Episode 898 - David Mamet
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what the fucksters what's happening what the fucking ux where's everybody at how you doing what's going on everything all right today you'll hear me talk to david mamet
Marc:And there was some stuff going on with me that day.
Marc:Before I forget, I also want to tell you that our friend Brian Jones has a new batch of cat mugs that you can get.
Marc:These are the hand-thrown ceramic mugs that I give to my guests.
Marc:They've got the original cat logo artwork from our buddy Dima.
Marc:Classics.
Marc:You can go to brianrjones.com slash shop to get yours.
Marc:brianrjones.com slash shop for the new cat mugs.
Marc:He always does a little bit of a twist on them.
Marc:They're all unique, every one of them, and each batch seems to be unique.
Marc:I got a thing for ceramics.
Marc:And I like ceramics.
Marc:I like practical ceramics.
Marc:I actually went to a place down on Eagle Rock Boulevard that never looked open some sort of ceramic studio and hoped that I could find some large bowls and things to put on tables and surfaces in my new house.
Marc:But I did not find anything.
Marc:Ceramics is tricky.
Marc:It's hard to find the right ceramic art.
Marc:I met someone after the show in Pasadena who is a ceramicist, a thrower of pots, a thrower of plates, a thrower of clay, a wheel worker.
Marc:I got to get back to her and see if there's anything there that I want to get.
Marc:Yeah, I've stalled out.
Marc:I've stalled out, folks.
Marc:Like the garage is starting to be moved piecemeal.
Marc:I'm going to leave some of it intact for when I show the house.
Marc:And I'm still working in here.
Marc:I'm still stalled.
Marc:I've stalled over at the other place.
Marc:There's things that need to be done.
Marc:I'm not doing.
Marc:Yeah, I'm just not.
Marc:I've got to reengage with the process of doing my house over there or else I'm just going to be living in a half done house, sort of half empty.
Marc:It'd be sad.
Marc:It'd be a sad story.
Marc:A sad story of a guy that made the big move and realized he's more like a cat in a box than a guy that relishes and excites in the space, more space situation.
Marc:Spending a lot of time in the den, which is the only room that is really kind of thoroughly done over there at the new place.
Marc:It's basically a scale replica of my living room at this house.
Marc:And that's where I'm doing a lot.
Marc:There's the guitars, the records are in there, and the TV, and...
Marc:Yeah, I got to get going.
Marc:I got to do some stuff, man.
Marc:It's got to happen.
Marc:So...
Marc:David Mamet is here.
Marc:I mean, that was a pretty big day for me.
Marc:Yeah, I find him intimidating.
Marc:And, you know, politically, he's a bit over the top in terms of... And I try to stay away from that and keep it.
Marc:But also, you know, his opinions about theater and about acting are also kind of provocative.
Marc:And I was... Well, I was a little ill.
Marc:So...
Marc:mamet has a novel out that quite honestly i did not have time to read all of it because i figured i could talk to david mamet about other things like writing plays writing screenplays directing uh acting there was plenty to talk to him about what i did not anticipate
Marc:was that I would be ill the day that it happened.
Marc:It was in the middle of my sickness.
Marc:I didn't want to cop to it.
Marc:I didn't really want to get him sick.
Marc:I didn't know how sick I really was, but I needed to go through with it.
Marc:It's not right, but he was coming all the way from... Here's the deal.
Marc:He was coming all the way from fucking Santa Monica, and I woke up that morning, and I'm like, I'm a little not right.
Marc:I'm a little feverish, I think, even.
Marc:But I didn't really know how to get through to him because I think we did it on a weekend even, if that's possible.
Marc:I think it was a weekend.
Marc:Was it?
Marc:I think it was.
Marc:Maybe a Saturday.
Marc:And, you know, there was no way.
Marc:There was no way for me to get to him.
Marc:He probably already left.
Marc:Maybe it was a Friday.
Marc:I don't know.
Marc:It was early.
Marc:Whatever the case, I decided to soldier through and not let on.
Marc:And I got in here and I was very woozy.
Marc:And quite frankly, I started sweating profusely during the first 15 or 20 minutes where I had to dab my face.
