Playboy Interview: David Mamet

In a joke that made the rounds not long ago, a beggar in New York City's theater district approaches a well-dressed man for a handout. "Neither a beggar nor a borrower be," the man says sanctimoniously. "William Shakespeare."

"Yeah?" the beggar fires back. "Well, fuck you. David Mamet."

It is a measure of Mamet's influence that he could claim title to that line.

But even if somebody else (Shakespeare, maybe) said it first, nobody has said it better, or put it in a more secure context, than David Mamet--playwright, essayist, novelist, scriptwriter and director. If Arthur Miller is to be remembered for his plays about the sorrows of capitalism--"Death of a Salesman"--and the witch-hunting side of the American character--"The Crucible"--then Mamet has been bold enough to take on those same themes in a raw, bare-knuckled fashion in two of his best-known plays--"Glengarry Glen Ross" and "Oleanna." The latter play touched a hot wire to the already nervous issue of sexual harassment in America. The public responded viscerally, even physically. Shouting matches and fistfights broke out in some audiences. To anyone who has followed Mamet's career, this was both surprising and predictable. It is never certain where Mamet will go next, only that the next move will be ambitious and that it will strike at the heart.

Mamet was born in 1947 to Jewish parents who divorced when he was young, and he was raised in Chicago. Mamet's father was a labor lawyer. His stepfather was--according to Mamet's own writings--a heartless and sometimes violent man. As a young boy, Mamet was exposed to the sort of cruelties that are prevalent in his work. Asked once where he picked up his ear for abusive, obscene talk, Mamet answered, "In my family, in the days prior to television, we liked to while away the evenings by making ourselves miserable, based solely on our ability to speak the language viciously. That's probably where my ability was honed."

He was also exposed to the theater at a young age as a child actor (he once danced onstage with Maurice Chevalier). Although he was, by his own estimation, "the worst actor in the history of theater," he spent most of his college years at Goddard (which he dismisses as "intellectual summer camp"), hanging around the campus theater. That was the advent of Mamet the playwright.

First, however, there were jobs that exposed him to life as it is lived away from the suburbs. He cooked on a merchant ship in the Great Lakes, drove a cab, sold rugs and real estate and even did a short stint as an editor, writing copy for the pictorial features in Playboy's sister publication, "Oui." During these years, however, his focus remained on the theater. In 1975, when Mamet was 27, he announced his arrival, emphatically, with 'American Buffalo."

That play, like all of Mamet's work, was full of the kind of rough talk that people were unaccustomed to hearing onstage. Brutal, elliptical and obscene, it sounded like the streets (or the pawnshop, which was its setting)--only different. "Eloquent stammering" was the way Mamet's dialogue was described by one of the many critics who have tried to parse his language. That David Mamet was a unique and disturbing new voice seemed undeniable.

And if anyone wanted to deny it, they were quickly disabused by the body of work piled up: "Glengarry Glen Ross" (for which he won both a Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award), "Speed-the-Plow" and "Oleanna," among others.

In the late Seventies, after his play "Lone Canoe" was less than generously reviewed, he wrote the screenplays for "The Postman Always Rings Twice" and "The Verdict." This initial exposure to film led Mamet to direct his own projects--"Homicide" and "House of Games," starring Lindsay Crouse, whom he had married in 1977. They were divorced in 1990. Mamet also wrote the screenplays for "Hoffa" and "The Untouchables" as well as an episode of "Hill Street Blues."

In addition, Mamet has written a book of poems ("The Hero Pony"), three collections of essays ("Writing in Restaurants," "Some Freaks" and "The Cabin"), a children's book, "Warm and Cold," with illustrations by Donald Sultan, and a novel ("The Village"). Mamet's private life is of a distinctively masculine nature. Though his plays are set in the rough, crowded, contemporary urban world, Mamet lives in rural Vermont in an old farmhouse with his wife, actress and singer Rebecca Pidgeon. He is known to collect guns and knives, to hunt and to play serious poker. Facile comparisons to Hemingway follow Mamet, who does not bother to refute them. He has, in mid-career, stopped giving interviews. (He used to send out a form letter to people who wrote objecting to the language or violence in his plays. The letter read: "Too bad, you big crybaby.")

Mamet did agree, however, to a "Playboy Interview" late last summer in Massachusetts. He was editing the final cut of the film "Oleanna."Geoffrey Normanand Playboy Assistant Managing EditorJohn Rezekconducted the interview. Their report:

"Mamet met us punctually at nine A.M. on the third floor of a walk-up where he works, a block or two from the Harvard campus. He looked fit and alert but more the scholar than the macho man of reputation. The office was a working space with theater posters on the walls and books on the shelves. Before we started, Mamet, who had just started drinking it again, sent out for what he said was the 'best coffee in Cambridge.' While we waited for it to arrive, we made small talk and were struck that this man who is known for the rawness of his dialogue would speak so softly, and so deferentially. What surprises you is that Mamet is flawlessly polite, bordering on the courtly. He reminisced affectionately about Chicago and then described his labors on the film version of 'Oleanna,' his controversial play (he has been called a 'vicious misogynist' and 'politically irresponsible' for writing it). When the coffee arrived (it was as good as advertised), it seemed like a good time to switch on the tape recorder. In three days of discursive conversation, Mamet spoke at times with the crude wit of his best characters and at others with an informed, recondite precision. He quotes a wide range of writers; some, such as Kipling and Veblen, are long out of fashion. His answers were sometimes enigmatic, occasionally evasive, often elaborate, frequently funny. David Mamet, people might be surprised to learn, is a very funny man. He likes jokes and he loves show-business stories, which he tells with relish.

