Latest news with #DavidMamet
Yahoo
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Why Bob Odenkirk Has Wanted to Do ‘Glengarry Glen Ross' for Decades
Bob Odenkirk ('Better Call Saul') earned a Tony nomination for his Broadway debut in the hit revival of 'Glengarry Glen Ross.' But almost 30 years ago, if he'd gotten his way, he would have starred in a very different production of David Mamet's celebrated from Variety 'Nobody 2' Trailer: Bob Odenkirk Kills Thugs With Whack-A-Mole Mallet, Boat Anchor and More in 'John Wick'-Style Action Sequel 'Glengarry Glen Ross,' Starring Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk and Bill Burr, Recoups $7.5 Million Investment on Broadway Where to Buy Tickets For Broadway's Biggest Tony Nominees: 'Oh, Mary,' 'Stranger Things,' 'English' and More 'Back around '97-'98, I wrote to David Mamet and asked him if I could do an all-comedy cast of 'Glengarry Glen Ross' with Fred Willard as Shelley Levine,' Odenkirk recalled on the new episode of 'Stagecraft,' Variety's theater podcast. 'I would be Ricky Roma, and David Cross and other people would be in it too. And I said: 'Is it okay if we change it so that instead of selling land, the characters are selling pots and pans?' He never wrote back.' Odenkirk has wanted to do the show ever since. When asked why, he replied, 'I can't help but think about my roots. My dad, who was not a friend of mine, he would take me and my brother to his office occasionally, until I was about seven or eight years old. And we would go to lunch with him and his friends and they'd get drunk. They were all drunks. They all destroyed their businesses, ended up divorced. Most of them had car accidents. My dad would take us to lunch, and those guys were the guys in 'Glengarry.'' He continued, 'So I don't know, something about the play. You say, 'Well, I thought you didn't like your father. You want to get close to him or whatever?' I don't know, I guess I want to play those guys. I hung out with them occasionally, and I want to be one of those fuckers for a little while and live in their world. Live in their shoes. They're very short-sighted people, and immature. But you know, so are most of us.' Odenkirk got his start in sketch comedy, which is considerably looser and more improvisatory than the word-perfect clockwork of performing in a Mamet play. His approach to 'Glengarry' ended up being an extension of how he worked on 'Breaking Bad' and 'Better Call Saul.' 'For 'Breaking Bad,' when I first got the script, I almost started marking up that first script, like: 'Well, what if you said it this way? What if you shorten this?' Like I'd been doing my whole life in comedy. And then I immediately thought, 'You know what? I don't think a real actor does that.' I think a real actor goes: These are the words. What character do they describe, as scripted? Who is this guy if he talks like this, if he uses these phrases, if he repeats himself, if he backtracks? Who does that tell me he is?' Also in the new episode of 'Stagecraft,' Odenkirk expounded on the honor of being a Tony nominee — 'to be invited in and embraced and given a nod here by this Broadway community, a community that you can see really knows each other, is pretty special' — and revealed why he was intimidated to tackle his first Broadway project. 'The truth is, this was very intimidating and I told myself it wasn't,' he said. 'I told myself this is no big deal. It's just a stage. I've been on a million stages. But it was another level by a lot, and I didn't prepare for it, anxiety-wise.' But, he added, he's grown to love it. 'The audiences at a Broadway show come with the best fucking energy, and you get to work from that. It's the best. So now I'm looking at other plays.' To hear the entire conversation, listen at the link above or download and subscribe to 'Stagecraft' on podcast platforms, including , and the . Best of Variety New Movies Out Now in Theaters: What to See This Week Emmy Predictions: Talk/Scripted Variety Series - The Variety Categories Are Still a Mess; Netflix, Dropout, and 'Hot Ones' Stir Up Buzz Oscars Predictions 2026: 'Sinners' Becomes Early Contender Ahead of Cannes Film Festival
New York Times
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Our Sympathy Hangover
In 1982, David Mamet shared troubling news. The American dream — our national amble, the short sunstruck highway between birth and success — had come to an end. 'And the people it has sustained,' the dramatist told an interviewer, 'the white males, are going nuts.' But the play he wrote about all this — subject, those going-nuts white males — itself enjoyed a dream career: 'Glengarry Glen Ross' won a Pulitzer in 1984, and then brought its low news to every corner of the globe. The star-studded film adaptation is one of the few absolutely surviving movie items of 1992. And when its third Broadway revival opened earlier this spring, in our own unsustained times, four sizable stars greeted the fans and selfie sticks. That is, Mr. Mamet's drama should cross the stage like a returned prophet, an I-told-you-so with lighting cues and an act break. That it does not — that the sales pitch to our imaginations has wickedly shifted — is the story of a fascinating national cooling. Why does 'Glengarry' feel weirdly wrong for now? Even though you can tick the parallels off on your fingers: Tilt-a-Whirl economy, conservatives (even Mr. Mamet now claims to be a conservative), frantically discouraged males? Part of it's that instead of being horrified — except perhaps by the non-P.C. language — we've become inured, listless: We're now ruled by Mr. Mamet's antiheroes, and lots of us just cheer them on. The news Mr. Mamet had to deliver was always bad. When audience members sit down to 'Glengarry,' what they're really commemorating is a cardiac event. In the early '80s, Mr. Mamet's stepfather-in-law told him the following bad-economy story: Before an office presentation, one older salesman had become so anxious about his job that his heart gave out. And the company president simply 'stepped over his body to leave the room.' The primal office fear: no mercy; loss of the capacity to do our jobs could literally kill us. Mr. Mamet intended a kind of protest — of 'a society,' he said, 'with only one bottom line: how much money you make.' He wasn't the only writer tracking this radar signature: recession, conservatives in ascendence, all the social guardrails being removed. The first sentence of V.S. Naipaul's 'A Bend in the River' extends readers this hearty welcome: 'The world is what it is; and men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.' (It's 'Glengarry' in one line.) That was the feel; of the fat being trimmed, margins so tight you could feel them along your skin. By 1983, Mr. Mamet told The Times he was at work on something new. 