For all his success outside of it, David Mamet has done all right by Hollywood. More than all right, in fact: His screenplays for The Verdict and Wag the Dog were nominated for Oscars, and, like Woody Allen, he gets to direct his own scripts just the way he wants to because 1) he’s got such unassailable artistic cred that everybody wants to work with him, and 2) he never spends very much money. Though he published yet another cranky treatise on the movies, Bambi vs. Godzilla, only a few months ago, he’s currently enjoying one of the biggest mainstream successes of his varied and brilliant career in The Unit, a CBS commandos-vs.-terrorists adventure series on which Mamet has a “created by” credit and to which he frequently contributes scrips.
Though he’s probably cashing some decent checks thanks to his fictitious account of the clandestine War on Terror, Mamet and the Taliban surely agree on at least one thing: Hollywood sucks. Mamet has written for the screen, stage, and prose page about how the The Biz is a morally vacant, vacuous confluence of self-serving, sycophantic idiots, but never with more elegance or wit than in Speed the Plow, his 1988 three-hander that’s just been revived in a slick and sharp new production at Theatre J.
Mamet’s acid-tongued script follows 24 or so eventful hours in the life of Bobby Gould, recently promoted to head of production of a movie studio. One fine Southern California morning, his longtime pal Charlie Fox — a guy whose star hasn’t risen as high as Bobby’s, and who is conscious of this fact every waking second of his ladder-climbing life — comes to him with a slam-dunk opportunity: It-boy Dougie Brown has offered to star in a dumb-but-lucrative action picture for Charlie’s studio, if Charlie can persuade his bosses to close the deal by 10 a.m. the next day. Charlie needs Bobby’s clout to keep him from getting fired off the pic without a piece of the pie. But Charlie’s been Bobby’s loyal toady for 11 years — of course his old pal is going to take care of him. Of course. Right?
Image of Peter Birkenhead, Danton Stone, and Meghan Grady in Theatre J’s Speed the Plow.