"But he is also deeply serious about his work. We began our talk by asking about 'Oleanna' and the storms it generated."

[Q] Playboy: Your film Oleanna--and the play--pushed the culture's hot buttons, with a man and woman winding up, literally, each at the other's throat. Why is there such tension between the sexes?

[A] Mamet: This has always been a puritan country and we've always been terrified of sex. That terror takes different forms. Sometimes it is overindulgence and, of course, at other times it's the opposite.

[Q] Playboy: Why should this be a time of repression?

[A] Mamet: For one thing, there is economic scarcity. People tend to get cranky when there aren't so many jobs to go around. Also, I think our expectations are scrambled. Sexual drive is designed to make sure the species will survive, as much as we fight the fact. But for young people today, it is very difficult to say, "Fine, either with you this year or with someone else next year, I'm going to get married, buy a house, get a job, settle down and raise kids." It's terrifying for them to say that. They can't get married. There aren't any jobs. They can't buy the house and have the dog named Randy. Our expectations have become greater than our ability to meet them.

[Q] Playboy: So the alternative is the kind of antagonism we see between the sexes?

[A] Mamet: Alternatives are going to emerge. In the Seventies and Eighties, there was the notion of continual romantic involvement. You said, "I don't want to get married; I just want to go out there and have a good time." That worked for a while and then, suddenly, it didn't seem like such a good idea anymore. Back in the Sixties or Seventies, National Lampoon published a story of a rumor about a new strain of the clap that guys brought back from Vietnam. If you got it, you died. Very funny.

So now you can't become committed to somebody because you can't support a family, and recreational sex is out because AIDS might kill you. As a result, society is going to bring us to some sort of intermediary mechanism, something to keep people wary about getting involved with each other. Here it comes--sexual harassment. The culture has to supersede. Alternatives will emerge to take the problem off our shoulders.

"Gee, what does she want of me?" It's a rhetorical question. It means, "I don't understand, better back off." On the other hand, "I need him to be more sensitive to me." That's poetry. It doesn't mean anything. It means, "I'd better back off because of my fear."

[Q] Playboy: Your timing with Oleanna was perfect. When the play was first performed, sexual harassment was probably the most incendiary issue around. Were you influenced by the Clarence Thomas hearings?

[A] Mamet: No. I didn't follow those hearings, actually. It was weird. I wrote the play before the hearings and I stuck it in a drawer.

[Q] Playboy: Why?

[A] Mamet: Two reasons. First, I didn't have a last act. Second, when I wrote the play, it seemed a little farfetched to me. And then the Thomas hearings began and I took the play out of the drawer and started working on it again. One of the first people to see the play was a headmaster at a very good school here in Cambridge. He said to me, "Eighteen months ago, I would have said this play was fantasy. But now, when all the headmasters get together at conferences, we whisper to one another, 'You know, all of us are only one dime away from the end of a career.'"

[Q] Playboy: Was that a typical response?

[A] Mamet: There was a great deal of controversy at a level I've never encountered in the theater. In the audience, people got into shouting matches and fistfights. People stood up and screamed "Oh bullshit" at the stage before they realized they'd done it. A couple of people got a little crazy and lost their composure.

[Q] Playboy: So it isn't a good date play?

[A] Mamet: It is a terrible date play. But I never really saw it as a play about sexual harassment. I think the issue was, to a large extent, a flag of convenience for a play that's structured as a tragedy. Just like the issues of race relations and xenophobia are flags of convenience for Othello. It doesn't have anything to do with race. This play--and the film--is a tragedy about power. These are two people with a lot to say to each other, with legitimate affection for each other. But protecting their positions becomes more important than pursuing their own best interests. And that leads them down the slippery slope to a point where, at the end of the play, they tear each other's throat out. My plays are not political. They're dramatic. I don't believe that the theater is a good venue for political argument. Not because it is wrong, but because it doesn't work very well.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think you can understand and empathize with the female point of view in this hostile climate? Your critics would say your point of view is almost exclusively male. Cheap shot?

[A] Mamet: Not cheap, but inaccurate. Take Oleanna, for instance, the points she makes about power and privilege--I believe them all. If I didn't believe them, the play wouldn't work as well. It is a play about two people, and each person's point of view is correct. Yet they end up destroying each other.

[Q] Playboy: So it is possible, then, that Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas were both telling the truth?

[A] Mamet: Yeah, sure. You know, the whole notion of American jurisprudence is that you can't determine who is telling the truth. That's not the job of the jury. The jury is supposed to decide which side has made the best case. Polls--which are replacing the judicial system as the way we settle disputes--are no better.

[Q] Playboy: But they do provide clarity, which some critics find lacking in your work. They find your dialogue almost intentionally obscure. What do you say to them?

[A] Mamet: First of all, I'd like to thank them for their interest in my work.

[Q] Playboy: Then?

