"Bambi vs. Godzilla" | The people who need this book probably won't read it

"Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie Business"
by David Mamet
Pantheon, 288 pp., $22

This is the time of year when everyone who is anyone in Hollywood gathers around the campfire that is the Oscars to hear glowing stories about themselves and bask in the toasty warmth of the world they inhabit.

What a perfect time for David Mamet to come along and slap them all down.

An actor at the Oscars, Mamet writes, "agrees to fawn and pant in return for a pat on the head. This, of course, is the reason for the Oscars' success as entertainment: The audience gets to see their oppressors brought low."

This and other deeply cynical words of movieland wisdom can be found in Mamet's "Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie Business."

Mamet, a Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright (for "Glengarry Glen Ross") and Tony and Oscar nominee, has published 43 essays, many of them reprinted or rewritten from his column in Britain's The Guardian newspaper. They offer a running commentary on the movie business from the inside, with anger but no artifice.

In Mamet's mind-set, the film industry is a nightmare for self-respecting writers; they routinely are oppressed, disdained, forced to toe the line and then criticized for doing just that, rendering themselves interchangeable.

He reserves his deepest contempt for studio structures that place unimaginative producers at the top of a creatively vacant hierarchy, and he heaps scorn on narcissistic above-the-line stars: "The star actor may complain and often does. He is pampered, indulged and encouraged (indeed paid) to cultivate his lack of impulse control."

Mamet expresses great fondness for directors, writers and, especially, the unheralded crew, who only want to work together to do their best. But he admits that Hollywood is largely a hopeless sinkhole of conform-or-die. In this, Mamet's biting dismissiveness can be very funny.

On summer blockbusters: "The very vacuousness of these films is reassuring, for they ratify for the viewer the presence of a repressive mechanism, and offer momentary reprieve from anxiety with this thought: 'Enough money spent can cure anything. You are a member of a country, a part of a system capable of wasting $200 million on an hour and a half's worth of garbage. You must be somebody.' The same mechanism operates equally in the Defense Department."

And on mainstream movies with little personality: "Just as the personal ad is written not to attract anyone specifically but only to avoid exclusion, the 'lazy Sunday mornings' screenplay strives to appeal to all — or to those who think it might appeal to all. In this it also resembles a political speech, written to lull and, by its soporific cadence and vocabulary, to allow the listener to intuit whatever the hell she wants."

In spite of all this, one thing is clear: When it comes to well-made movies, Mamet is a man in love. He understands them with the passion of not just a writer, director and insider but of a lifelong connoisseur. (This makes his contempt for critics seem hypocritical; he is one himself, whether or not he draws a paycheck doing it.) His fandom isn't snobbish, either; he calls "Galaxy Quest" a "perfect" film.

Mamet understands politics and film history, too, and puts his own spin on time-weary themes: "The McCarthy era ran quite a bit of the show business out of show business, and we were left with 'Pillow Talk'."

One wonders, at the end of the book, how a guy as brainy as Mamet could be making a living in a world ruled by the lowest intellectual denominator. Indeed, when he tosses around words like tocsin, apercu, tropism, maculate, condign, solecism, meeching, forfend and hermetic syllogism, one wonders if anyone in La La Land understands Mamet at all.

This is the chief irony of this book. Development executives and producers really should read this book and learn from it, but Mamet's piercing intelligence probably will alienate those who make a lot of money by dumbing things down.

The book will find its most ardent readers outside of the industry, people who like engaging their brains but who are in no position to do anything but shake their heads and sigh.

Susan Dunne is a staff writer for the Hartford Courant.