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Aug. 5, 2018 - The Ben Shapiro Show
52:55
David Mamet | The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special Ep. 13
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I mean, you look at a movie nowadays, if it lists 18 producers, that's not out of the ordinary.
I've been in the business 50 years.
I have no idea what a producer does.
So here we are on the Sunday special with David Mamet, America's greatest living playwright and screenwriter and the author of a brand new book called Chicago.
We'll get right into it with Mr. Mamet in just one second.
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Okay, David Mamet, thanks so much for stopping by, really appreciate it.
You're welcome.
So for folks who don't know David Mamet's work because they've been hiding under a rock for the last, oh, 40 years of American screenwriting and playwriting.
David Mamet is America's foremost living American playwright and screenwriter.
He's the, if you've ever seen The Untouchables, he's the guy who did it.
If you've ever seen Glenn, Gary Glenn Ross, he's the guy who did it.
And he has a brand new book out called Chicago, which is a gangster novel and it really is fantastic.
You're going to want to check it out.
So David, let's start from the very beginning.
How did you get into playwriting, screenwriting?
How did you get into writing from the very start?
Well, I was a ne'er-do-well kid, and I used to teach a lot of colleges, and they'd say, we want to have a special group of kids who just want to talk to you, so how would you like us to pick them?
So I'd always say, well, just give me the ne'er-do-wells, because they're the only people ever going to amount to anything.
But the college was never capable of doing that because, of course, they're set up to put the imprimatur on people who can tell them on Wednesday what the teachers told them on Monday.
But I was a class clown.
I never opened a school book.
And people used to tell me nobody likes a smart ass.
But that was the first encounter with authority where I knew they're just dead wrong.
And didn't make any difference if nobody liked the smart-ass at all because that was the only choice I had.
So that's how I started off.
Okay, and where did you grow up?
I mean, how did you, what were your parents like?
I grew up on the south side of Chicago and my parents were first-generation Americans.
Their grandparents were still alive.
They were all Ashkenazi immigrants.
They all spoke with the Wonderful, thick accent.
I guess you don't hear it anymore.
And my grandmother raised my dad as a single mom.
Didn't speak very good English.
And they were just marvelous people.
So my mom and dad grew up.
They courted during World War II.
They got married right afterward.
And my dad bought a house in something called Park Forest, Illinois, which was the first planned community.
It was before Levittown.
And it was houses half the size of this studio over there.
So then we moved to the south side, and I grew up on the south side of Chicago.
Okay, and where did you go to college, and when did you actually start the writing?
Was it in high school when you were being a class clown, or how did that get started?
Well, I started writing in high school, and I actually covered sports for the Park Forest Star.
They paid me like four bucks to cover the high school sports I wrote for them.
And then I wrote for my other high school Literary magazine and I went to college and it was a hippie dippy school called Goddard College in the middle of Vermont and there was no school there I mean there was literally no school there because all the kids of the baby boom generation were trying to go to college and trying to stay out of Vietnam and The school expanded so rapidly that there were no dormitories and there are no classrooms so they housed us in northern Vermont and
in these little cabins, tourist cabins, literally without any heat.
And we had to hitchhike every day eight miles to this abandoned town hall where there were no classes.
So that was interesting. - Okay, and so you started writing there and you were writing your own plays or?
Well, yeah.
You know what?
As a kid in Chicago, I was connected with Second City, which was the first improvisational theater group after The Compass.
Compass was Elaine May, Shelley Berman, and Mike Nichols, and then it became Second City.
And so as a teenager, 13, 14, 15 years old, I worked there as a piano player.
for the kids' shows, and I worked as a busboy, and so I used to watch these great comics every night, doing sets, right, one after the other, and everything was a seven-minute blackout.
And then I started reading plays, and I read that the people that really most influenced me were Chekhov and Pinter, because I realized what Pinter and Chekhov were doing was exactly the same thing they were doing at Second City.
They were saying, life is a serial comic sketch.
And I'm going to be able to reduce life to seven minute scenes, which is basically the length of any scene.
And see if I can make you laugh and cry because of the ineffable wackiness of existence.
So I discovered this, and I said, I know how to do that.
It's just like Second City.
It's a blackout sketch.
So I started writing sketches, and then I wrote sketches while I was at college, and one thing led to another.
Well, one of the things you're obviously very well known for is the hard-nosed nature of your writing.
The fact that everything you write has a real edge to it, and that's not a pun about the movie you wrote called The Edge, but it actually is true that when you read your writing, it's very edgy stuff.
Where did that hard-nosed sensibility come from?
Well, I mean, not everything I write is in the Dionysian vein.
I've also written a whole bunch of Apollonian bullshit.
But, as I say, I grew up on the South Side, and my dad did very well, eventually, as a lawyer.
We were a staunch middle-class family, and I was a nice Jewish boy.
But then I didn't have any money.
I got out of college, so I started working at everything in the world.
To support myself, so I got a chance to hang out, to be a part of the actual working class life of Chicago.
And you've written a lot about Chicago.
Obviously, that's your new book is about Chicago, but it's a period piece.
I mean, this is obviously written about the Prohibition era in Chicago with all the gangsters.
It's sort of going over some of the same period time as Untouchables.
What about that time did you find so attractive writing about?
Because obviously you revisited it.
Well, you grew up in Chicago, at least in the old days, you know, 50, 60 years ago.
The ethos of the Chicago came out of the gangster era.
Everybody talked about the gangsters.