[A] Mamet: Then, I suppose, I'd like them to think about Oleanna. They say the play is "unclear," and it occurs to me that what they mean is "provocative." That rather than sending the audience out whistling over the tidy moral of the play, it leaves them unsettled. I've noticed over the past 30 years that a lot of what passes in the theater is not drama but rather a morality tale. "Go thou now and do likewise." That's very comforting to someone who is concerned or upset. When you leave the theater and you say, "Oh, now I get it. Women are people, too." Or, "Now I get it, handicapped people have rights," then you feel very soothed for the amount of time it takes you to get to your car. Then you forget about the play. If, on the other hand, you leave the theater upset, you might have seen a rotten play. Or, you might be provoked because something was suggested that you could not have known when you came into the theater. Aristotle said we should see something at the end of tragedy that is surprising and inevitable.

[Q] Playboy: But while your structure is classical, the speech is entirely modern and urban, and, some critics have said, free of content. How do you get your characters to convey anything?

[A] Mamet: There is always content in what's being said. That content is not necessarily carried by the context of the words. There has never been a conversation without content. If you're in a room where a lot of people are talking with one another and you can't hear a word of what's being said, you can still tell what the people are saying because their intent communicates itself.

One of the things I learned when I studied acting is that the content of what is being said is rarely carried by the connotation of the words. It is carried by the rhythm of the speech and the posture of the speaker and a lot of other things. All conversations have meaning.

[Q] Playboy: Do men and women use speech differently?

[A] Mamet: Probably. But men talk differently to other men under different circumstances. Conversations with their peers in a bar vary from conversations with strangers in a bar. No one ever talks except to accomplish an objective. This objective changes according to the sex of the person, the age of the person, the time of day. Everybody uses language for his or her own purpose to get what he or she wants. I think the notion that everyone can be everything to everybody at all times is a big fat bore. Men have always talked with one another. I find it interesting that in the past five or six years, women have started talking with one another. It's called "consciousness-raising," whereas men talking with one another is called "bonding."

[Q] Playboy: Is the rough, profane talk characteristic of your plays an exclusively male language?

[A] Mamet: Anyone who would think that apparently hasn't met my sister [screenwriter Lynn Mamet Weisberg]. I have never found the issue of profanity to be very important. In the plays I was writing, that's how the people actually spoke. It would have been different if I had been writing bedroom farce. But I wasn't. I was writing about different kinds of people, people whom I knew something about.

[Q] Playboy: Including con men.

[A] Mamet: Absolutely.

[Q] Playboy: The con game is one of the fixtures in your work. What's behind your fascination with the con?

[A] Mamet: Well, I have spent some time around con men, and they are fascinating people. I've always been interested in the continuum that starts with charm and ends with psychopathy. Con artists deal in human nature, and what they do is all in the realm of suggestion. It is like hypnosis or, to a certain extent, like playwriting.

[Q] Playboy: How?

[A] Mamet: Part of the art of the play is to introduce information in such a way, and at such a time, that the people in the audience don't realize they have been given information. They accept it as a matter of course, but they aren't really aware of it so that later on, the information pays off. It has been consciously planted by the author.

[Q] Playboy: And he is working a con?

[A] Mamet: Right. Now, in a bad play, the author will introduce the information frontally. You actually tell the audience that you are about to give them some information and that it is important to what happens later in the play. In a good play, the information is delivered almost as an aside. The same mechanism holds true in the con game. If you're giving the mark information that he--or she, in the case of a film of mine called House of Games--is going to need in order to be taken advantage of, and you don't want him to know that he has been given the information, then you would bring it in through the back door. Let's say my partner and I are taking you to the cleaners. The three of us are talking and my partner and I get into an argument. We start saying things that you aren't supposed to hear. I say to you, "Excuse me for a second, I'm sorry about this, and blah, blah, blah." Then I take my partner aside and we start screaming at each other, really out of control. You have not only been given information, you've been told to please look the other way. Well, that is going to put your mind on afterburner. Later you use that information, which you think you got accidentally, to put together what you think are the pieces.

[Q] Playboy: A useful skill, then?

[A] Mamet: Sure. The con game is what people do, most of the time, with few exceptions. After we reach a certain economic level, we try to say that we're no longer trying to talk you out of your money. We're doing "investment banking" or we've got a film "in development."

[Q] Playboy: Films in development is a world you know something about. You've written scripts and directed films.

[A] Mamet: Yes.

[Q] Playboy: And used Hollywood as material in your play Speed-the-Plow, which painted a pretty bleak picture of a world where the con is everything.

[A] Mamet: Well, any business will eventually degenerate into a con game. The cause of the process is any kind of boom. If you get a boom, certain myths will crystallize around that success and cause eventual failure. If you get a boom in American virtue, like you did in World War Two when the citizen-soldiers of this country flat-out saved the world from Nazism, it is inevitable that you are going to have a military-industrial complex and wind up fighting a whole bunch of wars because you want to find a place to be virtuous again. Vietnam was the inevitable outcome of D day. We had the golden age of cinema and the consequences of it.

[Q] Playboy: This sense of corruption was almost overwhelming in Speed-the-Plow. Because this is a world you know, was there some personal malice reflected in the play?

[A] Mamet: Not nearly enough.

[Q] Playboy: Is your work in movies a way to make money or a way to do interesting things?

[A] Mamet: Well, both. I love making movies. I love writing them and I love directing them.

[Q] Playboy: At the end of the day, do you ever get a sense that you should go back to your room and to your real work, which is writing plays; that maybe moviemaking is a lesser form?

