David Mamet on Current State of Hollywood

To a large extent you don't know, for example, if in Hollywood, I wrote my first movie, I think 1979, and the guy who gave me notes on the movie was a guy called Samson Raffleson. Samson Raffleson is famous because he wrote the first talking picture. That's how close I am to the beginning of Hollywood. So I got to enjoy like 40 years of the great adventure of the movie business. But the movies that I made aren't getting made anymore. A. What kind of movies? Well, independent films. When I was, I wrote 30 films for hire and I directed like 12 films, which I also wrote. But in those days there was still a little bit of independence. Somebody said, okay, you know what, kid, I like the script. What's it going to cost? Four million bucks. Okay, good. Here's four million bucks, go make the movie and I'll sell it to blah, blah. So that was independent film. That doesn't exist anymore. It doesn't? No, not that I know of. Not only did that die, the movies are dead. The whole idea of movies was I'm going to get my best gal and my best boy and blah, blah, blah. We're going to go out on a Friday, Saturday night. We're going to sit in the dark. We're going to eat popcorn. And there's the people that are 20 feet high. They're like gods. We're going to have the best possible time. And if I don't like that movie, I'll see another movie, blah, blah, blah. But now the movies are being played on this, right? And the movies have become so corporate, you know, just like Twitter, that all the decisions, they aren't being made by some, you know, the people I grew up with, you know, ancient Jews like me smoking a cigar. I said, yeah, it seems like a good idea. Go make it. They're being made by 30 people sitting around a board table, you know, playing silly buggers and pig Latin with each other's pronouns. Right? I get it. You know, things mature and things die. Who would have thought that Kodak would go out of business? They had this magnificent hegemony. They made this little product that cost them nothing. And the more people used it, the more they had to use it. So who would Kodak would say 15 years ago, guys, you know, we have to stop. There's this other thing now. But they are still making some movies. Is it less? Like, is it overall like a lowered production of films? No, no, the problem is always in who holds the high ground? Right? Who holds the passes controls the commerce? Who owns the railroads controls the commerce? Who owns the blah, blah, blah? Who owns Twitter controls the commerce? So the suits at these movies? Sure. They own the high ground. So when I was starting out in the theater, I had a blessing. I started out in a garage, you know, William H. Macy and Joe Mantegna and Dennis Franz and Billy Peterson. People became John Malkovich. The people became huge stars. We just were working in a garage because we could. And then we eventually moved to Broadway and got some credibility because we could. But if you can't, if you can only start off by entering at the corporate level, what are you going to do? For example, the people who made the chop shops in Southern California, right, they took cars and they said, wow, this would be a good idea. Let's take the blazer and cut the roof off. I tell you what, let's take this Jeep and raise the fenders. Let's take blah, blah, blah. Those were guys in a garage just like me and John Malkovich were in a garage and all those ideas got adopted by GM, right, where they looked at this marvelous invention and said, well, that's a good idea. I'll do that. And so this year, last year, Ford bought out another Bronco. But if you take a degree in automotive design and get hired by Ford, you're going to be designing tail lights for 10 years, right? So where's the individual initiative? It's not going to exist, as Milton Friedman says, until you give the people with inspiration a reason to reveal it. It's kind of a brilliant thing to say. So what's the bottleneck? Is the bottleneck financial? Is it just too expensive to make films so that they try to make a film that's only going to be financially viable and they don't take any creative choices or chances? You know, who wants to make a film that's not going to be financial? The other did. You know, sometimes the chance the film was so expensive, it didn't matter anymore. The bottleneck is the corporation which controls the high ground, the method of distribution. That's the bottleneck. And okay, over 100 years, Vaudeville died and then there was radio and then radio died and there was television and then the movies and then television, then the television drove out the movies, the movies are dead and television becomes streaming. So the method of distribution, I hate to sound like a Marxist, is determining the content, right? So you say, okay, I want to, rather than saying, honey, let's go out and see if there's anything with Clint Eastwood in it. You say, no, no, no, I bought a subscription, right? What's on my subscription series? What can I get on Netflix? So they're turning out sausages. Of course they are. But the movies were turning out sausages too to the largest extent. I just had a good time making them. So I'm still trying to figure out like what's this leap that you're making to being like this hardcore conservative or whatever you are? Well I don't, the leap is- I don't, the hardcore conservative is wrong. The leap is I have to be able to understand. So your business doesn't exist in the way that it existed when you were coming up and making your great films? For me. For you. Yeah. Because the other thing is, I was 22 years old, I don't want to work with grandpa. Right. I get it, right? Even the young people have a chance to have their day, the technology changed, doesn't do any good, you know, to be the greatest designer of passenger trains in the world. But they are still making independent films, right? Yeah, a bunch of independent films. So how do they get made? I don't know. You don't know. Listen, Herman Melvo, right, wrote the thing about the big fish, wrote a book about a big fish, Moby Dick, you remember him? Yes. So he says, the first thing he says in the book is there's no difference. He says the greatest disparity in the world is between the people who are looking for work and the people who are looking for help. Right? So the people looking for help are always saying Jesus Christ, I can't get good help. And the people looking for work says I can't get a job. So, yeah, that's a great question. I think that's a great question. I think that's a great question. I think that's a great question. I think that's a great question. I think that's a great question. I think that's a great question. I think that's a great question. I think that's a great question. I think that's a great question. I think that's a great question. I think that's a great question. 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