'I would describe it,' he admitted, 'as overlong and depressing.' He sent off the pages to his British mentor, Harold Pinter, with a note: 'There's something wrong with this play. What is it?' 'The only thing' the play needed, Pinter wrote back, was a cast and a production. (Writers: Before the next draft, consult a reader.) The last words of the next spring's Times review were best-case. A message transmitted, the message received. Mr. Mamet's play was about 'the abject terror of a life in which all words are finally nothing because it's only money that really talks.' Most of us know 'Glengarry' from the movie. (Which, if you're curious, Mr. Mamet loved. 'I wouldn't have changed anything,' he said in 2004.) The heart attack stand-in is the Jack Lemmon character. Shelley Levene, an older real estate salesman on the howling way down. Al Pacino plays the inflexibly upward-trending Ricky Roma — a Zen salesman. Roma's approach isn't just digital; it's artificial intelligence to Levene's analog. It surrounds you in a kind of sales fog, from which you emerge, somehow, with a purchase. There's nothing Levene can do, happens to the best of us. Your skills age out, the present becomes a language you can't speak, no mercy. That's the story. And for years, nobody I know — most of them fans — has watched a movie called 'Glengarry Glen Ross.' They watch a do-it-yourself edit: 'Glen,' or 'Ross.' Everything but the Levene parts. His capsize is so naked and complete it makes you shudder. Pure frank collapse is terrifying. After a certain point, you identify with the winners, the Romas, in self-defense, for relief. At the same time, there's the accumulated weight of 25 prestige-TV seasons celebrating the hero who survives: Tony Soprano, Don Draper, Walter White, the various belligerent claimants to Westeros and Yellowstone. All, in their ways, Romas. Dark-hearted but still on their feet. People even developed a meme soft spot for Patrick Bateman of 'American Psycho,' who buys such great stuff that his murderous competence becomes likable, the homicides a sort of weekend flaw viewers can overlook. It's the same effect as a few hours of the Discovery Channel. The herd scatter, the sudden paw — and out of exhausted sympathy we begin to root for the lion and not the gazelles. To resist this may be to counter some baked-in humanness. 'Tame submission,' the essayist William Hazlitt wrote in 1817, 'has nothing to excite or flatter the imagination.' He was discussing the Shakespeare play 'Coriolanus.' (A key text for our times. Combine 'Coriolanus' — a banished leader brings unhappiness to his former nation — with 'Glengarry,' and the features that begin to come clear are Donald Trump's.) 'The love of power in ourselves,' Hazlitt observed coolly, 'and the admiration of it in others are both natural to man.' It's there in the poll numbers for the Democratic Party — 27 percent approval, an obstructed-view seat, the worst in more than three decades. The awful shame of identifying with the losing side. Asked in April what the party might do to recapture the public's sympathy, veteran strategist James Carville gave the Ricky Roma answer, twice. 'Win elections. Win elections.' Another change is a sort of compassion fatigue — after a decade of an unprecedented national mania for empathy. In her 2021 novel, 'No One Is Talking About This,' Patricia Lockwood defined the overall question of the era's social media: 'Who am I failing to protect?' This feels gone; with, as its replacement, a kind of sympathy hangover. A depleted, fatalistic willingness to let difficult situations — immigration, the environment, homelessness, abortion — take what shape they will. We now seem to find it more natural to identify not with the employee on the floor but with the executive stepping out of the room. These might be the signals Bob Odenkirk — now starring as Shelley Levene on Broadway — was picking up when he told 'Playbill' that he did not intend to portray the capsizing salesman as tragic. Instead, Mr. Odenkirk aimed for a 'hopeful' 'Glengarry.' 'It's an American thing,' the actor explained, 'to find that positivity and try to ride that wave.' Mr. Mamet, with a somewhat different understanding of audience, had written his director a letter one month before the original Broadway premiere. Failure to insist on the play's 'not nice things,' its 'viciousness,' he said, 'is to betray the play and the audience.' The audience when I saw it seemed most excited not by the fates of the characters but by the celebrity of the actors — fellow professionals facing up to a fresh challenge, Broadway, and living a success way bigger than Roma's. There were stage door calls. Each star: a whoop, a push, phones swinging in their direction like bouquets. Fans thrilled to selfie, to photo-bomb, have their programs autographed. I asked one woman what she thought of the play. She explained she'd just come East for treatment — no information what kind — had never heard of the play; had just seen a crowd, picked up the program and understood immediately this was her good fortune, an omen. 'Glengarry' as lucky break. The dream has returned, or, as we watch, is becoming something far stranger.