[A] Mamet: I don't think it is a lesser form. I do, however, feel absolutely that the theater is my real work, and when I'm making movies I sometimes feel like I'm playing hooky. I'm like the pilot flying multimillion-dollar airplanes, landing them on aircraft carriers, and when he gets out of the cockpit he says, "And they pay me to do this, the fools."

[Q] Playboy: Do you feel like you have to cultivate that part of your career fairly assiduously? Or can you stay in Vermont and write plays and go back to films when the spirit moves you?

[A] Mamet: I think I am hanging on by my fingernails. But I also think most people feel the same way out there and don't show it. And I do spend a lot of time in Vermont.

[Q] Playboy: In the theater--as a writer and a director--you worked with the same tight core group of actors. Has it been tougher in movies, with the kind of egos you find there?

[A] Mamet: I've heard all the stories about big egos, but I have never encountered them myself. Maybe if I stay in the business long enough, I will. But I think it might be a bum rap. I've found on movie sets the most hardworking people I've ever seen. There is an ethic of help out, pitch in, get the job done, keep quiet about how hard it is to do. It is kind of the modern equivalent of a cattle drive. I'm sure there are bad apples. You'll find that in any business.

[Q] Playboy: You like actors, then?

[A] Mamet: They are absolutely the most interesting people I know. I loved hanging around them when I was young and I still love having them for friends. I'm especially lucky that way.

[Q] Playboy: You've written scripts that were altered and, when the movies were finally made, had other people's names on them. Do you resent that your own work wasn't accepted?

[A] Mamet: Sure, of course. Like everybody else in the world, I would like everything to be exactly my way all the time. You know that old line about the scriptwriter who gives something to somebody to read. It's a first draft, and he's looking for a reaction. "Tell me," he says, "how much do you love it?"

[Q] Playboy: Is there any story you especially want to do?

[A] Mamet: Oh yeah. There's one project I want to do. A Hemingway novel--Across the River and Into the Trees. I was talking with some of the people who have the rights and I finally figured out a way to do the movie. It isn't one of Hemingway's better novels, but that could work in its favor. Somebody once told me that the better a play is, the worse the movie version will be. I think the same may be true of the novel.

[Q] Playboy: Like a lot of other American writers, you have been compared to Hemingway.

[A] Mamet: A heavy, impossible burden. You know, you can't play Stanley Kowalski without being compared to Marlon Brando--even by people who never saw Marlon Brando in the movie, let alone onstage. He revolutionized that role and the American notion of what it meant to act. The same is true of Hemingway and writing.

[Q] Playboy: Any validity to the Hemingway comparisons?

[A] Mamet: No, I don't think so.

[Q] Playboy: The way you live? Your interest in hunting and guns?

[A] Mamet: I have always felt that my private life is nobody's business except my own and, of course, that of the readers of this magazine.

[Q] Playboy: What is the most curious description of yourself that you've read?

[A] Mamet: I read only the good stuff. But seriously, there is a kind of flawed thinking in the world today that has to do with celebrity, with the idea that there are special people who are somehow different from the rest of us, who lack the usual human weaknesses. So inevitably we revere them and then, when we get closer, we are disappointed by them and turn on them. We're all the same. That's why I stopped doing the press. Until this interview.

In one of my last interviews I explained that I didn't like talking to the press because it made me feel stupid.

The interviewer said to me, "That is ridiculous."

I said, "See."

I stopped talking to the press because I just didn't know how to answer most of the questions. And my inability was seen as reluctance or coyness. I thought, Why should I subject myself to that? And so I quit.

[Q] Playboy: Perhaps celebrities are no different from the rest of us. But don't people develop unique skills? Doesn't your gift for dialogue give you a better-than-average ability to size up people from what they say? To tell, for instance, when they are lying?

[A] Mamet: I have a good sense of what people are like and when they are lying. Except when I'm emotionally involved. Then, like everyone else, I am hopeless.

[Q] Playboy: How do you see through a lie--or a con?

[A] Mamet: There are clues--they are called "tells," because they tell you something.

[Q] Playboy: What are some examples between men and women?

[A] Mamet: We see them all the time but sometimes we choose not to because we're emotionally involved. It is in our interest to disregard the fact that someone was late, forgot a telephone number, got the wrong size or forgot a birthday.

But these are things most of us know. Or, if we don't, you can't learn them from me. I think it's natural that when someone has a little notoriety, we start to assign certain magical attributes to him that just aren't true. People say to me, "Can you tell us about the art of play-writing?" I say it isn't an art, it is a trick. There are no magic properties that go with a little publicity.

[Q] Playboy: People nevertheless find fame to be irresistible.

[A] Mamet: Absolutely. Let me tell you my favorite story about that. Gregory Mosher is flying from Chicago to New York because he's casting a play and he wants to see Rex Harrison. The plane is late and he gets in the cab and says, "47th and Broadway, I'm going to the theater."

So the cabdriver says, "What are you going to see?"

And Mosher tells him.

"Who's in it?" the cabdriver asks.

"Rex Harrison and Claudette Colbert." The driver stands on the brakes, pulls over to the side, turns around in the seat and says, "Claudette Colbert? Claudette Colbert? I fucked her maid."

That is absolutely my favorite theatrical story.

[Q] Playboy: If celebrity is a current American obsession, then violence is another. Do you think that we live in more violent times?

[A] Mamet: More violent than what? The world is a very violent place. It always has been. Why is it a violent place? Because human beings are wired with a touchy survival mechanism that goes off very easily.