Everybody knew somebody who knew Al Capone.
Everybody had an uncle who was maybe a little bit bent, or maybe your dad or mom had been a little bit bent.
And Chicago was a machine town, right, which is things got fixed after you went up and saw the captain, as we used to say.
And if you didn't go up and step up and see the captain and turn out the vote or kick back two weeks of your salary, which happened to my stepsister, she got a job working on the Illinois toll road, and she came back one day and said, they want me to kick back two weeks of my salary.
And everyone said, yeah.
So, like, somebody said, who wants to live in a town where you can't fix a parking ticket?
You know, did Chicago work?
Yeah.
You know, if you're a white guy, Chicago worked pretty well.
Now it doesn't work at all.
I mean, it works better if you're a white guy than if you're getting killed on the South Side.
But it was a working man's town, and it was a machine town, and it became clear that if you want the government to do something for you, you gotta do something for them.
So that was the Chicago way.
Yeah, well, and that's something even I knew about.
My parents are both from Chicago, and when my dad was growing up there, he said it was still the kind of place where you could wrap a $20 bill around your ID when you were pulled over for a traffic stop, and you might be able to get away with it.
Oh, yeah, definitely.
I mean, when I was a cab driver, we were getting harassed by the cops all the time.
I'm sure that that's completely changed.
So let's talk a little bit about your political point of view, because of late, you've been in some political controversies in the last few years.
You're obviously incredibly well-known for your writing, and that means that a lot of people who are on the left, a lot of critics who tend to be on the political left, were very complimentary of your work for years and years and years.
Do you find that since you've become more overtly conservative politically, that that's had any impact on how the critics treat your work, or have they been fair?
Well, the critics are never fair.
I mean, that's what critics are.
You know, I'm working my side of the street, they're working theirs.
And if you're a writer, it's a perfect example of the free market, right?
I could spend one... I might spend an afternoon writing an act, or 15 years writing a play.
The audience doesn't care, right?
All they know is the price of the ticket, right?
They might say I like it or they don't like it.
I don't have the right to ask them why, right?
So if they don't like it, that's 15 years down the drain, especially in the theater.
It opens in New York, they don't like it, you're dead.
Interjected into this, as all human endeavors, are hangers-on and parasites and camp followers, which is what critics have traditionally been.
They've been, you know, some good-willed people.
I was a beneficiary of a lot of goodwill, for example, from Roger Ebert and also from Richard Christensen, Chicago's Daily News and the Tribune.
But most critics, they say, what do you need to do to be able to write dramatic criticism?
You need to have a lack of talent to write sports.
So that's true.
So some people, they get cross-decked over to write dramatic criticism, and generally they've been the bane of my existence.
I mean, I get it, right?
There's always ants at a picnic.
Sometimes they come down in my favor, sometimes they come down on the other side.
But trying to be a good Jew, I say, wait a second, you know, if I'm going to kvetch, when they toss my work onto the ash heap, I shouldn't read the other reviews, which I know, through my sixth bad sense, are good.
Generally, you can't survive in the United States as a playwright until you please the people in New York.
And since a political conversion, the press in New York, especially in the New York Times, has been vicious.
It's a peremptory challenge, in effect.
And in effect, I wrote this book, which is on everybody's bestseller list.
And the question is, how did the New York Times review it?
And the answer is, they didn't.
They just chose not to.
Okay, so, well, as they used to say in the 19th century, the doctors used to say, we have to wait and let the disease declare itself.
So as we've seen now, in our country politically, the disease has declared itself.
Because let's talk about your politics.
Were you always politically conservative?
Did you sort of find yourself on the political right?
How did you end up identified as somebody who is politically conservative, Republican, if you're comfortable with that label?
And where do you find it?
I mean, what is your political label?
Well, you know, curiously, I think I'm a complete conservative and a strict constitutionalist.
But when you say Republican, my blood runs cold because everybody I ever knew and everybody who they ever knew was a Roosevelt Democrat.
And the Republicans were the guys with the white plastic belts playing golf at the country club.
But I wrote a political play.
It wasn't a political play, it was a farce.
It was called November, and it's about a president who's about to get kicked out of office because What do you call them?
Approval ratings, as he says, are lower than Gandhi's cholesterol, okay?
He's about to get kicked out of office.
And so he has this plan where he's going to... It's... Both the election's coming up and Thanksgiving's coming up, so he's going to pardon all the turkeys.
And hold up the turkey.
So it's a really funny play.
So the New York Times, back in those days, they were still speaking to me.
Oh, by the way, NPR decided I was a non-person, too, about ten years ago.
But Scott Simon just recently came back and said, you know, come on, do my show.
So that was very nice of him.
So, they're doing my play, November, on Broadway.
It's hysterically funny.
So they asked me to write a piece for the New York Times, because back in the days when I was a pre-non-person, that's what they did, if you were.
So I wrote a play, a piece for the New York Times called Political Civility, based very much on the teachings of my great friend and great teacher, Rabbi Mordecai Findley.
And he said, okay, we have to be civil to each other.
I said, we have to be able to state the other person's point of view in such a way they say, yes, that's what I mean.
And then they ask me, and I have to be able to state their point of view, and they say, yes, that's what I mean.
And then we're going to reduce facts upon which we can agree.
We say, we can't agree on the term off the table.
All we're going to have on the table is facts upon which we agree, and then we'll reason from those facts.
In effect, come let us reason together to see if we can arrive at some mutual understanding.
