David Mamet scathingly dismantles Hollywood’s "brain-dead liberals," tracing his political awakening from a rabbi’s civility lessons to rejecting leftist dogma after progressive backlash on his 2003 Village Voice essay. He brands studio executives as parasitic bureaucrats, praising The Sound of Freedom’s success over woke propaganda, and mocks the industry’s exploitative contracts—like his clash with Harvey Weinstein—while championing independent films like A Peanut Butter Falcon. Now avoiding studios, he’s scripting a Hunter Biden project, insisting art must defy conformity, not cater to it. Mamet’s rebellion proves creativity thrives outside ideological and corporate chains. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview.
Today I'm interviewing David Mamet, and I want to warn you before we start that I am a fan.
I was, you know, I love the theater, and I was at one of the early, the early production of Glenn Gary Glenn Ross.
It opened in England, but I saw its early American opening with Joe Montaigne, Speed the Plow that had Madonna in it, and Ron Silver and Montaigne again.
All the Anna I Saw it in London, just terrific, terrific plays.
He's also, of course, a very accomplished screenwriter with two of my favorite pictures, The Untouchables and The Verdict.
And he's a director as well with House of Games.
His new book is about Hollywood.
It's called Everywhere and Oink Oink, An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of 40 Years in Hollywood.
And I'm about 70, between 70 and 100 pages into it.
And it's the best of his books I've read.
It is absolutely hilarious, and I highly recommend it.
And just one other note, which is I have to say I owe David personally because many years ago, maybe 20 years ago, he wrote a piece that shocked the literary world in The Village Voice, announcing that he was no longer a brain-dead liberal.
And this made me so delighted that I wrote an op-ed in the LA Times celebrating his decision.
And Andrew Breitbart, who I had never met, called me up and said, you are the only person in the conservative movement who knows how important it is that David Mamet wrote that column.
And that was how Andrew and I became friends.
David, thank you so much for coming on.
It's a genuine pleasure to see you.
You're very welcome.
Glad to be here.
What's up?
So I'm loving the book.
The book is really hilarious.
But before I get to that, I do want to ask you, go back and ask you, what was it that woke you up to leftism?
What was it that changed your mind?
Well, it was the leftists that woke me up because at that point, whatever the hell that was, my rabbi was saying we have to have political civility.
He says it's more important than anything.
He says, we live in a democracy.
People have different views.
If they didn't have different views, we would live in a dictatorship.
They have different views and we adjudicate them by an electoral process.
He says, we have to be civil.
And he said that here's what the Jewish idea of political civility is.
I state your position such that you say, yes, that is my position.
You state my position such that I say yes, that is my position.
Now our positions are clear.
We understand that.
Now we proceed to facts.
We say, okay, since we each have stated each other's position, we know where we stand.
Let's bring forward facts.
Do we agree that this is a fact?
Yes.
Okay, that's the basis for discussion.
Do we not agree that this is a fact?
No, then that's off the table.
So the only things we bring into the discussion are things which we communally assent to as being a fact.
Now we can discuss the facts, right?
We've met upon the level and we're going to part on the square.
We want to discuss the facts.
That's called political civility.
So I wrote an article for the LA Times.
I checked that.
I know it was for a newspaper, actually.
It was for the Village Voice called Political Civility.
And as part of the article, I said, you know, I'm not even civil to myself.
I said, for years, I've been referring to myself as a brain-dead liberal.
That's incivility.
My position is my own.
I'm entitled to it.
I don't have to beat myself up.
So the Village Voice takes this article and there's a scarehead that takes up the whole front page, why I am no longer a brain-dead liberal.
So at that point, The people I thought were my friends turned into acquaintances, and the people I thought were my acquaintances turned into enemies, right?
And my enemies turned into fiends.
And I realized that we are in a huge political crisis in this country, which threatens the very integrals, if I may, of American democracy.
And they said, you know, thanks for all the plays and thanks for being so forthcoming.
There's just one thing, f you.
So that was the beginning of, I had to look around and say, hey, wait a second, how long has this been going on?
Right?
It's like Sarah Silverman.
She got kicked to the curb and she said, I can't remember what for.
Oh, yeah, for putting on blackface when she was six years old.