Marc:with a Kleenex, with a dishrag I brought in here.
Marc:I brought a dishrag with me to dab my face because I was dripping sweat.
Marc:I don't know if he noticed or he thought I was nervous or what, but I felt bad and I hope he didn't get sick.
Marc:And also...
Marc:I like Mamet's writing a lot.
Marc:There's a couple of screenplays that he's written that I love.
Marc:I remember seeing American Buffalo with Al Pacino in Boston, and I just was blown away by it.
Marc:And Glenn Ross, who doesn't love that play?
Marc:And also, I was sort of fascinated with him, too, because my...
Marc:First ex-wife was a student at the Atlantic Company, and I remember reading the handbook for actors and writing in restaurants, which I was in Harvard Square.
Marc:I remember buying it.
Marc:This was before I was married, actually, when I read writing in restaurants.
Marc:I liked his concise sort of way of writing, and I liked some of the thoughts he had philosophically, but I was sort of at odds with him about acting.
Marc:And then when my wife was enrolled in the Atlantic, just the way that it was very practical.
Marc:Everything's very practical.
Marc:And I just realized that, you know, he's got this disposition.
Marc:He's sort of a worker, you know, a sort of, you know, alpha Jew kind of work.
Marc:You know, you just kind of sit down, you do it, you just do it.
Marc:You say the lines, you write the sentence.
Marc:So I found him to be sort of impressive and very different than me.
Marc:I'm not making any excuses, but I was sweaty and and a bit lethargic.
Marc:But I was excited to talk to David Mamet, and I think we got along all right.
Marc:I even reached out to his old friend Jonathan Katz, the comedian who you know as Dr. Katz, who I've had on the show here before just to sort of get a pulse, get a sense, get an insight.
Marc:But ultimately, it is what it is, and I enjoy talking to David Mamet.
Marc:So, yeah.
Marc:i just remember man going to see that production of al pacino and uh in american buffalo and i just there's some things about plays and i talked to tracy let's about it's like where does it come from where does the language what is the flow you know how does that happen does it all mean something does it not you know how does theater work how does a play work i you know i never written one i i i
Marc:I wrote a one act many years ago, but it was straight up shtick.
Marc:I wrote it with Steve Brill.
Marc:Going Down, it was called.
Marc:It was about some aliens who come down to Earth to find the new Jesus.
Marc:You know, it was what it was.
Marc:It was mostly jokes.
Marc:There are these fantasies I have that, you know, I'll write a play or I'll write a movie.
Marc:And it seems like, why not do it?
Marc:You know, I'm at a level where maybe I could get it done.
Marc:Maybe, maybe not.
Marc:Maybe I'm too scared.
Marc:I'm too vulnerable or I'm too like, you know, you don't want to put it out there.
Marc:But I don't know if that's it.
Marc:I really just think it's about being daunted by following through with the task.
Marc:Shouldn't there be joy in it?
Marc:I'm not sure, man.
Marc:There's nothing but struggle in the creativity that I've experienced.
Marc:There's joy when things work or come to fruition or kind of start making sense or kind of come into the form, start to evolve.
Marc:Then you're like, oh yeah, all those years of doing this shit, look at that, showing up in the output.
Marc:Yeah, I'm going to do it.
Marc:I'm going to do something.
Marc:You wait.
Marc:I'm going to do something.
Marc:But right now, what I'm going to do is share my conversation with David Mamet with you.
Marc:His new novel, Chicago, is available now wherever you get books.
Marc:The funny story about your glasses.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Marc:These guys?
Marc:Yeah, dude.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Marc:I I saw you I used to do I started doing comedy in Boston Harvard Square I used to see at the cigar store Oh working up top.
Marc:Yeah, what was the name of that place?
Guest:Oh, I'm gonna remember two names.
Marc:Yeah, yeah, Leonard and Pierce, right?
Marc:So I used to go in there and I'd see you working up there and I saw you walking around with these sunglasses on that with those frames Yeah, and for 20 years I had to I tried to find those fucking things because you were wearing them and
Marc:And I ran into some guy at the Y here in LA that was wearing them.