So I wrote this thing about political civility, and I said, I find it's also important to be civil to myself because all my life I've referred to myself as a brain-dead liberal.
I said, you know, there's a lot of truth in jokes.
So I said, I have to stop and say, wait a second, why are you maligning yourself?
Is this platform something which you believe or not?
You know, it was this great middle-of-the-road piece, blah, blah, blah, New York Times, you know.
As we say, we can deal with the Christians, God help us with the German Jews, right?
So I wrote the piece for, oh wait a second, it was for the Village Voice.
I wrote it for the Village Voice.
Meanwhile, New York Times come out and give a, play a terrible review.
So the Village Voice takes this piece I called Political Civility, and they retitle it, Why I Am No Longer a Braindead Liberal.
Front page.
Okay, kaboom.
New York Times comes back and re-reviews the play November, gives it a worse review, and I find myself out in the cold.
And I said, well, okay, I've got to figure this out.
So I sat down for a couple of years and I wrote a book called The Secret Knowledge about politics and did a whole lot of reading, a whole lot of thinking, trying to reason my way through to an understanding of the political process, which hurt like hell, because I had to recognize that what I had accepted as the way things are were simply prejudices, and examine them to see if there was any truth in them or not.
So, I wrote that book, and I found that my friends turned into acquaintances, and my acquaintances crossed the street.
And Ruth Weiss said something great about the great Ruth Weiss.
Somebody at Harvard said, you know, Dr. Weiss, what will I do if I tell people what I really think?
What will happen to me?
And Ruth said, you'll be free.
So we'll talk about that in just one second.
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Okay, so, in the secret knowledge, what did you actually discover when you delved into the political system and you say that you learned some things that you hadn't thought about before?
What exactly were those things that hadn't occurred to you?
Well, nothing had occurred to me because I was a red diaper baby and grew up in the bubble.
You know, it was great to hate all the Republicans and great to be a peacenik and all these things.
What I went back and what I understood, I think, was the biblical underpinnings of the Declaration and the Constitution, which basically goes back to the Torah on one foot, right?
If it's hateful to you, don't do it to your neighbor.
That's it.
So I tried to reason my way back to the bare metal.
If you would.
And what I came up with was that the Constitution is a compact among thieves.
It's people who say, you know, I know I'm not a very good person.
I try, but I fail.
I know you're not either.
Let's see if we can agree on the least amount of rules that will get us free of King George III and allow us to keep an eagle eye on each other, to allow us freedom from government.
So this was a concept that, you know, I might have heard the phrase, but I didn't understand what it meant.
But then I started thinking.
I said, well, wait a second.
Every time you get a letter in the mail that addresses any governmental agency, what's the first thing you feel?
It's fair.
It's fair.
And then they wanted to tear down my hedge in Santa Monica.
So we bought this house like 20 years ago.
It's a big old hedge, right?
Wonderful hedge.
Great, complete privacy.
Marvelous.
We got a thing in the mail that says, You were in violation of 1943 Hedge Law.
No hedge can be more than three feet tall.
If you don't cut down your hedge immediately, we'll charge you, get this, $25,000 a day.
So I start going to the city council.
People are weeping, weep, weep, weep.
You know, my grandfather planted a hedge, bibbidi-bobbidi-boo.
I start looking into it.
They're going broke.
The city of Santa Monica is going broke, as are all the liberal communities, because they've taxed business away.
Okay?
So they figure, how can I Make money.
You, comb through all the laws and find something that you can enforce.
So everybody fights them.
They fight them in the court.
They say it's unconstitutional.
It's never, you can't fine somebody $25,000 before it's been adjudicated.
The law was never enforced.
So what they come up with is this.
They say, okay, anybody who had a hedge that's been there for 22 years or more, and you can prove it through blah, blah, blah, you can keep your hedge, but We now have a new organization which is the Hedge Police.
And the Hedge Police will come every year and they will take a surveyor's transit to make sure that the hedge is not higher than it was 22 years ago.
I think this is all government.
It's like I said to my kids, all government comes down to the Hedge Police.
Well, it's really interesting because when you watch your movies, there are a lot of, and see some of your plays, there are some lines that have become just part of sort of the American parlance.
Obviously, there's the whole Chicago Way speech from The Untouchables, or the speech that, in the movie version, Alec Baldwin gives in Glen Ross, the always-be-closing speech.
And a lot of folks on the left tend to use these particular lines, actually, a fair bit.
So, Barack Obama famously suggested that you don't bring a knife to a gunfight.
In his sort of political heyday.
And people on the left are constantly suggesting that capitalism is this dog-eat-dog business where people are attempting to tear each other down.
And they use that as an excuse for government interventionism.
But it sounds like, you know, your basic view of human beings, that all human beings are basically at each other.
And that's why we have to come to these basic agreements to leave each other alone.
Well, yeah, I was watching yesterday that the great Tucker Carlson, I'm crazy about him, he had some cockamamie, I think Democrat something or other, you know, congressman or something like that, and he says to the guy, the Democrat, he says, wait a second, he says, you guys got nothing left in the golf bag.
So what in the world are you going to run on in the midterms?
And the guy says, economic justice and social justice.
So I said, well, okay, you know, let's break it down to the English language, right?
What does economic justice mean?
At the end, how's that different than justice?
Right?
It's communism.
What it means is, it's statism.
It means that someone is going to stand above whatever rules we have for commerce and decide what's just to whom, right?