[Q] Playboy: What is your personal response to actual flesh-and-blood violence? To a fistfight on the street, perhaps.

[A] Mamet: Well, it's pretty shocking, isn't it? Not at all what we've been led to expect.

[Q] Playboy: Are you attracted to violence? In prizefights, say? Or bullfighting?

[A] Mamet: No. I've never been.

[Q] Playboy: Do you consider your work to be violent?

[A] Mamet: Violent? No.

[Q] Playboy: As an artist, do you find it more challenging to deal with the evil and violent side of human nature? In your script for The Untouchables, the Al Capone character--played by Robert De Niro -- stole the movie from Kevin Costner's Eliot Ness.

[A] Mamet: Drama can't be about nice things happening to nice people. Anyone who has ever been around gangsters knows that they are extremely charming. They speak colorfully, they're sentimental. Generous. They are interesting to write about, interesting to create.

[Q] Playboy: In your work, women are frequently the victims of violence, beginning with the violent seduction in The Postman Always Rings Twice--

[A] Mamet: I should point out here that what I wrote for that scene was, "They kiss."

[Q] Playboy: The tabletop scene--you didn't write that?

[A] Mamet: "They kiss."

[Q] Playboy: OK. But there is a pattern in your work. Paul Newman decks Charlotte Rampling in The Verdict and now, in Oleanna--

[A] Mamet: Look, you mention Oleanna. People might want to know why these two characters are at each other's throat. Well, you have a two-character drama. One person is a man and one person is a woman. Two people in opposition. That's what drama means. I sincerely believe that my job as a dramatist is to explicate human interactions in such a way that an artistic--not mechanical but artistic--synthesis can happen.

It is just dead wrong to suggest that my work incites--or supports--violence. My job is exactly to the contrary. My job is to show human interactions in such a way that the synthesis an audience takes away will perhaps lead to a greater humanity, a greater understanding of human motives. I don't know how successful I am at it, but that absolutely is my job. If the net effect is otherwise, which I don't think that it is, then they should throw me in jail.

[Q] Playboy: Are the best American characters people who get things done by violent means? Capone and the gangsters. Hoffa. Gunfighters in a Western.

[A] Mamet: Well, that's the American myth. See it and take it.

[Q] Playboy: Going all the way back to The Deerslayer and other Cooper novels?

[A] Mamet: It goes back as far as America. See it and take it. There's nobody there, boys, jump in and take what you want. Manifest Destiny. I mean, Lord have mercy, if it's Manifest Destiny to take over the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific, what is that except pillage, plunder and steal?

[Q] Playboy: Is there excessive violence in films and on television?

[A] Mamet: Sure.

[Q] Playboy: There are serious suggestions--from the attorney general, among others--that society needs to control the depiction of violence. Could you live with that?

[A] Mamet: The question, of course, becomes, What is violence and who gets to say so? It is a serious question when the community standard gets so broad. Any law is going to be interpreted by community standards, because people aren't machines. Laws probably work as long as we have a community that understands them in more or less the same way, or is willing to trust one another to interpret them ad hoc. When you don't have that community, it's like the blind men trying to describe an elephant.

[Q] Playboy: What if the attorney general and her team could identify exceedingly and unacceptably violent content? Would it be helpful for them to eliminate it?

[A] Mamet: Once you set up a czarship of any kind, rest assured that however brilliant the original people are, those who come after will be swine. That's the way it works.

The problem is, who's going to decide and what are his or her qualifications? There was a story in the papers recently about a fellow who calls himself a performance artist, and he very well may be. If I knew what performance art was, I'd be better qualified to say. Anyway, he is HIV-positive, and in his act he has an associate score his back with a scalpel and then press paper towels against the cuts to take blood impressions, which he hangs on a clothesline to dry. His performance is funded in small part by government money, and that has caused some controversy. Is it art? Hell, I don't know. And if I don't know, then Janet Reno sure doesn't know.

[Q] Playboy: OK. Then if the government shouldn't be in the business of censoring expression, should it be in the business of supporting it? There is a lot of discussion about cutting off federal funding of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Public Broadcasting System. Do you think that this would be a disaster for the arts?

[A] Mamet: Right. I'm going to say something heretical. My experience has been that literal, actual art flourishes better without government support. On the other hand, having come up the hard way as everybody does in show business, it would be nice if some people could be helped. I'm torn between wanting to see them helped and wondering if the government is the best way to do it. I mean, people object to the government's subsidizing--even a little--this fellow's performance art. Well, I object to a lot of the pablum that gets grant money. I think people who get that money would be better left to their own devices and eventually to lapse back into the real estate business.

[Q] Playboy: Without public television, won't children be deprived of an alternative to repetitive violence, which some people say is the real threat? Doesn't the sheer number of killings they see on the screen eventually desensitize them?

[A] Mamet: I don't buy it. The violence you see on television and the violence you see in real life have nothing to do with each other. Even kids know it. The reports of violence in the news, on the other hand, may desensitize them. Too much exposure to the O.J. Simpson case may desensitize them. The answer is, one does not have to watch television.

[Q] Playboy: You're a father. Is it part of your role as a parent to censor what your kids watch on television?

[A] Mamet: I don't think kids should watch television. Period.

[Q] Playboy: Not even Sesame Street?

[A] Mamet: Not even Sesame Street. And I love Sesame Street.

