David Mamet On Return To Cinema With Self-Distributed ‘Henry Johnson', State Of The Industry & J.K. Rowling-Inspired Play He's Writing For Rebecca Pidgeon
We kick off the 2025 summer season of the Crew Call podcast with a candid, wide-ranging conversation with Pulitzer-winning playwright and two-time Oscar nominee David Mamet.
Mamet has directed a new movie, Henry Johnson, his first in 12 years, based on his 2023 play that premiered in Venice, CA. The pic, which is self-distributed and available to rent digitally, follows the title character (played by Mamet's son-in-law, Evan Jonigkeit), who after helping a friend out becomes collateral damage and complicit in his sex crime affairs. This leads Henry Johnson to jail. He looks to authority figures he encounters along the way including his eventual cellmate, Gene (Shia LaBeouf). Henry's journey leads him down a road of manipulation and ethical uncertainty.
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We talk with Mamet about the origins of Henry Johnson, LaBeouf's sublime performance (and how Mamet doesn't believe in method actors), the state of the motion picture industry and how streaming is killing it, and his wisdom when it comes to self-distribution. 'Anyone can make a movie and distribute it and take their chances,' says Mamet. 'Your chances of people seeing that movie are not less than your chances of going to offices in Hollywood for 10 years to convince some f*cking idiot to look at your work.' Also, it's been a while since we've seen Mamet pen a big studio movie, ala his previous event movies such as The Untouchables, Hannibal, The Verdict and Ronin. Why? Well, when studios want to hire Mamet, they have to follow his rules: 'Give me a lot of money and feel free to f*ck it up of which I'm going to hell, or give me enough money to get the movie made, have me submit my director's fee and leave me alone. Both of these things were acceptable. Only one of those things were normal, but both them were acceptable.'We also chat about the buzzed-about female stage version of Glengarry Glen Ross ('We did a reading a few years ago, Rebecca Pidgeon played Ricky Roma, and Felicity Huffman played Shelley Levene); his Harvey Weinstein-inspired play Bitter Wheat and why it never made it to Broadway ('Broadway has become very, very problematical, and it was the height of the woke insanity and the thought of doing a comedy about guy who was a libertine, as if Moliere never existed, was thought not quite the thing), and what he really thinks of the now incarcerated mogul.
Also, what's next: 'I'm writing a play for Rebecca about these two women who need to kill J.K. Rowling. I'm writing a screenplay now and I think I might have found some suckers to give me a couple of bucks to make it, about a couple of old confidence men, who got jammed up, and have to resort to some odd measures to take a mark to the cleaners.'
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