So as Tom Sowell said, whenever anybody says it's going to help A, you say, well, who's going to hurt, right?
So economic justice is At the end of the day, it's communism.
And communism is someone's going to be in charge of saying what you have to give to me, and I'll keep what I think I want and give it back to you.
Which brings me back to when I realized that the Marxian idea, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, really begs the question.
Because the term which is missing is, the state shall take from each according to his ability, which means the state's going to determine what your ability is.
The state shall give to each according to his ability.
I'm the state, I'm going to determine what you need.
You don't determine it anymore.
You don't determine what your ability is, the state does.
So, so much for economic justice.
I thought social justice, how's that different than Decaf justice, right?
Regular common garden decaf justice, right?
So justice is drawing a line.
That's what justice is, like taking a line of type and justifying it.
I'm going to say, this is in, that's out.
Is there going to be injustice in terms of justice?
Yeah, sure.
Talmud says, right, where there's law, there's injustice.
Okay, great.
We're going to have a line, right?
Social justice means there's no line.
Whoever's screaming loudest gets to say, this is what you have to do.
So you say, wait a second, let's refer to the line, let's refer to the law.
They say, no, no, throw out that law.
The law is insufficient.
And I got a guy talking to a shul.
He says, well, obviously the Constitution's out of date.
How would a 2,000, a 230, 40 year document possibly be relevant?
I didn't want to say, well, then why are we sitting here reading the Torah?
But, so what I said was, wait a second, okay, let's say it's out of date.
How are you going to fix it?
What do you suggest?
And more importantly, what are the rules By which you suggest we're going to go about fixing it, because social justice is fascism.
That's what it means.
It means that the group of people who has screams the loudest gets to determine what the law is, and that always ends in murder.
So there are two wonderful phrases, economic justice and social justice, which don't mean nothing, as the Samanthists would tell us.
They mean something.
And the first thing they do is they're an anesthetic.
So how much should politics play into the art that you make?
You sit down to write a book.
You sit down to write a play or movie.
How do you filter out your politics?
Or do you just sort of let it flow?
Does it just sort of find itself?
The main thing is, like, in the last hour of the day, I have to stop listening to Mark Levin.
That's the main thing.
He's a pretty smart guy, but, you know, he gets tired, and so he gets irate, and I get irate.
So the main thing is, for me, is listen to the radio a lot less, read the newspaper a lot less.
And I spent, like, the last couple of years writing political essays, and I just said to my assistant, you know, file them.
I mean, burn them if you want to.
I know what I think.
Nobody else really cares what I think.
Let me get on with going back to being a gag writer, see if I can make people laugh once in a while.
One of the things that's driven people on the right absolutely insane is obviously the dominance of the left in the cultural sphere.
And my good friend Andrew Breitbart, who I think you knew, Andrew was fond of saying that culture is upstream of politics.
The more people are shaped in the country by sort of the culture with which they engage, television, movies, Entertainment, because we spend a lot more time engaging with that content than we do with political content.
Do you think that's true?
Do you think that people... Yeah.
There's a guy who wrote a book, his name is Paul Ingrassi, and he wrote a book, I believe, called Crash Course or Crash Something, about the merger of Chrysler and Fiat.
Right?
And what he says in that book is really important to me.
He says, culture will outdo organization every time.
Because culture is the oral Torah, right?
Upon which, you know, our understanding of the written Torah is based.
Now, so my wife, every year she goes back to visit the old folks at home in Scotland, so I spent like three weeks alone forgiving her, okay?
I was watching the Turner Classic movies.
I love old movies, right?
But they ran out of old movies, so they're running like Lassie Come Home Part 2, you know?
All of that.
I get it already.
How many times can you watch Lawrence of Arabia?
So I started looking at on-demand movies, right?
New releases, on-demand movies.
I've just seen a couple of good movies over the last ten years.
Most of these movies are garbage, and not only are they garbage, they're a form of cultural obscenity, because they're either kiss-kiss or bang-bang.
They're either simulated or non-simulated sex, or they're a sadomasochistic fantasy of violence.
So I'm thinking, well, okay, left, right?
Okay, Hollywood, if you're really interested in not mistreating women, Don't do the sex scene.
Knock it off.
Learn how to write for the love of God.
Right?
Because that's why the sex scene's in there, because people can't write.
I say if you're really interested in doing away with gun violence, Why do you have a gun in every poster of every movie ever made?
Why are people shooting each other?
Why are they carving each other up?
Well, the reason is that the people who write these things don't have any skin in the game because they can't write very well.
So if they don't get any joy out of figuring out a plot, what they're going to do is they're going to put, you know, Adolf's meat tenderizer in everything, which is either sex or violence.
How do you think that that impacts the culture?
Do you think that that has an impact on politics more generally, or do you think that it's sort of just the background noise?
Like when people go to see a movie, do you think that that actually has the capacity to shift how people think?
No, no, no, no, absolutely not.
Well, I don't know, but that's good.
It's a good question because it doesn't have the capacity to make people better, which is the other obscenity that movies are supposed to raise our consciousness, right?
By saying deaf people are people too, black people are people too.
Gay people are people.
The only people who aren't people, too, you'll notice, are the Jews.
We Jews are not people, too, but nonetheless.
So movies don't make people better.
So the question is, I think, hydraulically, I have to say, do movies make people worse?
I've got to say probably not.
With all of that said, do you think that the obsession that people on the right have with sort of left-leaning and bias in Hollywood, do you think that's overstated?
