Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood
“The book is neither a memoir nor an argument, but rather a scramble of recollections, anecdotes, and pronouncements about the movie business, spiced with off-color jokes and frequent obscenities . . . and illustrated with his crudely drawn cartoons . . .”
Hollywood is both a physical place and a culture—the culture of the movie world, with its heady mix of glamour, envy, wealth, fame, financial risk, and business chicanery. Its unique blend of aspiration/success and failure/disappointment makes it a place both desired and reviled.
David Mamet, a successful and famous playwright, screenwriter, and director, has now given us Everywhere an Oink Oink, his bitter commentary on the film world he has inhabited for over forty years. He subtitles this sardonic work “An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood,” and then proceeds to gleefully bite the hand that has generously fed him over the course of his long career.
The book is neither a memoir nor an argument, but rather a scramble of recollections, anecdotes, and pronouncements about the movie business, spiced with off-color jokes and frequent obscenities (“fuck” and “pussy” are two of Mamet’s favorite words), and illustrated with his crudely drawn cartoons that often ridicule his favorite target, the Suits who try to ruin his movies with their venal stupidity.
The book is arranged into short, discontinuous essays under headings whose meaning is often bafflingly obscure, and that do not provide a reliable guide to the content that will follow. Thus, an essay that opens under the heading “The Centipeep” begins with a reference to Ira Levin’s The Boys From Brazil, segues to Barbra Streisand’s dog, leaps to his experience working with “difficult” actors, and closes with a disquisition on the inborn talents of actors and directors. Mamet carries the reader along this lurching journey in his idiosyncratic style—blunt, cryptic, acerbic, and self-assured to a fault.
Mamet’s bugbears in the world of illusion and make-believe that he loves (cf. his adoration of the magician Ricky Jay), are the money people—the producers, agents, managers, and studio executives who function as parasites on the writers, actors, directors, editors, and craftspeople who actually make movies. This characterization of the management class echoes Thorstein Veblen’s autopsy of corporate America in The Theory of Business Enterprise, in which businessmen are portrayed as predators exploiting the industry and skill of the workers they employ.
When Mamet writes about the people he has worked with on sets during production, and in the editing room during post-production, he puts his cynicism and resentment aside and demonstrates a profound understanding of how cinema creates its effects on an audience, and what these effects are. He writes, “All film is an alteration, not only employing light and sound in the service of fantasy but playing upon our consciousness, such that we accept the manipulation as ‘true tolife.’” He holds craftspeople, actors, and other directors in high esteem, but defers to no one on screenwriting. “Was I arrogant in my fifty years in Show Biz?” he asks rhetorically. “You bet. But only toward my inferiors.”
Readers opening this book hoping to find gossip about celebrities or to encounter scenes of Mamet interacting with his peers will not be disappointed. You can learn from Mamet why Milton Berle’s member was regarded with awe, what obscenity Danny De Vito used to dismiss an obnoxious neighboring diner, or how rude Brian de Palma was during a script meeting. Rest assured that Mamet suffers no fools. Even the Pacific Ocean does not escape his scorn. He finds it “boring” when compared to his provincial Lake Michigan.
Beneath Mamet’s abrasive surface lies a lament for a diminished movie industry and a lost potential for cinema as an art form. “The culture of Hollywood today resembles that of my youth as little as a PTA meeting calls to mind a fire in a whorehouse. Simultaneous with a raid. The workers and the thugs, in my time, were many things, but I do not recall that we were sententious.”
He is especially disgusted by the current fad for diversity, enforced by a Diversity Committee that panders to wokeness, regardless of the damage inflicted on artistic creation. He sees himself as a refugee from a vanished world whose vitality has been irrevocably lost. “Here one finds oneself now, the film and theatrical culture of the twentieth century dead. As the means of distribution have been superseded.”
A new generation of artists in many fields is now reckoning with this new reality, in which a sense of community fed by physical human connection has fractured.