Name: David Mamet on Current State of Hollywood
Uploaded: 2022-04-05T17:08:31.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'David Mamet on Current State of Hollywood' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-04-05. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'David Mamet on Current State of Hollywood' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-04-05. Transcript available.

- The Joe Rogan Experience.
- 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 Rafelson.
Samson Rafelson is famous
'cause he wrote the first talking picture.
- Really?
- That's how close I am to the beginning of Hollywood.
So I got to-- - Wow.
- Yeah, 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, right?
Like when I was, I made a bunch,
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.
So somebody said, okay, you know what, kid?
I like the script.
What's it gonna 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, that doesn't exist anymore.
- It doesn't?
- No, not that I know of.
Because not only did that die,
the movies are dead.
The whole idea of movies was,
I'm gonna get my best gal and my best boy
and blah, blah, blah, and we're gonna go out
on a Friday, Saturday night.
We're gonna sit in the dark,
we're gonna eat popcorn.
And there's the people that are 20 feet high.
They're like gods.
We're gonna 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've thought that Kodak would go out of business?
- Right.
- 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,
oh guys, you know, we have to stop.
There's this other thing now.
- But they are still making some movies.
Like, is it less?
Like, is it overall like a lowered production of films?
Is it?
- 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 it's 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, with William H. Macy and Joe Mantegna
and Dennis Franz and Billy Peterson.
People who became, John Malkovich.
The people who became huge stars.
We just worked in a garage 'cause 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 gonna 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 funders.
Let's take blah, blah, blah.
Those were guys in the garage just like me and John Malkovich
were in the garage.
And all those ideas got adopted by GM, right?
Where they looked at this marvelous invention.
You say, 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 gonna be designing tail lights for 10 years, right?
So where's the individual initiative?
It's not gonna 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 gonna be financially viable,
they don't take any creative choices or chances?
- Well, you know, who wants to make a film
that's not gonna be financial?
- Right.
- Nobody ever did.
You know, sometimes the film was so expensive
it didn't matter anymore.
The bottleneck is the corporation
which controls the high ground
or 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 then there was television, and then the movies,
and 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?
- Mm-hmm. - Okay.
- So somebody, so you say, okay, I wanna,
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, right?
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 mean, whatever you, you know,
I don't, hardcore conservative's 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.
- 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,
I could be the greatest designer
of passenger trains in the world.
- But they are still making independent films, right?
- Yeah, they're a bunch of independent films.
- So how do they get made?
- I don't know.
- You don't know.
- Listen, Herman Melville, right,
he wrote the thing about the big fish.
He 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 different,
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.