Because if it turns out that culture doesn't really Change people's minds on various issues or play into politics all that much.
Should we stop worrying about the sort of movies that we see quite so much?
Or should we kind of let it go?
Or is it something that the right has a reason to be obsessed with and upset about?
Well, what are you going to do about it?
I mean, what concerns me is blacklisting in Hollywood.
Because, you know, I've been in show business for 50 years and most people in my family are in show business.
And I don't know what their politics are, but I know that I get tales all the time of, and people come up to me on the street, and they'll say, "Oh, Mr. Mamet," and they'll whisper.
They'll say, "You know, I read your book." Man, that's sick.
I mean, because everybody who's not above the line, which is to say a featured player in Hollywood, is in the closet if they're a conservative because they'll lose their job.
Yep.
And I wrote a 400-page book, actually, specifically about this.
It was very funny.
I went into all of these producers in town wearing a Harvard Law baseball cap with the last name Shapiro, and they obviously assumed that I was on the left.
And then I would ask them questions about whether they discriminated against conservatives in Hollywood.
And they said, absolutely.
Yeah, absolutely we'll fire people.
We'll try to make sure that nobody can get a job if they're on the other side of the aisle.
Here's my theory.
My theory is that because the left has taken over the commanding heights of culture, because they've basically decided they're going to sneer down their nose at everybody who disagrees with them, the entire middle of the country, that because of that, the right has responded by saying, we're going to respond politically.
We're going to take over the politics of the country.
In response to you, because we're so angry, we can't take over Hollywood, but what we can do is vote.
We can definitely vote.
We can get out there and we can vote our people in, and then the left responds to those votes by getting even more angry and making the culture even more degraded.
It used to be that there was a common culture we all shared back in the 1950s where people only had three channels or two channels, and we all watched the same sort of stuff, and we all watched the same sort of movies.
There was a common background to our culture, and now the culture has fragmented, but is essentially to the left.
And people have responded to that left-leaning culture with a right-wing politics.
Do you think that there is any hope that culture is infiltrated by conservatives anytime soon?
Or that we come back together?
Do you think the political split is just going to get worse, exacerbated by culture?
That's a good question.
I don't know.
I mean, I'm not that concerned about Hollywood culture.
I'm very, very concerned about education.
But there seems to be, maybe I'm crazy, a little bit of groundswell under the pre-millennials of saying, wait a second, let me think about this.
You know, I don't want to have my head stuffed full of trash.
I don't know.
I always thought as I get older that it's not that people change, but rather that they die so that My generation, you know, one generation passes away, another generation comes up.
But the earth, in spite of global warming, ha ha, endures forever.
So there's a new generation that's coming out of the center of the country and out of younger people, and we're going to have a different Supreme Court.
And eventually, the people on the left have to stop screaming.
I mean, I don't know what their program for this wonderful country is, other than hatred of Donald Trump.
That's not a program.
It is an amazing thing.
I mean, you and I were having lunch, sort of brunch, over in Santa Monica area, and we were sitting there, and I've observed this to friends, that we were sitting there, and it's beautiful.
I mean, it's a really nice restaurant, and all the light's streaming in.
I'm having a Coke, and you're having lunch, and everybody around is having $200 bottles of Chardonnay, sitting there, playing with their iPhones in the most prosperous, freest country in the history of the world.
And if we had taken a poll of the room, people would have thought that we are living in the shadow of looming tyranny, When in reality, we're living as close to a heavenly existence as is possible to live on this earth.
If you plunked somebody out from 1900 and plunked them down right here, aside from the general lack of values, I think that those people would look around and go, wait a second, if I have a baby now, I can expect that baby to live till 80 years old.
If I have a kid right now, I don't have to worry about that kid dying in infancy, and I'm going to survive childbirth.
And yet, here we are sitting in the richest area of the richest neighborhood in the country, and everybody, if you would pull the room, They would think that we were living in Weimar, Germany and the whole thing's about to collapse.
Well, they're enjoying it.
I mean, God bless them, you know.
But as they say, people who don't believe in something will believe in anything.
Here's what I think.
You go to the newsstand.
I was watching, walking past the newsstand today, Newsweek magazine.
The terrible news is on the cover is a picture of Betsy DeVos, right, who devoted her life and her fortune to education.
And it says, Betsy DeVos' War on Teachers.
Right?
That's the bad news.
The good news is Newsweek magazine is now this thin.
Right?
The week before is Donald Trump, you know, looking down at a child who's weeping, you know, a phony together photo montage.
That's the bad news.
The good news is Time Magazine is now that thin.
There's now three people who subscribe to the New York Times, and I think two of them have parrots.
So things are changing.
Now you're optimistic for the future of the country, or do you think that... Yeah, I feel incredibly, you know, somebody said a long time ago, they said no democracy survives more than 300 years.
So I think that this new shift I mean, I'm a little more pessimistic than you, just because I feel like the pendulum swings pretty far in this country, and it's swung from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, which means that it's going to swing back even further to the left the next time around, just because the Democratic Party, by default, has made itself into a Democratic Socialist Party.
Kind of a European Democratic Socialist Party.
And so when the pendulum swings, it's going to swing back toward a Bernie Sanders or an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, at least temporarily.
And that's not good for the country.
I don't think that there are a lot of substantive conversations being had because people are so angry at each other.
And I do think that has to do with a lack of a common base of values.
It sounds like when you were growing up, you were growing up with the feeling that despite all the corruption in Chicago, if you worked hard, you could get ahead.