And she went, weep, weep, weep.
It's my own party.
It's my party.
Can't kick me out.
And I thought, well, Sarah, you know, welcome to the world.
Your party just did kick you.
Yep, it can kick you out because the left is a party of fascism.
And you're going to have to sign on to absolutely every proposition or you're out.
And so I said, oh, okay.
I get it.
And I understand.
You know, I read the Torah.
I read history.
These things happen, right?
It's called the death of a civilization and the necessity to stand up.
So from that point, did I go kicking and screaming?
Yeah.
You know, Moses went kicking and screaming.
Jesus went kicking and screaming, right?
Everybody went kicking and screaming, you know, except for Buddha who put his hand down underneath the poetry.
And, you know, he had a weight problem.
He probably just wanted to sit around.
So you told me once, we were at a dinner, a Breitbart dinner in Hollywood, and you told me that after this happened, the New York Times showed up at your next play and gave you a bad review twice.
Has any of that gotten any better?
No, f them.
Pardon me, but I'm going to speak English from now on.
Listen, the New York Times is disturber, right?
It's the house organ of fascism.
So the New York Times was the Torah of my Jewish youth.
Yes.
Of everybody's Jewish youth.
If it wasn't in the New York Times, it was the voice of reason.
It was the voice of true liberality.
It was the voice of culture.
And it may have been that to a certain extent at one point, but it's not anymore.
So I wrote this hysterically funny play, Nathan Lanesdale's done called November, about a president who's got the lowest approval ratings in history.
And he's running for office, but he hasn't had any money.
So it's almost Thanksgiving.
And they come to him and say, well, we'll give you $100,000 if you pardon a turkey.
You always pardon a turkey every year.
And he says, well, this year they have two turkeys because last year the turkey got sick.
There's a main turkey and alternate turkey.
He says, well, then they're going to have to give me $200,000.
$100,000 to Turkey is the going price.
So the turkey guy shows up and the president says, Welcome.
You're going to have to pay me $200,000.
And the turkey says, the heck with you.
He says, your numbers are lower than Gandhi's cholesterol.
You're a loser.
We don't need your help.
So the president gets mad and he says, okay.
He says, I want $100 million on my plate by breakfast tomorrow.
I'm going to pardon every turkey in the United States.
So this play is hysterically funny.
Nathan Lane gives the best performance ever.
And it's curiously apolitical.
It's a play about politicians rather than about politics.
And the New York Times gives it this terrible, terrible review.
And then the thing comes out of the village voice.
Come back the next week to give it an even worse review.
So just to make sure you understood yeah yeah so oh, you know okay, you know, let's give it, as we used to say, give it a name.
What's going on here?
So that was my beginning of a little bit of a um, a political awakening.
And, as I say, you know I, I went kicking, I didn't want to go.
Realizing the Power of Stories00:13:52
I said i'm having a good time, you know, making a couple of bucks, and I got a nice wife and family and like that I, I really don't want to go around with everybody hating me.
But then I remembered, you know, my dad was in uh, the ARMY during World War Ii.
My grandfather was in the NAVY during World War One.
My grandfather was an immigrant.
My dad was born right off the boat.
The American system allowed them to thrive and my question was, what did I ever give back to United States Of America?
The answer is, you know nothing.
I wrote plays for a living, but blah blah, blah.
It's my responsibility, who?
The question was, who's going to bell the cat, right?
So that's the question that that, that that's a, that's a moral question.
And I said, you know, i'm a big fat sinner sure, I am right but um, somebody's got to bell the cat and i've been mouthing off, for you know, for all these years about this and that and the next thing uh, I guess it's me.
So I I, I hope I do have been to whatever extent fulfilling my responsibilities as a great beneficiary of American democracy, which is to say of the sacrifices of men and women over 250 years, and especially of my grandparents, who came here uh, not speaking the language, with nothing.
Uh, and here I am.
Do you, do you still get bad reviews all the time, or do you?
Can you get around?
I don't read, I haven't read reviews for you why, you know?
It's like how many bites of tainted fish do you need?
So, and somebody's, somebody I gotta tell you this because I just learned this somebody said this to me the other day.
He said, other people's opinions are none of your business.
I said oh, that's wisdom.
