American Buffaloer

David Mamet didn't stand a chance in Hollywood. His Samuel Beckett-influenced plays hacked back plot to an ominous implication, pared each nobody's thought to an elliptical repetitive essence and anguished common English. Take the rants in Obie-winner American Buffalo (1976) about a botched rare-coin heist: "What are we saying here? Loyalty. (Pause.) You know how I am on this. This is great. This is admirable.... This loyalty. This is swell.... All I mean, a guy can be too loyal, Don.... What are we saying here? Business.... Loyalty does not mean shit in a situation like this!"

Like his hero Theodore Dreiser, Mamet works out his characters' scummy scams in their own sweet time ("Midwestern legato," he calls it) and mutant demotic tongue. It was all wrong for movies: the half-comprehensible compression, the unadmirable characters, the habit of following words wherever they plotlessly led.

So movie men screwed him at first. They rewrote his scabrous 1974 play Sexual Perversity in Chicago as 1986's simpering flick About Last Night. But scalawag director Bob Rafelson saw the pre-castrated play and hired him to write The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981). Mamet abruptly got it: movies want plot and genre straitjackets. Postman hit big, then The Verdict (1982). Rewritten again on The Untouchables (1987), Mamet got even by satirizing Hollywood in Broadway's savage Speed-the-Plow (1988). (Increasingly rich, he skewered it with increasing affection in 1997's Wag the Dog and 2000's State and Main.) His directing debut, the card-sharp drama House of Games (1987), fused classic noir with his own brand of con. He got so much clout that his career capstone play, Glengarry Glen Ross, made it unscathed to film. The 1996 movie American Buffalo almost did too, weighed down by Dustin Hoffman's stagey ego, but with Mamet's words intact.

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