And it was actually your obligation as a decent human being to work hard and make something of yourself.
I feel like there are entire generations of people in this country who have been raised on the premise that America is actually a terrible place that is seeking to put its boot on your throat, and that anyone who proclaims that America is good is a perpetuator of this evil system.
That's true, but all these generations who were raised in the bubble, I don't think Starbucks can open outlets sufficiently enough to keep pace with that growing population.
So what are they going to do for a living after their parents die and they're sitting on the couch and working as a barista?
I don't get it.
Well, that's the big question, and I do wonder, you know, whether these folks have a skill set.
Well, they don't.
I mean, that's the other thing that gets me.
I have a lot of kids.
I mean, I want to go live in a shoe with the old woman.
That's how many kids I have.
But we talk a lot, and I talk to them, and some of them experience the great joy of doing something for a living.
Yeah, but I don't know that there are that many people in the United States who actually see that.
Maybe I'm the pessimist here, but I see a lot of people in the United States who see work as something to be avoided.
They attribute all of their stress to work.
Work is always a bad thing.
When they talk about things in their life that they want to get over, it's work.
For me, my goal is to work until I die, because that's usually how it works.
The minute you retire, you're gone.
So, my belief is sort of the belief from the book of Genesis, which is that you are put on the earth to cultivate it, and the minute you stop cultivating it, there's no reason for you to be here anymore.
But I think that there are a lot of people who actually believe that they are put here on earth for leisure time and enjoyment, and the more that we require of you, the harder you have to work.
That's an inherent flaw in the country.
According to Bernie Sanders' logic, we're so rich, why should anybody have to work?
Well, Bernie, I think I met him in the old days because I spent a lot of time about the same age overlapping in north central Vermont.
I don't think he's ever worked a day in his life.
Literally.
He hasn't.
I mean, he was kicked out of a commune for not working enough when he was in Vermont.
Legitimately, it's an actual thing that happened and now he owns a lake house, right?
So it's a great country where you can never work a day in your life and have a lake house where you vacation with Bill de Blasio.
Well, the question is, which the young won't address, is where does the money come from?
They say, from the government.
Well, all the government can do is either tax you or steal it from you, or waste it, or spend money on either things that everybody needs but nobody wants to pay for, or things that nobody wants.
Those are the only two things the government can spend the money on.
So the young person doesn't say, where does the money come from?
I mean, what I worry about, I'm not sure that we have a problem of economics as so much as, you know, a lot of folks on the left think it's a problem of redistributionism in the economic system and all this.
I really don't think that's the problem.
I think we do have a problem of virtue and heart.
I agree.
I think there's a giant hole in the middle of the American soul that has been carved there by 40, 50 years of dependence on government and a belief that There is no higher calling for you, that your job on this earth is basically to experience the most pleasure possible and then die.
And I don't know what replaces that other than a return to some sort of centralizing values.
Well, I don't know either, except that I have a difficult time controlling myself.
I mean, I want to I mean, I'm not talking about compelling people, but I do think that the appeal of a moral lifestyle has always been a hard sell, and it's a particularly hard sell when there are no consequences to immorality.
Well, there's a very good book on the subject, you know, which is called the Torah.
You know, what's the consequences for morality?
It's a, it's a plague or 40 years in the desert or, I don't know, think twice about it.
So let's talk about your Jewish philosophy because you came from, you said, a red diaper doper baby kind of background.
So your parents were secular Jews?
They were very, very secular Jews, and they went to Sunday school, and I mean, let alone a Talish, you never saw a Yarmulke.
I mean, someone who went to Yarmulke, there was like these Episcopal Reformed temples that would have been lynched.
And I thought a lot about it, and two things occurred to me.
One is that Arthur Hertzberg, in his wonderful book, The Jews in America, talks about the Ashkenazi abandonment, that at least a quarter, maybe more than a quarter of the men who came over abandoned their wives.
They just couldn't take it.
Which is a huge secret among the Ashkenazi community.
And it happened to my dad.
And his dad came over from Russian Poland, just left them.
And so my grandmother's single woman, hardly spoke English, raised two kids during the Depression.
But if you said to your dad, my dad, oh, you know, your dad abandoned you, he'd say, no, no, no, he didn't abandon me, and I always knew where he was.
So, as Hertzberg says, it was the father who took the kids to show.
So if the father's not there, who's taking the kids to show?
The other thing about assimilationist reform was these young people wanted to be American.
They didn't want to be European, they wanted to be American.
Being Jews was tough.
And they encountered a lot of anti-Semitism in those days.
And then, if that weren't bad enough, Europe killed all the Jews.
Right?
So if there's no upside to being a Jew, which is Judaism, and the Torah, and the wonderful Yiddishkeit, all there is is downside.
The people in my Episcopal Reform upbringing went to temple the same way one might go to the dentist.
They say, I don't want to, but I know it's good for me.
And you see that today in a lot of the Reform synagogues around here.
You know, people will sit there, you know, as if they're watching paint dry, and nod and nod, and then give all their money to the building fund.
So what do you get out of it?
I mean, you obviously grew up in that environment.
What made you kind of return to the value of the Torah?
Was it allegiance to the past?
Was it inherent value in the document?
What is it that you like about the Torah?
Because obviously that's, again, a hard pitch for a lot of young people today.
We're becoming an increasingly secular society.
Fewer young people are going to church than ever before in American history.
Is that true?
Are you sure?
