees as a temptress, a calculating girl using Gould’s mid-life crisis as a pressure point to get what she wants. It’s not about the book or the Doug Brown film; Mamet makes their argument about authenticity. Fox insists Gould is blinded by lust, that he has no real interest in making an “important” movie from some fancy novel, that in fucking Karen he lost sight of a shared goal: making movies people will see, rather than “important” movies or “artistic” movies or whatever nearly-meaningless adjective Fox can attach to that one hundred and twenty minutes of celluloid passing for “cinema.”

And what does Karen want? To be involved, at the ground level, in the making of a movie. The Douglas Brown film is separate from her, but she was a reader for the novel. Never mind the realities of readers being quite literally a dime-a-dozen in the studio system—Karen grasps for any foothold. Fox sees this.  He is amazed that Gould does not. We, the reader, see this, but are not amazed Gould does not. Why? Because Mamet refuses to make him entirely cynical. Gould does want to make an important film, and Karen has awakened something within him, as revealed at the end, when Gould says to Fox:   “I wanted to do Good…But I became foolish.” Good capitalized, as though representing some Platonic notion, and Gould sounding like a child, infantilized by both Karen and Fox, the head of production suddenly made helpless. He even puts Fox’s name first in their imaginary title for the Douglas Brown film—can you imagine a head of production allowing such a thing?—and Mamet rightly guesses this act of largesse will win us over.

GOULD: We’re here to make a movie.

FOX: Whose name goes above the title?

GOULD: Fox and Gould.

FOX: Then how bad can life be?

So what, if anything, is Mamet trying to express in Speed The Plow? In our search for his intent we must first discover the central question: Will Gould and Fox get their movie made? It could also be: Will they succeed in pitching it to Richard Ross? The crisis occurs once Karen convinces Gould to switch movies. The resolution is Fox’s unveiling of Karen’s machinations, throwing her from the scene and their lives. Mamet’s focus is clear: he never strays from the central question, throwing hurdles at every opportunity. Yet there is an abridged feeling to this play, an unrealized potential for a greater satire about the business of Hollywood and the uncomfortable marriage of art and commodity.[4]

Using the previous sentence as a temporary answer to the “What’s it All About?” we can see where Mamet fell short of his mark. His style is paramount—much time is spent (non-fans would say wasted) in typical Mamet back-and-forth patter, which neither moves the plot forward nor differentiates the characters because they all sound the same.[5] It does entertain, but it entertains in the way dessert served first fills you up; we might have no room left over for the meal, but we don’t feel entirely satisfied.

So why, then, does Mamet make this choice? Why settle for a simple satire of the Hollywood system, not fully-realized, with the only female a vamp and two producers sounding like ultra-cool versions of Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum? I suggest he “settled” because this play was about one man’s quest for authenticity, in some ways a one act divided into three parts, never quite leaving Gould’s struggles, letting us watch him almost escape the vicissitudes of his career—the movie guy who’s not really supposed to care about movies—and it remains a character survey, quotidian by design and necessity. Focused to a few scenes—an office, Gould’s apartment—Mamet relies on his strongest talent: the language.

And what language! His Girl Friday written as if Ben Hecht had attention deficit disorder. Characters stop in mid-sentence, repeat themselves, and sound both fumbling and impossibly slick—their confusion becomes our confusion, though the brilliance of Mamet is his ability to say more than what you hear. The audience fills in the gaps; we understand before the characters do. Mamet makes his point—the system is ridiculous, profit wins the day, people will screw you (literally) for a sliver of the possibility of moving one tiny rung up the ladder. Yet buried within Mamet’s satire we discover a portrayal of a lost man. Gould, the aging, at-one-time infant terrible clutching both his young secretary and a novel of decay and apocalypse. As if making a movie about the End of It All will ward away Gould’s own demise, this “artistic” novel representing Gould’s peace offering, as it were, to the gods of drama. But the gods prove fickle in Mamet’s play; or, more likely, Gould’s decision to abandon his dream proves there were never any gods to begin with.

[2] The screwing-over-writers part doesn’t require Freudian analysis to decipher what’s going on—awe turns to envy turns to loathing. I use “awe” because even the most experienced producer doesn’t quite understand just how that writer gets all those words in the correct order, even if said experienced producer knows structure, motivation, and every element of Aristotelian/McKee/Field story theory.

[3] David Mamet has been criticized for his portrayal of women, and I’m sure Speed-The-Plow did little to silence his critics. But his choice to use Karen as both temptress and Gould’s conscience—picture a lingerie-clad angel on Gould’s left shoulder, with Fox as the devil on his right—is an interesting reversal and deserves credit. Karen is not all bad; she’s just as ambitious as her two male counterparts, and might be right about that novel. But she admits she would not have slept with Gould had he not agreed with her about the book, and this admission—while courageous and revealing of a double standard—ultimately places Karen into vamp territory.

[4] Mamet further explored these themes in the films Wag the Dog and State and Main.

[5] I must imagine a Mamet retort to this criticism: “Sure they sound the same, but they all use different words.”

Originally published in Total Theater Magazine, June 2010