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“Sharp, savvy. . . . Icily hilarious. . . . Mr. Mamet writes with insight, idiosyncrasy and a Godzillian imperviousness to opposition.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times “Winningly pugnacious. . . . [ Bambi vs. Godzilla ] is funny and angry and intemperate and passionate enough to tell the truth about movies.” — San Francisco Chronicle “This is a book infused with love – the sweet, helpless love Mamet has for film, and the communal process that makes it.” — Los Angeles Times “Playful . . . deft. . . . Mamet the dramatist has developed a career as a prolific philosophical essayist.” — Chicago Sun-Times Informationen zum Autor David Mamet is a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and an Academy Award-nominated screenwriter, 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 is a founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company. Klappentext 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. Hard Work Billy Wilder said it: you know you’re done directing when your legs go. So I reflect at the end of a rather challenging shoot. The shoot included about five weeks of nights, and I have only myself to blame, as I wrote the damn thing. Directing a film, especially during night shooting, has to do, in the main, with the management of fatigue. The body doesn’t want to get up, having had so little sleep; the body doesn’t want to shut down and go to sleep at ten o’clock in the morning. So one spends a portion of each day looking forward to the advent of one’s little friends: caffeine, alcohol, the occasional sleeping pill. The sleeping pill is occasional rather than regular, as one does not wish to leave the shoot addicted. So one recalls Nietzsche: “The thought of suicide is a great comforter. Many a man has spent a sleepless night with it.” One also gets through the day or night through a sense of responsibility to, and through a terror of failing, the workers around one. For folks on a movie set work their butts off. Does no one complain? No one on the crew. The star actor may complain and often does. He is pampered, indulged, and encouraged (indeed paid) to cultivate his lack of impulse control. When the star throws a fit, the crew, ever well-mannered, reacts as does the good parent in the supermarket when the child of another, in the next aisle over, melts down. The crew turns impassive, and the director, myself, views their extraordinary self-control, and thinks, “Thank you, Lord, for the lesson.” The director, the star players, the producer, and the writer are above the line ; everyone else is below . There is a two-tier system in the movies, just as there is in the military. Those abo...
