I am willing to think ill of anyone, so I suppose I have an open mind.
It was easy to abominate the liars and fools who were the Producer Coterie of my youth; but in defense not of them but of our Culture, everyone then knew everyone was lying.
The starry-eyed got off the bus and believed or accepted the bushwa until they had been seduced and abandoned, perhaps serially. They then tried to share their wisdom with the new arrivals, to as little avail as reasoning with a lovestruck youth, or a stone.
But with the fall of the Other Shoes, the situation was eventually seen to have been screaming out its clarity:
Producer: “I love you and everything you’ve ever done.”
Aspirant: “Pay my rent.”
Producer: “Lie on the bed and think of England.”
Cheap literature was full of tales of the Gentleman Robber, but the Gentleman Mugger was nowhere a staple of Romance.
It’s an axiom that if each man acted in his Own Best Interest this would be a paradise on earth. But who has ever understood another’s Best Interest as other than that which would (coincidentally) benefit oneself?
The whole profit in the sugarcane is in the last two inches. Those who do not cut it close to the ground will fall to the mercantile wisdom of those who do. The Talented here may stand in for the sugarcane.
The producers shot Judy Garland full of speed, just as the canny restaurant owner, paying rent twenty-four hours a day, keeps the restaurant working through the night. Just like Judy.
We know that culture beats organization every time. In Hollywood there is no organization—it has always been the war of each against all.
Sporadic efforts at organization, here as elsewhere, are only collusion; that is, the momentary association of brigands against their mutual prey. As everywhere, the collusive entity dissolves when one element or individual sees the possibility of usurping the communal gain.
Absent a communal culture, even organized religion, like representative government, devolves into conspiracy against its constituents. But though Hollywood lacks an organization it possesses a culture.
Like that of aviation, it grows from the one immutable fact: in aviation, that on every flight the flyer risks his life; in Hollywood, that everyone is flogging nonsense.
There is little difference in the assumption that the earth is burning or that Mickey Mouse is funny. Those who hold the high ground exhort or extort agreement. In the case of the mouse they do so with that false smile that always indicates duplicity.
Red Skelton was not funny. Neither was Jerry Lewis. He was only funny to the French, who themselves are not funny.
A television comedy with a laugh track need not amuse. And a studio system that owned the theaters didn’t need to entertain. Should it supply the advertised benefit, well and good; but here, as in Boss Tweed’s New York, the bottom line was, “What are you going to do about it?”
The studios consented in 1948 to sell off their theaters. But there is no new thing under the sun; and lo, their progeny now control the production and distribution of “product.”
A product is a commodity intended for sale. Its production is determined by considerations of cost and marketability. Beyond product design and packaging, beauty, even denatured as “artistic integrity,” has no place in industrial thought—and design itself is constrained by cost and guesses about market strategy.
Artistic creation is absolute dedication to beauty—the artist working in Industry is, at best, and of necessity, engaged in Product Design. Conflict between him and the Executives is inevitable; the only variables are its extent and the time of its arrival.
I began my career in Hollywood at the top.
As I was a noted and successful playwright, my entry was a demotion. I was happy in the theater, in New York, knocking it out of the park; but, like all close to the Immigrant Experience, I was always looking to better capitalize my stock and my time.
The first American Jews were peddlers of needles and old clothes; their grandchildren founded the mercantile empires. My stock-in-trade was dramatic writing. It has always seemed to the uninitiated that this consisted in writing dialogue. But film writing is, actually, the construction of a plot. Films do not need dialogue. We watch foreign films, reading subtitles, and enjoy silent films with no dialogue at all. We will watch Buster Keaton all day, as we will the generally silent Hedy Lamarr.
The stage, of course, is all dialogue. That’s how one tells that story; and though snappy dialogue in a film a) does not necessarily advance the plot, and b) indeed may become tiresome, ability at playwriting could buy one a ticket on the DC-3 to Los Angeles. As in my case.
So there I was, feted and petted in New York, and Bob Rafelson came to town to cast his Jack Nicholson film The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981).
A young friend was to audition for the part of The Girl. I asked her to tell Bob that if he didn’t hire me to write the script he was nuts. She pointed out that, as they were casting, they of necessity already had a script.
She went to the meeting and told him anyway, and that afternoon my phone rang and Bob Rafelson said he’d seen one of my plays, he had no script, and would I like to write one for him?
I went to his hotel. Here are his introductory remarks:
“They’re going to tell you that I threw an executive through a plate glass window. It’s true.”
That set the tone for forty years in Hollywood.
I did ten features as a director, the world’s best job; and wrote forty or so filmscripts, half of which got made, the horror of my position as piss-boy balanced by money, spiced by wonder at the absolute inability of those who paid me to understand my scripts. No one ever liked them save the actors and the audience.
They’re on the Inside, Folks, they’re on the inside: the freaks, the frauds, the recovering virgins, the betrayed and the betrayers. Here find salacious gossip posing as information, and reminiscences that may astound and disturb and, should you love the movies, bring to your lips a wry, sad smile.
These are from the horse’s mouth, the horse being the last cogent survivor of Old Hollywood. And I alone am escaped to tell thee.
David Mamet
Santa Monica