Wall Street Journal
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘The Disenlightenment' Review: The Rules According to Mamet
There are many ways to describe the style in which David Mamet addresses life in America in 'The Disenlightenment,' his collection of political essays. He's mordant; unsparing; rollickingly intemperate; laugh-out-loud funny; belligerent; unapologetically Jewish and Zionist; and adamantly conservative, in a way befitting an ideological convert who was once a self-described 'brain-dead liberal.' Mr. Mamet is an American dramatist of renown, still celebrated after all these years for 'Glengarry Glen Ross,' his 1983 play currently enjoying a lively revival on Broadway. Since the later stages of the first Obama administration, he's been known as much for his political essays as for his drama. The first of these books was 'The Secret Knowledge' (2011), in which he laid bare the extent of his rejection of liberalism (his original apostasy having been revealed three years earlier in a brief essay in the Village Voice). 'Recessional' (2022)—its title taken from a Rudyard Kipling poem—came next. In this, Mr. Mamet observed, among other things, that the Miss America pageant is 'the reenactment of a slave auction.' It was a book designed to jolt. 'The Disenlightenment' is his latest assemblage of heat-seeking thought, made up of 44 short and razor-sharp essays, some as brief as three pages. They're a stream, not so much of consciousness as of deliberate, concentrated reasoning, distilled into conclusions of almost rabbinical finality. 'My political writing, over the last twenty years,' he tells us, 'has been of the genre 'Hold on a second. . . '.' He's a hunter-gatherer of cant—and its destroyer. You can dip into any essay in the book at random, and still enjoy (or wince at) a self-contained argument that lays bare some form of American humbug. His name for America's 'political pseudodrama' is Wokelahoma. Mr. Mamet is a passionate devotee of President Trump, whom he regards as America's rescuer from unhinged, godless progressives. 'Trump is a hero, and his heirs will, God willing, increase the longevity of the American Experiment.' Mr. Mamet loathes Barack Obama and Joe Biden with undisguised venom. President Obama, he writes, 'was a Marxist and Islamist opportunist.' And Mr. Biden, in his view, embodied all that was moribund in America. The country 'has been dying,' Mr. Mamet writes, and 'it is no mere coincidence that, in Biden,' the country 'elected and abided a leader in the last stages of senility, and devoted time and treasure to denying the fact, and savaging the observant.'
