Pun Salad

I guess I've been on a David Mamet kick over the past few days. I linked his Free Press article (with a title I won't share with the sensitive souls at Goodreads). That caused me to rent Heist, a movie he made back in 2001. All that concurrent with reading this book.

The main takeaway I had from the book: Gee, showbiz folks sure do talk dirty. It is the polar opposite of "polite company".

Mamet discourses on his moviemaking memories, and the colorful characters he's met along the way. (And movies he's seen and, mostly, admired.) It's a series of short chapters, and I'm not sure if there's a coherent theme in any of them. Each has the feel of a transcribed oral stream-of-consciousness monologue. This sounds like a criticism, but it's not; Mamet is interesting even when I can't follow exactly what he's talking about.

Lots of anecdotes, my favorite being the one about Don Rickles and Frank Sinatra. Page 65.

It also contains numerous Mamet-drawn cartoons, all funny, some laugh-out-loud funny.

Mamet may be (see his subtitle) embittered and dyspeptic, but that seems to be directed mainly at anyone in the credits with the word "producer" in the title. For everyone else in the biz, he's mostly complimentary, and sometimes laudatory.