[Q] Playboy: Then what's the problem with kids watching it?

[A] Mamet: The problem isn't with Sesame Street. The problem is with television. If you aren't watching television, then you could be learning some other skill like carving wood, or even reading. I was talking with a friend of mine, a guy who is something of a scholar of show business, and I said, "I don't get television. I believe I understand certain things about the essential nature of live performance and the central nature of radio and movies. But I don't understand television." He said, "Television is essentially a medicine show." And he was right. For X minutes of supposed entertainment, television is going to have your attention for 30 seconds so it can sell you a bottle of snake oil. That is its essential nature. It's a sales tool.

[Q] Playboy: Can't technology change that? With some cable channels, for instance, you have no ads.

[A] Mamet: No. Not at all. It's possible to have television without ads, but that doesn't alter its essential nature. You can describe a painting--a Renaissance masterpiece--on the radio and it might have a certain amount of value. But it is not the best way to do painting.

[Q] Playboy: You've done some work for television. Didn't it change your opinion of the medium?

[A] Mamet: What is television's agenda? It is a tool to sell you products. What are the tools it uses? Guilt. Shame. Envy. It tells you to be like Ozzie and Harriet. I grew up in the first television generation and I spent a lot of time wondering why my life was so inferior to--and unlike--the lives I saw depicted on television.

[Q] Playboy: Which brings to mind the British reviewer who called you "one of our chief critics of capitalism."

[A] Mamet: I don't think I was ever a critic of capitalism. I'm a dramatist. The drama is not a prescriptive medium. Part of what the drama can offer--because it should work on the subconscious level--is the relief that comes with addressing a subject previously thought unaddressable. I'll give you an example.

On the day John F. Kennedy was shot, Lenny Bruce was performing in San Francisco. Everybody was waiting to hear what Lenny Bruce would say. He came out onstage, shook his head and said nothing for five full minutes. Then he looked up at the audience and said, "Vaughn Meader." That was the comedian who'd made his career out of imitating one character--John Kennedy. Saying that--making that joke--was an incredible relief. Does that mean Lenny Bruce was insensitive to the terror and horror and tragedy inflicted on the country, on the Kennedy family? No. He was doing his job as a humorist and he was doing it bravely.

Anything I might know about American capitalism is not going to be found in a play.

[Q] Playboy: Just the same, your play--and film--Glengarry Glen Ross could be called an indictment of the kill-or-be-killed nature of business.

[A] Mamet: Yeah. Well, Robert Service said it best. He said there isn't a law of God or man that goes north of 10,000 bucks. You know, money makes people cruel. Or has the capacity to do so. Human interactions--that's what I hope my plays are about. The rest of it is just a way to get somewhere.

[Q] Playboy: How do you feel about money? Is it better to have money than not?

[A] Mamet: I'd say so. But you can get carried away. There's a story about Herb Gardner, who wrote A Thousand Clowns. First a play, then a movie. He's hot and his agent conies to him with a deal for a television show. Gardner thinks it's a dumb idea and says, "I don't want to do the show." The agent says, "Herb, listen, do this show and you'll never have to write another word."

[Q] Playboy: And?

[A] Mamet: Well, you have to ask yourself if that's why you became a writer. So you'd never have to write another word?

There is another story. I was talking to a guy who'd been in the CIA and had an idea for a script. He said, "You know, you could probably make 50 million off this deal. For a half hour's work."

I said, "Fifty million for half an hour's work, huh? That works out to 4 billion a week, if you don't put in any overtime. That comes to 200 billion a year, if you take two weeks off for vacation."

"Listen," this guy said, "when you're making that kind of money, you can't afford to take a vacation."

[Q] Playboy: All right. Getting back to earth here, you mentioned Lenny Bruce, who made his reputation by saying what couldn't be said. Is there anything left that you can't say?

[A] Mamet: You can't say Wayne Newton's head is too small. Or that Richard Simmons is too pudgy. Other than that, you can say anything. Or you can say anything you want so long as you don't mean it. If you mean it, you're in a lot of trouble.

[Q] Playboy: Aren't we actually moving back, in a way, to a climate like the one that existed during Lenny Bruce's time? Isn't that what some aspects of the political correctness on American college campuses is all about, that there are some things you can't be allowed to say?

[A] Mamet: Well, sure, but I think centralization will do away with free speech before PC does.

[Q] Playboy: Centralization?

[A] Mamet: Sure. One day, three corporations will own all the means of disseminating public information. We'll have to get through their censors, who will make the PC kids look like mice.

There was a Russian dramatist who described working during the Stalin era. He had to sit down with this guy whose job was to censor plays for the Party. The guy would say, "You can't put this and that onstage," and the playwright would say, "Sit down, for Christ's sake. Have a cigar, have a drink, let me tell you what this play is about. Blah, blah, blah."

So the censor listens and says, "Well, OK, but I got to check it out with my boss. Tell you what, when the guy says so and so, in act three, take that out so I can tell my boss."

And the playwright says, "Fine, I can live with that."

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And the censor says, "Good, can I have two tickets for Wednesday?" And he goes back to the building where he works. I would much rather deal with that guy than with some idiot who just got out of the Yale drama school and works as a script reader at the XYZ studio in Hollywood. Those are the people who will eventually control publishing and movies.

[Q] Playboy: You don't see a danger in fundamentalist groups that want to get J.D. Salinger out of the library? Or black groups that try to do the same with Huckleberry Finn?