The Guardian
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
James Foley obituary
The film director James Foley, who has died from brain cancer aged 71, was a self-effacing and shrewd stylist whose camerawork always served the actors and the psychology of the characters. This thespian focus was best showcased in his 1992 adaptation of David Mamet's stage play Glengarry Glen Ross; its heavyweight cast, which included Al Pacino, Jack Lemmon, Alec Baldwin, Ed Harris and Kevin Spacey, might have overwhelmed a less purposeful supervisor. But in his hands this dissection of American capitalism, set in a beleaguered real-estate office, became an actors' masterclass; the cast would turn up on their days off to watch each other work. Foley had been convinced to direct it by a new version of Mamet's script that broke down what on stage had been cerebral monologues into pithy, visceral repartee. Accordingly, the director insisted on casting 'great actors, people with movie charisma, to give it watchability, especially since the locations were so restricted'. Recruiting Pacino as Ricky Roma, the star salesman, Foley had the luxury of a three-week rehearsal period. He used it to avoid a pitfall endemic to Mamet: 'There was a real danger that actors could get seduced by the superficial level of gratification that comes with saying great dialogue. I was much more interested in getting actors that had an interior, emotional life,' he told the WHYY radio station in Philadelphia. With many of the stars reducing their salaries to come on board, egos were on hold – a prerequisite for Foley. 'My litmus test is I have to be able to make fun of actors, and of who they are, and their fame,' he said. It paid dividends: the finished Glengarry Glen Ross had a commanding intensity and bite. The 'always be closing' pep talk – an added scene with Baldwin in the role of head office's ball-breaking envoy – later became a staple of acting classes. The film's prising open of male belligerence and insecurity was a recurrent feature in Foley's films, which were often noir-inflected, character-focused crime dramas. Its milieu of tawdry salesmanship, and the eternal imperative of the hustle, must surely have resonated with his struggle to rise up Hollywood's pecking order. Born in Bay Bridge, Brooklyn, New York, James was the son of Frances and James Sr, a lawyer, and grew up in Staten Island. After graduating in psychology from the State University of New York at Buffalo in 1974, he abruptly switched tack to cinema after taking a six-week course at New York University. He then studied for a master's degree at the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts in 1979. Foley was offered the chance to direct by Hal Ashby, an errant New Hollywood auteur; Ashby was impressed by one of the young man's films being projected on to a wall at a student party. They never made anything together, but what Foley described as Hollywood's 'weird calculus' meant Ashby's patronage was enough to earn him the directorial chair on his first feature: a derivative but energetic high-school romance, Reckless (1984). He followed it up with the crime drama At Close Range (1986), starring his friend Sean Penn as a Pennsylvanian latchkey teenager drawn into the orbit of his psychopathic father, played by Christopher Walken. Not only exhibiting Foley's way with actors, especially in Walken's flamboyant but subtly shaded performance, the director also imbued the film with an insistent romanticism. He later summed up his low-key approach to style as: 'I like getting the movie inside of the drama as if there was no director involved.' Foley's connection to Penn led to him directing the screwball comedy Who's That Girl (1987), starring the actor's then wife, Madonna (he was best man at the couple's wedding, and directed the music videos for Madonna's Live to Tell, Papa Don't Preach and True Blue, under the name Peter Percher). Who's That Girl was a critical and commercial bomb; Foley had to regroup in the wake of this atypical foray into lighter material: 'It was a major life experience. That first failure is so shocking,' he told Film Freak Central. He returned with the fraught and intense desert noir After Dark, My Sweet (1990), adapted from the 1955 Jim Thompson novel, which was Foley's only feature-writing credit. Although, like many of his films, it was a commercial failure despite critical admiration, it earned him Pacino's attention for Glengarry Glen Ross. Foley continued working throughout the 90s and early 2000s, with his two films with Mark Wahlberg – the teen sociopath thriller Fear (1996) and the actioner The Corruptor (1999) – finding moderate commercial success. But the critical lashing and commercial failure of the costly $60m cyberstalking neo-noir Perfect Stranger (2007), starring Halle Berry and Bruce Willis, led to him being consigned to 'director jail' for a time. For much of the 2010s, he worked exclusively in TV, a medium about which he expressed reservations; among other jobs, David Fincher – whose psychological slant he shared – hired him to direct 12 episodes of the Netflix series House of Cards. For his final features he accepted a franchise gig: directing the two sequels to Fifty Shades of Grey, in 2017 and 2018. Easily the most commercially successful films of his career, he viewed them with a certain pragmatism. 'The movie is not going to win Oscars,' he said of Fifty Shades Darker. 'But I don't think it's going to win Razzies [Golden Raspberry awards]. That's my goal – to not win a Razzie.' Having weathered several cycles of fortune within Hollywood, this journeyman took the long view: 'I'm interested in studying the history of directors, and why they make a few good films and then fall off the map. You look to the credits of episodic TV and there they are – and I think that it has so much to do with how you respond to failure.' He is survived by a brother, Kevin, and two sisters, Eileen and Jo Ann. James Foley, film director, born 28 December 1953; died 6 May 2025
Yahoo
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
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. More from Deadline Shia LaBeouf Stage Debut In David Mamet Play 'Henry Johnson' Extends Run – Update 'Glengarry Glen Ross' Broadway Review: Kieran Culkin, Bill Burr & Bob Odenkirk Break Bad In Unmissable Succession Of Cutthroats All-Female 'Glengarry Glen Ross' Expected For Broadway Following Kieran Culkin, Bob Odenkirk & Bill Burr Limited Engagement 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.' Best of Deadline Sean 'Diddy' Combs Sex-Trafficking Trial Updates: Cassie Ventura's Testimony, $10M Hotel Settlement, Drugs, Violence, & The Feds All The 'Mission: Impossible' Movies In Order - See Tom Cruise's 30-Year Journey As Ethan Hunt Denzel Washington's Career In Pictures: From 'Carbon Copy' To 'The Equalizer 3'
