Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business »

DAVID MAMET is an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright as well as a director, novelist, poet, and essayist. He has written the screenplays for more than twenty films, including Heist, Spartan, House of Games, The Spanish Prisoner, The Winslow Boy, Wag the Dog, and the Oscar-nominated The Verdict. His more than twenty plays include Oleanna, The Cryptogram, Speed-the-Plow, American Buffalo, Sexual Perversity in Chicago, and the Pulitzer Prizewinning Glengarry Glen Ross. Born in Chicago in 1947, Mamet has taught at the Yale School of Drama, New York University, and Goddard College, and he lectures at the Atlantic Theater Company, of which he is a founding member. He lives in Santa Monica, California.

From the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and playwright: an exhilaratingly subversive inside look at Hollywood from a filmmaker who’s always played by his own rules.

Who really reads the scripts at the film studios? How is a screenplay like a personals ad? Why are there so many producers listed in movie credits? And what on earth do those producers do anyway? Refreshingly unafraid to offend, Mamet provides hilarious, surprising, and refreshingly forthright answers to these and other questions about every aspect of filmmaking from concept to script to screen. A bracing, no-holds-barred examination of the strange contradictions of Tinseltown, Bambi vs. Godzilla dissects the movies with Mamet’s signature style and wit.

The New York Times - Janet Maslin

… most of this sharp, savvy book is amusing and reassuring. Somebody with a keen knowledge of gamesmanship knows exactly how Hollywood s games are played. And refuses to play by the rules.

Introduction     xi
The Good People of Hollywood
Hard Work     3
Producers     8
Victims and Villains     13
Jews in Show Business     19
The Development Process; or, Learning to Make Nothing at All!     23
The Repressive Mechanism
A Dark Comedy     33
An American Tragedy     37
An Understanding and a Misunderstanding of the Repressive Mechanism     42
Corruption     46
The Screenplay
How to Write a Screenplay     51
Character, Plot, Dialogue, Camera Angles, Advice to the Editor     56
Helpful Hints on Screenwriting     61
The Script     69
Women, Writing For     72
How Scripts Got So Bad     77
Begging Letters     81
(Secret Bonus Chapter) The Three Magic Questions     84
Technique
Storytelling: Some Technical Advice     89
Learning by Doing     93
Improvisation     102
The Slate Piece     107
The Wisdom of the Ancients     110
Some Principles
The Audience; or, Lessons from Duck Hunting     119
Aesthetic Distance     123
The Five-Gag Film     126
Bringing aGun to a Knife Fight; or, A Short Tour of the Concept of Suspension of Disbelief     132
Genre
Bang-Bang     139
The Cop Movie     142
Film Noir and He-Men     145
Shadow of a Doubt     151
Religious Films     153
The Sequel     158
Passing Judgment
Reverence as Opposed to Love     165
Great and Rotten Acting     169
Good in the Room: Auditions and the Fallacy of Testing     174
Critics     183
The Critic and the Censor     186
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Manners in Hollywood     191
Theft     195
Two Great American Documents; or, In the Wake of the Oscars     198
Conclusion: It Ain't Over Till It's Over     202
Films Referenced     207
Index     239