[A] Mamet: Of course. There is a vast danger. But, again, I say that's a minor threat. I noticed some black group wants to get Uncle Tom's Cabin out of the library somewhere. I wonder if they've even read the book. If there were ever a more beautifully written novel that was an indictment of slavery. . . .

[Q] Playboy: You know very well that people are sensitive about these questions. You wrote an article in The Guardian calling Schindler's List "emotional pornography" and "Mandingo for Jews." Can you elaborate on that?

[A] Mamet: I don't think you can get more elaborate than "Mandingo for Jews."

[Q] Playboy: Is anti-Semitism something you are especially worried about?

[A] Mamet: As a Jew I'm very concerned that we are falling back on the traditional answer of the Jewish intellectuals in the Twenties, which was to assimilate. To try to hide. You say, "I am an Austrian or a German or a German Jew, and I am such a part of the culture that I don't have this other identity."

I was talking to a survivor of the Holocaust, who had lost all his family. He said the worst fear of intellectuals was not in seeing their families killed and their possessions confiscated and their race destroyed. Their worst nightmare was in winding up naked in the field with a bunch of Jews.

But there is no ticket of admission. During the Holocaust, all they cared about was if you were a Jew. They didn't care how much money you had or if you'd won the Iron Cross in World War One. To be Jewish meant to be dead.

[Q] Playboy: Do you think this desire to assimilate is still a problem?

[A] Mamet: Before I went to Israel, I talked to my rabbi and he said, "You are in for a shock." And I said, "Why? It is a Jewish country." He said, "No, that's easy. You are going to be in for a shock because what you will find is that there are rapists, murderers, litterbugs and grumpy people in Israel, just like in any place in the world." He said that the lesson in Israel is that Jews are just like anybody else. That's what we've been fighting for 3000 years--to have a country just like anyone else.

But if you look at the depictions of Jews in the movies, it's the kindly little old lady, Molly Goldberg, or it's the Nobel physicist. People are bending over backward to say, 'See, we're treating Jews with kid gloves.'

I wrote another essay in which I said that you find few Jewish heroes in the movies. The Jewish answer has always been, "Well, that's OK. It's not important." Earlier you asked about things you cannot say--well, here are two: You cannot say you are a Jew first and then an American. And you cannot say that the movie business is a Jewish business. If there is anything wrong with that, I don't know what it is. Except that the Jewish moguls kept the Jews out of the movies. Where are the Jewish characters? When you find a Jew in the movies, it is probably something like the character in Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues, which was a straight-up anti-Semitic portrait. It's not right. The end of it is murder.

[Q] Playboy: Should Spike Lee have his wrist slapped?

[A] Mamet: By whom? I sent him a letter.

[Q] Playboy: Did he respond?

[A] Mamet: No. It's not his job to respond. But it is my job to write a letter.

[Q] Playboy: How do you respond when people challenge your characterizations?

[A] Mamet: The first time we did Oleanna, we had about 15 young people from universities who came to see the play. Afterward I asked them, "Well, what do you think?" One young woman said, "Don't you think this is politically irresponsible?" I didn't know what it meant and I still don't know.

[Q] Playboy: Is this sort of thinking going to be with us for a while?

[A] Mamet: I hope not, but I think so. Like I said earlier, young people are frightened. They wonder why they're in college, what they are going to do when they get out, what has happened to society. Nobody's looking out for them and there's nothing for them to go into. It's no wonder they're trying to take things into their own hands.

[Q] Playboy: Were your college years fearful or did you find your vocation then?

[A] Mamet: There was a light verse I heard once about Hamlet. It goes like this:

Young Hamlet was prince of Denmark,

A country disrupted and sad,

His mother had married his uncle,

His uncle had murdered his dad.

But Hamlet could not make his mind up,

Whether to dance or to sing.

He got all frenetic

And walked round pathetic,

And did not do one fucking thing.

The last three lines sum up my college career. I spent a lot of time in the theater in college.

[Q] Playboy: Was that the genesis of your interest in the theater?

[A] Mamet: Actually, I grew up as something of a child actor in Chicago. My uncle was the head of broadcasting for the Chicago Board of Rabbis and I used to do a radio show for Jewish children Sunday mornings. I was an amateur actor as a kid, then I got involved at Hull House in Chicago in the early Sixties.

[Q] Playboy: And playwriting? Did you suddenly find your calling when you read Death of a Salesman at 16, or something like that?

[A] Mamet: None of it ever made any sense to me until I started reading Beckett and Pinter. That was my wake-up call.

[Q] Playboy: When would that have been? College?

[A] Mamet: I was 14.

[Q] Playboy: That must have made you some kind of nerd.

[A] Mamet: Not really. I hated school. But I was on the wrestling team and I played football. I was sports editor for the school paper. And I read a lot. I used to hang out at the Oak Street Book Shop in Chicago. It was a magic place for me. In back they had a room full of books by playwrights, and I used to dream about what it would be like to have a book I had written on one of those shelves.

[Q] Playboy: Did your feeling for drama sustained you through college?

[A] Mamet: Yeah. That's all I did. Hung out at the theater.

[Q] Playboy: When you were starting out professionally, back in Chicago, were you able to support yourself with your work in the theater?

[A] Mamet: Lord, no. I had jobs. I worked as a real estate salesman and as a cabdriver.