Yeah.
Even among the evangelicals and the fundamentalists?
Well, no.
I mean, among evangelicals and fundamentalists, it's still a large number.
But overall, the number of young people who are going to church has been steadily declining for years.
For Jews, it's always been like eight of us.
Among the Orthodox, it still remains high, but everywhere else in the Jewish community, it's very low.
What is the strongest pitch for taking the Bible seriously, or at least the values of the Bible seriously?
Well, people should read.
I mean, the only thing wrong with the Bible is, as we used to say, there's not enough pictures.
Right?
And more pictures and there's somebody, you know, who's going to take that idea and run with it.
But the wonderful thing about the Bible is, my teacher and rabbi, Mordecai Finley, says, people say, is this what happened?
He says, no, it's not what happened.
It's what always happens.
So this is a magnificent compilation of folk tales and literature and how-to and humor.
And it's just, it's the history of the West.
And if you said this was, you know, all the Jews they used to call about the Judists, right, or the Buddha Jews, right, they want to become Buddhists, they want to become Wiccans, they want, because they're searching for meaning, of course they are.
But there's a lot, the meaning is right there, it's the history of our people, and it's what made America what it is.
Because all of these people, they read two books in their life, a lot of them, they read the Bible, they read the collected works of Shakespeare.
And they came up with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
So I was getting married to my wonderful wife, Rebecca, and she said, oh, we have a Jewish wedding.
And she was raised by a physicist and a yoga teacher in Scotland.
So people thought religion was nonsense, but a generation back, a lot of them were Jewish.
She said, we have to have a Jewish wedding.
And I said, okay, why?
Because.
So we found this great rabbi, Rabbi Larry Kushner, who's now in San Francisco.
We started going to his show in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and at one point he said, he said, oh, he said, you guys should really learn Hebrew.
We said, oh, no, no, we'll learn Hebrew and foreign language, blah, blah, blah.
He said, no, no, no.
Biblical Hebrew is simple.
He said, you know, on a scale of difficulty, if English is an eight and Hungarian is a nine and Mandarin Chinese is a ten, Hebrew is a two.
So he taught us Hebrew.
We started reading the Bible in Hebrew.
We said, my God, what a great What a great gift!
I'm actually going right back.
No one has to interpret it to me.
I'm going right back to the actual word that was written 3,000 years ago.
I think what you say about the impact of biblical kind of foundations on Western civilization, that's one of the reasons why I don't think it's the people reject the Bible and therefore they reject kind of the American tradition and the Western tradition.
I think they reject the Western tradition and the American tradition and therefore they reject the Bible.
They don't like how America turned out, and they're upset about things as they are, and so they say, well, then I don't like any of the foundations for America either.
And it seems like they're angry at the current status.
It's not that they decide they're going to be secular and they don't believe in the Bible.
It's that they decide that America has too many flaws, that it was based on a bad system, and that bad system was based in turn on the Bible, and therefore we have to be against the Bible if we want to build something better, which is a sort of Marxist take on history, I think.
Well, yeah, I mean, and also, I mean, I haven't been to a lot of, I haven't been to church in decades, but I go to a few synagogues around the world, and most of the reformed synagogues, I mean, I'd rather drop bowling balls on my feet, you know?
Why?
You say, why?
I don't get it.
There's nothing there.
So, there are some wonderful people among those, again, I'll mention my rabbi, who's An absolute genius.
So we go every week and he talks about the Torah and talks for a couple hours on the Saturday.
He's an absolute genius.
He says things that you never thought about before, because he's devoted his life to trying to understand that document.
Well, understanding history, I think, as an Orthodox Jew, you know, somebody who takes it very seriously, understanding history and understanding where we came from, I think if you don't understand that history, you're not going to understand, as you say, America, and you're not going to understand what makes America a wonderful place and how we got to this place in civilization in the first place.
It's easy to pick off the fruit of the tree after having burned down the trunk, which is, I think, what so many people are trying to do right now.
I want to ask you, you mentioned earlier that you think the writing in Hollywood, the quality of it has declined.
Number one, why do you think that is?
And number two, if you had to name five movies that are not your own, that you just love, what would those movies be? - Well, Galaxy Quest, of course, the greatest movie ever made.
And of course, I love the Super Troopers.
I see they come out with Super Troopers 2.
I'm afraid to see it because I've seen Gone with the Wind 2.
I mean, you can't do better than Gone with the Wind.
The Godfather is, you know, I think one of the great gems of world, of film literature.
And I like The Killing by Stanley Kubrick and Doddsworth by William Wyler.
There was a little marriage of convenience between...
So the cinematograph, the kinematograph started out as a carnival arcade, right?
You put a nickel in and it showed you a couple of pictures, and the earliest pictures were pictures of a train coming toward you, or people walking down the thing.
We'd go, ooh-ah, ooh-ah, they were selling an experience.
Then, they started, as films in the late teens went from being a one-reeler to being a full-length movie, they said, Jesus Christ, you know, We need a plot.
How are we going to do a plot?
We'll have a story.
So they started filming stories, right?
And they started going, they went to a lot of novels, they went a lot to the theater, they started doing stories.
And then when sound came in 1928 like that, they said, okay, I get it now.
We're basically, this is going to be a filmed Then as movies progressed, some people got the idea, wait a second, this is a whole new vocabulary.
We get to tell the story in pictures and we get to have dialogue.
