We kick off the 2025 summer time season of the Crew Name podcast with a candid, wide-ranging dialog with Pulitzer-winning playwright and two-time Oscar nominee David Mamet.
Mamet has directed a brand new film, Henry Johnson, his first in 12 years, based mostly on his 2023 play that premiered in Venice, CA. The pic, which is self-distributed and out there to lease digitally, follows the title character (performed by Mamet’s son-in-law, Evan Jonigkeit), who after serving to a pal out turns into collateral injury and complicit in his intercourse crime affairs. This leads Henry Johnson to jail. He seems to be to authority figures he encounters alongside the best way together with his eventual cellmate, Gene (Shia LaBeouf). Henry’s journey leads him down a street of manipulation and moral uncertainty.
We speak with Mamet in regards to the origins of Henry Johnson, LaBeouf’s chic efficiency (and the way Mamet doesn’t imagine in technique actors), the state of the movement image trade and the way streaming is killing it, and his knowledge in the case of self-distribution.
“Anybody could make a film and distribute it and take their possibilities,” says Mamet. “Your possibilities of folks seeing that film aren’t lower than your possibilities of going to workplaces in Hollywood for 10 years to persuade some f*cking fool to have a look at your work.”
Additionally, it’s been some time since we’ve seen Mamet pen an enormous studio film, ala his earlier occasion films resembling The Untouchables, Hannibal, The Verdict and Ronin. Why? Effectively, when studios need to rent Mamet, they need to comply with his guidelines: “Give me some huge cash and be at liberty to f*ck it up of which I’m going to hell, or give me sufficient cash to get the film made, have me submit my director’s price and go away me alone. Each of this stuff had been acceptable. Solely a kind of issues had been regular, however each them had been acceptable.”
We additionally chat in regards to the buzzed-about feminine stage model of Glengarry Glen Ross (“We did a studying just a few years in the past, Rebecca Pidgeon performed Ricky Roma, and Felicity Huffman performed Shelley Levene); his Harvey Weinstein-inspired play Bitter Wheat and why it by no means made it to Broadway (“Broadway has turn out to be very, very problematical, and it was the peak of the woke madness and the considered doing a comedy about man who was a libertine, as if Moliere by no means existed, was thought not fairly the factor), and what he actually thinks of the now incarcerated mogul.
Additionally, what’s subsequent:
“I’m writing a play for Rebecca about these two ladies who must kill J.Okay. Rowling. I’m writing a screenplay now and I feel I might need discovered some suckers to present me a few bucks to make it, about a few outdated confidence males, who acquired jammed up, and need to resort to some odd measures to take a mark to the cleaners.”