Okay yeah, I like it.
Yeah, so the book Everywhere In Oink Oink, an embittered, dyspeptic and accurate report of 40 years in Hollywood, is in fact an embittered and dyspeptic report and absolutely hilarious.
But I I couldn't help thinking, I mean, you've had actually a great Hollywood career.
Why are you embittered and dyspeptic?
I'm actually not.
If you read the book, it's full of it's.
It's nothing but gags.
It's nothing but cartoons by me.
I've had the best you know Hollywood.
Don't owe me nothing.
Right?
My career in Hollywood has been the ability to um make movies.
Right, that's the payoff.
It's like Ingersoll said, the battle is the payoff.
Ralph Ingersoll in World War II.
So the battle's the payoff.
I've had a great time, right?
No, it's one of the wonderful things about actually being in the movie business, which is to say actually making movies, whether you're writing them, directing them, costuming them, or in pre-production, is you get to hate the people in the suits because they're idiots.
And as I say in the book, you know, God put them on the earth.
So obviously God put them here for a reason.
I would wish that the reason wasn't be to up my films.
But the thing about making a movie is you need an idea and a camera.
That's all you need.
You can make a movie on, if you've got an idea, whether you do or not, you can make a movie on this little iPhone, which is, if you got a great idea, know what you're doing, can be as good as Lawrence of Arabia.
That's all you need.
The people who made the original films, they didn't have technology that was near this good, right, that we have in our pocket.
Also, on the conservative side, what the people realized is that Hollywood, like any organism, what's an organism's best trick?
Do you know what it is?
Reproduction.
Dying.
Dying.
Okay.
Yeah, that's an organism's, you know, organisms are a one-trick pony.
You know, we look at the Mayfly or we look at the Black Widow Spinner.
You know, we reproduce and die to make room for new life, whether that is the cells in our body or that is the United States of America or that is the movie business.
So the cause of a boom is a bust, and the cause of a bust is a boom, right?
Elevator operators are dealing in stocks in 1929, some of them getting very rich.
Of course, the stock market's going to crash.
So the movie business became so incredibly powerful and had such a monopoly on our attention that the tail started wagging the dog and the bureaucrats started saying, oh, the bureaucrats are there just like in government to keep their jobs, to browbeat their inferiors and to kiss the ass of their superiors.
That's what bureaucrats do, right?
Whatever the supposed point of the organization is, is ancillary, right?
The bureaucrats in Washington don't care about the United States of America.
They care about their ass.
That's why they're bureaucrats.
If they cared about the United States, they'd join the military, you know, or get a job.
So similarly, in the movie business, the bureaucrats who there are parking lots, huge parking lots all over Los Angeles.
Those parking lots used to be the back lots of the studios.
The back lots were where they made bunches of movies.
They made so many movies that they just had a standing set of a cowboy town, of a New England village, of a French cathedral.
They just churned out the movies.
Now those parking lots, now those back lots are parking lots, right, for bureaucrats who spawn bureaucrats.
You know, they're like cockroaches.
They give birth, they give birth to their kind, and then their termites and they eat the house.
But so there are people on the other side who said, wait a second, duh, technology has changed again, just like technology changed and movies wiped out vaudeville.
And just like technology changed and TV wiped out radio.
So technology has changed and you can download your product.
You don't have to go through the studios.
You can download your product directly.
For example, some conservatives made a movie about Jesus with Jim Coviesel, right?
Made a lot of money.
So they said, oh, we'll make another movie.
So they made a movie with Jim Coviesel called Sound of Freedom.
It's a very, very good movie, but it's a straight up, they kidnapped this little girl.
I, as a police officer, have to get her back.
There's nothing particularly conservative about the movie at all.
It's just a damn good movie.
But what's particularly conservative is the audience who said, Lord, have mercy.
I love that movie about Jesus.
I'm going to see what you do next.
They made it for $20 million.
They made a half a billion dollars.
There's a huge audience out there that's just had it with this woke garbage.
Nobody enjoys that stuff, right?
We watch it when it's downloaded because we have no choice, right?
What's our choice?
Oh, black people who realize that white people who finally, finally come to realize that black people are people too, or straight people who finally, finally come to realize that transsexuals are people too.
Or who cares?