[Q] Playboy: How did you do as a real estate salesman?

[A] Mamet: I never got out of the office. I was in charge of the leads, like the character in Glengarry Glen Ross.

[Q] Playboy: Was that as unpleasant an experience as the play depicts?

[A] Mamet: It was harsh. I also sold carpet over the phone. Cold calling. Anybody who has ever done it knows what I'm talking about.

[Q] Playboy: How did you describe color over the phone?

[A] Mamet: They had all these names that sounded like they could have been ice cream. Or horses.

[Q] Playboy: If you learned business from handling real estate leads, what about cabdriving? Did you get any material from conversations you overheard?

[A] Mamet: No. But I always enjoyed driving a cab. For two reasons. You could start in the morning with no money, even to eat, and after a couple of fares, you would have enough to buy breakfast. The other reason was those Checker cabs, which we all drove in those days. They had the best heaters in the world. It could be 30 below in Chicago and you could drive all day in a T-shirt. It was so wonderfully warm. It was great.

[Q] Playboy: Since American Buffalo, your breakthrough work that had you on Broadway when you were 27, you have been a prolific playwright. Do you have dry spells?

[A] Mamet: Sure. You always have dry spells as a writer. What I usually do when I'm in a dry spell is write something else. I just like to write. And I reap all sorts of rewards from it. It supports me and I've made a lot of friends doing it and it gives me a feeling of accomplishment. If I can't do it one way, I'll do it another.

[Q] Playboy: Do you pay much attention to the mechanics? Are you fussy about whether or not you are writing with number two pencils, that kind of thing?

[A] Mamet: Oh, sure. If I've got nothing else to do, I'll bitch about that. For years I worked with the same manual typewriter. And I drank coffee. I'd sit down to write, take a sip of coffee, put the cup down on the right side of the typewriter, light a cigarette and type the first line. Then I'd hit the carriage return and it would hit the cup and the coffee would go everywhere. I did that every day for 20 years. Then I quit drinking coffee.

[Q] Playboy: And smoking cigarettes.

[A] Mamet: That came first.

[Q] Playboy: It has been reported that you like cigars.

[A] Mamet: I gave them up, too.

[Q] Playboy: Are you one of those writers who need a routine?

[A] Mamet: Sure. I have all kinds of routines. But I like to describe myself as a free spirit-will-o'-the-wisp. So I keep myself blissfully ignorant of my routines.

[Q] Playboy: Do you write every day?

[A] Mamet: Sometimes.

[Q] Playboy: What's the source of your feeling for speech?

[A] Mamet: My family, I suppose. I had a grandfather who was a great talker and storyteller. His name was Naphtali. I was reading in the Bible the story of when Jacob is about to die and he is giving his sons his blessings. One of the sons, whose people became the tribe Naphtali, was given the blessing of speech, of being able to talk the birds out of the trees.

[Q] Playboy: For all your success, there have been some setbacks, such as Lone Canoe onstage and We're No Angels on film. How do you bounce back?

[A] Mamet: Rudyard Kipling said, "If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same." I'm getting to be middle-aged enough to see that there is more than superficial truth in his assertion that they are both impostors. It's nice to have people like your work. I also hope as a writer that I am my own best judge and worst critic.

When you're young, everything seems like it's the end of the world. Bad review? OK, that's it. Oh my God, what's happened? You've just been excoriated in every newspaper in the country. How can you ever go on? Goddamn them all. I hope they all get the mumps.

Having spent too many years in show business, the one thing I see that succeeds is persistence. It's the person who just ain't gonna go home. I decided early on that I wasn't going to go home. This is what I'll be doing until they put me in jail or put me in a coffin.

Kids today say they are going to go to graduate school so they'll have something to fall back on. If you have something to fall back on, you're going to fall back on it. You learn how to take the criticism. You have to, or you get out. I was talking with a friend the other day about something I was working on that wasn't going right. I said, "I don't like it. It's a piece of shit."

He said, "Dave, never berate yourself. There are people who are paid to do that for you."

[Q] Playboy: Any other advice for the young playwright?

[A] Mamet: My best friend, Jonathan Katz, was for a number of years the kid ping-pong champion of New York State. And when he was 12 or 13, he wandered into Marty Reisman's ping-pong parlor in New York City. Reisman was then the U.S. champion in table tennis and a genius, an absolute genius. Jonathan asked him, "What do I have to do to play table tennis like you?"

Reisman said, "First, drop out of school."

That would be my advice to aspiring playwrights.

[Q] Playboy: And how did you break into movies?

[A] Mamet: I got my first job in pictures through my ex-wife. She was going to audition for a part in Postman and I told her to tell Bob Rafelson, who was directing, that he was a fool if he didn't hire me to write the screenplay. I was kidding, but she did it. And when it turned out he needed a writer, he called. When he asked why he should hire me, I told him, "Because I'll give you either a really good screenplay or a sincere apology."

[Q] Playboy: One last question. Where do you get your titles?

[A] Mamet: I don't know. But I thought of a good one the other day: In These Our Clothes. I think of titles and I write to fit.

I don't believe the theater is a good venue for political argument. Not because it's wrong, but because it doesn't work.

After we reach a certain economic level, we're no longer trying to talk you out of your money. We're doing "investment banking."

What is television's agenda? It is a tool to sell you products. What are the tools it uses'? Guilt. Shame. Envy.