Everywhere an Oink Oink
An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood
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- $25.99
Publisher Description
Award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and director David Mamet shares his “smart, addictive, hilarious, and insightful” (Breitbart) tales from his four decades in Hollywood where he worked with some of the biggest names in movies.
David Mamet went to Hollywood on top—a super successful playwright summoned west in 1980 to write a vehicle for Jack Nicholson. He arrived just in time to meet the luminaries of old Hollywood and revel in the friendship of giants like Paul Newman, Mike Nichols, Bob Evans, and Sue Mengers. Over the next forty years, Mamet wrote dozens of scripts, was fired off dozens of movies, and directed eleven himself.
In Everywhere an Oink Oink, he revels of the taut and gag-filled professionalism of the film set. He depicts the ever-fickle studios and producers who piece by piece eat the artists alive. And he ponders the art of filmmaking and the genius of those who made our finest movies. With the bravado and flair of Mamet’s best theatrical work, this memoir describes a world gone by, some of our most beloved film stars with their hair down, and how it all got washed away by digital media and the woke brigade. The book is illustrated throughout with three-dozen of Mamet’s pungent cartoons and caricatures. Everywhere an Oink Oink is “nothing but wicked jokes, angry broadsides, and pointed gossip: in other words, the ideal Hollywood book” (The Wall Street Journal).
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Mamet (Recessional) documents his four decades working "bit by bit, much like a Missionary among cannibals" in Hollywood in this acerbic and entertaining series of anecdotes and sketches accentuated by his bitingly witty cartoons. Arriving in 1980 as a hotshot playwright commissioned to write a screenplay for Bob Rafelson's The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), Mamet witnessed the entertainment industry evolve from "an adventure" ("any next moment" could bring "love, sex, money, fame, artistic challenge, or an encounter with the highwaymen") into a business ravaged by "corporate degeneracy" and policed by "Diversity Commissars." Interspersed throughout are accounts of meeting such greats as Billy Wilder, Sue Mengers, and Bob Evans, as well as contemporary stars including Alec Baldwin, Denzel Washington, and Steve Martin. Elsewhere, Mamet dissects the inner workings of the movie biz, from on-set politics ("Executives have no place.... They don't know what they're looking at") to the ills of filmmaking by committee, which "carries and transmits the age-old immutable lessons of bureaucratic survival." The in-depth commentary on the nuts and bolts of screenwriting are among the most insightful (and least cynical) parts of the book ("the dialogue is of as little concern to a skilled screenwriter as the paint is to the mechanic. When the machine is correctly assembled, the thing can be painted whatever damn color pleases the money guy"). Cineastes will find this irresistible. Illus.