You know?
Nobody goes to see these movies on purpose because they just aren't enjoyable.
So what everybody is, the smart people are realizing is people want to hear stories.
Whether there's liberal or conservative, don't make any difference.
You tell them a good story, they'll show up.
So what the smart people are doing is saying to hell with the New York Times, right?
And to hell with Warner Brothers and Disney.
It's dead.
It's just dead and it stinks, right?
Let's have some fun.
And maybe in the process, we'll do some good by pleasing people.
And maybe in that process, we'll make a couple of bucks.
What could be better?
That does seem to be happening.
But you have a line in the book, Everywhere in Oinkoink.
You have the line that really struck me because conservatives complain about all the things you're talking about, the wokeness and the bad values and all the stuff, the anti-religious values.
They complain about all this, but you have this line, and I'm going to read it slightly edited so people get it.
It says, The movies today are made and advertised not to excite the natural thirst for adventure and novelty, but to satisfy the human desire for conformity.
They are no longer in the service of Eros.
I thought that was like really on point, incredibly specific.
Can you explain to me how you write a story that satisfies the human desire for conformity, what that looks like?
Oh, when you desire the story that satisfies the human desire for conformity, what you're doing, you know, look, it's possible to make wonderful films in the service of fascism.
Lenny Riefensloff certainly did it, right?
She was like the prime example of a genius who turned her genius to evil.
There's also the Soviet tradition of me and my tractor, right?
I am in love with my tractor.
I am in love with my tractor family.
Oh my goodness, there's a bad worker who's not working as hard as he should.
Doesn't he realize that these tractors, you can't do the wheat.
I will help him.
I will bring him to a sense of his own worth, that his own worth comes through service.
What nonsense.
Listen, if you the worth of a story is the same as the worth of a joke told at the bar or a story told to a kid at bedtime, right?
It taps into the deepest human desire to share an experience that's not rational, right?
Some people used to call it religion, right?
But the same thing is the same, the joke is not rational, but it's true.
Here's the difference, right?
A penguin, a nun, and an octopus walk into a bar, okay?
Right?
So now you're listening.
Yeah.
Tell me.
It's not rational, but you say, I get it.
Something interesting is going to happen that's going to reveal something to me.
I put myself in this guy's hands, right?
It's not rational.
It's true, just like the Bible, right?
Well, people say, well, wait a second.
Wait a second.
You're telling me that this, quote, supreme being actually parted the Red Sea?
You can't part the Red Sea.
I can't part the Red Sea, right?
I could part the Red Sea.
No, I don't believe it.
I don't believe you can part the Red Sea.
I say, okay, you don't believe you can part the Red Sea, but you believe that the solar ice caps are melting and so that we're all going to both freeze to death and burn to a cinder at the same time.
How does that work?
We're deeply irrational people.
And what drama does and what Huber does especially is it allows us to enjoy our own irrationality and say, I guess I, wow, you know, we're all here together, right?
We're the craziest monkeys that ever lived, and we're all here together, right?
So we see Hamlet and they say, oh my God, it says ghosts running around.
It says ghost running on.
People don't say, excuse me, ghosts don't exist.
You say, yeah, well, I'm going to watch that story.
And because we're taken out of ourselves, we enjoy the story and we're moved to laughter or tears, right?
But the wokeness puts us right back on ourselves.
So, yes, I agree on that.
People, they puff up their chest, don't they?
But they leave.
Yes, my God, I understand that those people are people too.
And the bad, bad people, the haters, bibbity-bobbity-boo.
What nonsense.
But, you know, you could a joke at a bar or people shoot in the breeze or going to an AA meeting or something like that.
They're sharing their humanity, which is so far beyond and so much more important than their political position.
Okay, I get it.
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Paying for Performance00:11:24
I mean, you worked on The Untouchables, just a terrific movie.
You're working with Sean Connery, you know, a great cast.
Was that your first movie, or was it House of Cards?
I can't remember.
The first movie I wrote was The Postman Always Rings Twice.
The Postman Always Rings Twice for Jack Nicholson.
So, how was the experience of working of doing The Untouchables?
It was great.
Yeah.
I wrote it and they took it away and they made the movie.
And that's generally been my experience of working on a movie.