And so you got the golden age of Hollywood, you know, in the late 30s into the 40s of some magnificent filmmakers who really understood The capacity of film as a new medium, and for some reason, the suits weren't paying attention, right?
So a lot of good stuff got made.
Then as film became more and more big business, the suits took over.
And they said, wait a second, we have a franchise, we can't put this franchise in jeopardy by having a plot.
So if you look at the late 50s into the 60s, American movies, and into the 70s, versus European movies, there's nothing very much happening.
You know, it's the big franchise, and it's Doris Day, as opposed to Sophia Loren.
So, okay, so now things start degenerating, degenerating, degenerating, They took all the back lots.
They just did this at Fox Lake five years ago.
They had the last back lot, I think, left on the west side.
And they tore it down to put in parking structures.
For who?
For whom?
I mean, you look at a movie now.
If it lists 18 producers, that's not out of the ordinary.
I've been in the business 50 years.
I have no idea what a producer does.
Zero.
Who are these producers?
Are there people who are in charge of making sure that we're going to keep the audience rather than people who get a kick out of making a movie?
So here's a question because you mentioned sort of the 30s and 40s and maybe early 50s is sort of the golden era of movies and that of course is not just a common opinion.
I think that it's pretty well accepted.
How much do you think that has to do with going back to a point you made earlier?
About the fact that right now every movie seems to be very reliant on sex and violence and basically from 1933 to 1960 the Hays Code was in place thanks to the Catholic Legion of Decency saying we don't want to see any of your sex and violence and so you had to operate around the rules.
One of the theories has basically been that when there are all these rules in place with regard to writing that actually in some ways makes the writing better because you actually have to write around all the stuff that otherwise would be obvious.
What do you make of that?
That's a very good question.
I really like the pre-code movies, as everybody does, because they're rougher.
You know, the code comes in and all of these, you know, lechers and whores and pimps and blah blah, who then has now ruled Hollywood, said, oh, I'm going to get on my own high horse so I can get out of here and snort some coke and go have some illicit sex.
There's a great energy to the pre-cut movies, but I don't know if that's a causal relationship or just things got too rich that people could not afford.
I'll tell you a story.
A guy comes to me.
He says, From the big agency, right?
He's trying to lure me to the big agency.
And he says, listen, he says, we want you to write this half-hour television show.
And he gives me the idea.
I say, thanks, that's a pretty good idea.
I don't want to write it.
He says, listen, you don't understand.
He says, if you write this and it goes into syndication after 10 years, you could get $10 million.
He said, how long would it take you to write a half-hour television show?
I said, it'll take me about a half an hour.
He said, think about it.
I said, I am thinking about it.
I said, if I get $10 million a half hour, that's $20 million an hour, right?
That's $800 million a week.
$800 million a week.
That's $4 billion a year if I take two weeks off.
He says, if you're making that kind of money, you couldn't afford to take two weeks off.
So what do you make of the changes to the industry right now?
So, you know, the industry is obviously fragmenting.
A lot of film is getting made not only abroad, but also by the various independent producers.
And now it's being aired on Netflix.
The movie model itself seems to be collapsing.
It's very difficult for a star to even hold a film anymore.
Stars don't have the same sort of cachet in the United States that they used to.
Are you excited about the future of where film is going?
Or do you think that TV is where it's at?
Where do you think the entertainment industry is going?
Which trend lines should we be following?
Well, the only thing I'm excited about my latter years is taking a nap.
So I'm going to let things go on without me, as they will.
But if you look at the 20th century, entertainment and the theater was always changing, right?
Vaudeville came in and the people on stage looked down at Vaudeville.
And then movies came in, and the people on stage looked down at movies, and so it was the second tier of stage actors who went into the movies.
And the same thing happened in radio.
Radio came in, and the second tier of the stage people went into radio, and then television came in, and those radio people plus the second tier again From movies went into television.
They became the huge stars as people who basically see players.
And every subsequent iteration of technology drove the other one, you know, we don't have much theater anymore, you know, except for Mamma Mia.
And we don't have any vaudeville anymore.
Nobody listens to the radio anymore.
And broadcast television is all over, right?
And so now movies are getting to be all over.
Okay, things change.
So now we're going into the, we are definitely into the electronic age.
The people have been saying for 30 years, wait until the first person figures out how to monetize Home video.
And now it's here.
So I asked you earlier about your favorite films.
So what are your favorite plays?
Because obviously you're a playwright as well.
Who do you think are the, you mentioned Pinter and Chekhov before, but who are your favorite playwrights and favorite plays, if you had to name your top five?
Well, I don't like going to the theater because there's no popcorn.
So the thing about going to the movies, which is really great is, you know, if you really like popcorn, I love popcorn.
So what do you do?
You eat down to the bottom of the popcorn and you start crunching the kernels because you can't, because it's the current, it's the, it's the great human dilemma, right?
I want some more popcorn, but I don't want to shame myself by going back to the popcorn thing again.
So I'm getting, so what happens is the last little bit of kernel, you get that little thing stuck in your teeth, you know, And so do you spend the rest of the movie picking that out so that the movie doesn't have to be that interesting?
Okay, well, you know, it's really a pleasure to have you here.
And I'm so glad that you could make the time.
Folks, if you've not read David Mamet's latest book, the book is Chicago.
You should definitely go check it out.
It really is.
It really moves.
I mean, it's a book that definitely will keep you awake all the way until the end of it.
David, thanks so much for stopping by.
I really appreciate it.
You're welcome.
You're welcome.
The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.
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