I write them a drip, a draft, and either they say once in a while, they say thank you, or they generally say, This wasn't what I expected.
And I say, Well, that's why you're paying me, you idiot.
Right?
If it was what you expected, you could have, right?
I had that, I went around with Harvey Weinstein at one point, and he wanted me to write something for him.
I met with him a few times, and he said, Okay, he said, I said, Well, okay, now it's time to meter to drop.
You know, you want to engage me, talk to my people, and I'll write you an outline.
He said, Well, you want me to pay, he says, you want me to pay you before you write the outline.
I say, Yes, because that's the deal.
He says, Well, what if I don't like the outline?
I say, Well, I'm going to do the best job I can.
You know who I am.
You've seen my work.
You're capable of making a decision.
You might be right or you might be wrong, but you can, I would think, reasonably conclude that you could trust me to do the best I can.
And that's what you're paying me for.
He says, Yes, but what if I don't, what if, but if you don't do the best you can, I said, well, so what you're saying is you think I'm a thief.
And he kind of made a noise like, well, I said, well, I said, well, then you write the and left because that's the only important word in Hollywood is no, right?
Because what you're going to do right down the line is negotiate a contract, right?
Which, from my point of view, is a pledge for specific performance.
And from the point of view of the studios, is the worst case scenario.
Because what's going to happen is they don't care about the contract.
They're going to say, oh, okay, you're a human being.
And I have 25 lawyers each paying half a million dollars to here to defend me.
Would you like to sue me?
The answer is from bitter experience, no.
So what's going to happen is if you have a long career in Hollywood in the old days, you're going to get screwed, blued, and tattooed, right?
If you're a young person of either sex, people are either going to try to get you into bed or get you into bed, right?
People are going to try to get as much work as they can out of you for nothing.
They're going to lie to you.
It's a tough business.
Once in a while, you're going to meet magnificent people, right, who say thank you and who you would die for, right?
Because they treat you with respect.
That's going to be a rare occurrence.
That may be a rare occurrence in any business.
And to have a situation beyond that, which is actually not transactional, which is, I say, of course, you need to get paid.
And of course, I need the script, but I so enjoy working with you.
That's worth anything, right?
Whether or not you get paid.
Are there movies that you have written but not directed that you think are really good?
That's a very good question.
Yeah, I thought Ronin was a wonderful movie.
I thought The Edge was a wonderful movie.
There's a bunch of movies that I directed that I did, that I wrote that I didn't direct that I thought were pretty good.
Glengary Glen Ross, a superb movie Jamie Foley directed.
Yeah.
There's a bunch of them.
But not The Verdict and The Untouchables?
I love them too.
They were right.
The thing, you know, one of the wonderful things about having an overlong career in anything, especially in show business, is people come up to you and they nod and they say, you know what the best thing you ever wrote is, don't you?
And I say, yeah, the first thing I wrote, tell me, the first thing you wrote.
I say, yeah, well, thank you.
So I guess I've just been, you know, taking up electricity since then.
Thank you very, very much.
So that's the thing about reviews is that the good ones are as harmful as the bad ones, right?
The bad ones are destructive if you read them, and the good ones are destructive if you read them.
And anybody you meet who comes up to you, anything past I enjoy your work, is likely to transgress the Jewish restriction on flattery because the rabbi said flattery is theft.
What does that mean?
Oh, if I flatter someone, that means that I'm trying to get something from them, but I wouldn't get an uninflected interchange, right?
Even if that's to make them feel better, it's not my job to make them feel better.
So I say, keep your damn mouth closed, right?
Yeah.
So I'm a big theater fan, although I don't think I've seen anything really good in the theater for quite some time.
Will you go back to the theater?
Will you write for the theater again?
I'm writing for the theater all the time.
I did a play that I really loved just before COVID called The Christopher Boys Communion.
And we did that in a small theater out here.
And then during the strike, you got to love these people, right?
They went on strike and my friend Marjorie Lewis Ryan, who directed a lot of my works, terrific director, says, let's do a play.
You got anything you have?
So I had this play I wrote called Henry Johnson, and it was sitting around.
And I sent it to her.
She said, yeah, let's do it.
So I called up a bunch of people who I knew, you know, Dominic Hoffman and Chris Bauer and David Payman and Shia LaBeouf.
And so we did the play and it was really, I loved it.
She directed it.
And at the end of the limited run, it was Shia and Evan Jonikait who was playing Henry Johnson.
It was also my son-in-law.
He's my beloved son-in-law.
He's my daughter Zasha's husband.
He said, let's do a movie.
I said, well, yeah, okay, where are you going to get the money?
And he says, we'll do it for nothing.
And they just made a movie.
Shia just made a movie called A Peanut Butter Falcon.
A really good movie.
They made that movie for Jump Change.
Because you don't need a lot of money to make a movie.
You need a camera and you need to know what you're doing.
So I said, well, gosh, you know, we're going to get the money.
I don't know.
He says, the guy who funded this thing, he made 25 grand.
Well, reach out.
We'll get the money.
We'll go together.
So he made the movie.
And I'm really, really happy with the movie.
And I'm just finishing cutting it now.
And we're going to take it to conn.
And I realized, you know, it's time to stop, to get out of my COVID, the country's dying head and go back to work because I can't work in the studio system anymore because A, they don't want me.
And B, more informedly, I don't want them.
My deal has always been, you know, give me a lot of money, leave it alone, and you're free to hate it.
Or give me a little bit of money, leave it alone.
And those experiences were even more fun.
So I said, well, wait a second, we'll make this movie in a short amount of time for nothing.
I got a million of them.
I got to stack this high of stuff that I haven't done.
So I'm looking forward, God willing, and weather permitting, to doing a lot of movies.
And so these guys, so wait a second.
So these guys who did The Sound of Freedom, they came to me and they said, you want to write a movie for us?
I said, yeah, sure.
What do you got?
They said, they wanted to do a movie about Hunter Biden.
So I thought about it for a while and I said, okay.
I said, but here's what.
I said, you know, you're going to pay me a couple of bucks, nothing much.
Maybe a back end, haha.
But the deal is, you give me half of that couple of bucks now.
I give you a half.
You give me half of the other couple of books when I hand you the script and we're done.
I'm not going to call him Hunter Biden and it's not going to be a travelogue because the hardest part, the hardest, the most challenging form of drama is biography.
Because of course you have to show George Washington chopping out a cherry tree, right?
But you also have to show him taking his leave of the troops or crossing the Delaware or Valley Forge, blah, Now you're making a travelogue, right?
So I've written a few biographies as dramaists.
You have to get inside and say, what don't the people know?
So Hitchcock said, if you go into Paris, for God's sake, show them the Eiffel Tower, right?
But after you show them the Eiffel Tower, you're done, right?
You don't want to say, oh, look, there's the Madeleine over there, right?
Oh, look, that must be the Louvre.
Oh, look at all the nice people with their berets and their little loaves of things, you know, going off to their mistresses at night with poodles.
They must be French people.
Right?
So the question is: if it's not interesting, it doesn't matter if it's Hunter Biden.
And if it is interesting, it doesn't matter if it's Hunter Biden.
People don't care.
Right?
They made this movie about Lincoln, which Sally Field playing Mrs. Lincoln says to her husband, Abe, you're upset.
Is it that slavery thing?
I saw that movie, yeah.
Yeah.
So there was a book that John Steinbeck wrote called Bomber about how great it was to be a bomber pilot and a navigator.
It wasn't even the bomber pilot, it was the bombardiers on the heavy airplanes.
And Hemingway read it.
He said, I would have rather cut my arm off than have written that book.
So that's what I feel about the Lincoln thing.
I got to stop.
The book, the author is David Mamet, of course.
The book is Everywhere in Oink, Oink, an Embittered Dyspeptic, an Accurate Report of 40 years in Hollywood.
It is making me laugh out loud repeatedly.
It's great.
David, it's great talking to you, and I really look forward to seeing you.
Thank you so much.
Thanks a lot.
You know, Mammet is really an American original, terrific playwright.
I think some of his movies are really, really good.
And this book, you should definitely get it: Everywhere in Oink, Oink, an Embittered Dyspeptic, an Accurate Report of 40 years in Hollywood.
And you should definitely tune in on Friday for the Andrew Clavin Show, or else you will be clavenless.