Marc:I said, what the hell are those?
Marc:And I don't know if they're the same, but like these are the ones, but they're not quite the same, are they?
Marc:Oh my goodness.
Guest:No, but that's... Close, right?
Guest:Very much flattered.
Guest:These guys were like my fifth iteration.
Guest:I lost those guys and I was devastated.
Guest:And so I was at the synagogue and I saw a guy who had these glasses on.
Guest:Those ones.
Guest:I can't find him anymore.
Guest:And he sent them to me.
Marc:At synagogue.
Marc:How often do you go to synagogue?
Guest:Every week.
Marc:Yeah?
Marc:Yeah, sure.
Marc:You know, it's interesting.
Marc:Where'd you go?
Marc:You grew up in Chicago, right?
Marc:But how Jewish were you?
Guest:Oh, we were kind of like Episcopal Reform.
Guest:I mean, it was extraordinary because my grandparents all came from...
Guest:from Poland.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my grandmother came from a little town called Chubicew and they were all Orthodox because the Eastern European Jews, that's all there was was Orthodox.
Guest:Right.
Guest:The assimilationists, you know, they went to Germany.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And all of a sudden they moved over here and my dad had us going to these, it was called St.
Guest:Sinai by the lake.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was Sinai Temple.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Rabbi was called Dr. Mann.
Guest:And I mean, nobody wore a yarmulke, let alone the tallis.
Guest:Anybody that's shown up with a tallis, they would have burned him at the stake.
Marc:So that was the reform, like the reform was already happening when you were a kid?
Guest:Very much, very much so.
Guest:Reform movement?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That was Jews trying to pass.
Guest:Yeah, it was Jews trying to pass, exactly so.
Guest:But I read this book years later by a guy called Arthur Hertzberg called Jews in America, a really great book.
Guest:And what happened was my dad's father deserted the family.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just left them.
Guest:So here they are.
Guest:It's 1923.
Guest:A single mother, two kids, the depression, not the depression, but she didn't even speak English very well.
Guest:And she raised them all by herself and nobody ever spoke about it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Never mentioned.
Guest:The old man just left.
Guest:Just left.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So Hertzberg says the dark secret of the Ashkenazi immigration was more than a quarter of the men just left.
Yeah.
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So I ask other people and they say it's a common story, but nobody ever talked about it.
Guest:So the other thing he says was it was the men who took the kids to the synagogue.
Guest:It wasn't the women, it was the men.
Guest:So the men left, the kids didn't get to the synagogue, so the kids had no...
Guest:When they came to this country had no religious upbringing.
Guest:Why'd they leave?
Guest:I mean, they couldn't stand it I mean here they were, you know, they're burdened with the wife and several kids.
Guest:They can't make a living.
Guest:Nobody speaks English.
Guest:Oh, because they're immigrants, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Okay, so and oh, so they were embarrassed.
Guest:Shame.
Guest:Shame and cowardice.
Guest:I mean, I don't want to indict.
Guest:Who knows in any case.
Marc:Indict your grandfather?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like I was at some amusement park and there's a guy with a sweatshirt.
Guest:He said, I'm not a stepfather.
Guest:I'm a father who stepped up.
Guest:And, you know, those of us who have kids, you know, sometimes it's tough.
Guest:But when you were growing, like how many kids in your family?
Guest:There was me and my sister and then we had a couple of stepchildren from the various families that we had.
Guest:were farmed out to.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:So, you come from a broken home?
Guest:Oh, yeah, it was shattered.
Guest:Yeah, it was interesting.
Guest:But the other thing talking about the Ashkenazi dads who left was my prince got divorced in 1958.
Guest:That didn't seem to happen in 1958.
Guest:No, it didn't.
Guest:Nobody knew.
Guest:I mean, it must have happened, but nobody ever spoke about this.
Guest:Huge shame.
Guest:perhaps even a scandal in the Jewish community.
Guest:So there was that to grow.
Marc:But like when, like, I guess I'm curious because I was brought up, you know, Jewish, conservative Jew.
Marc:And I know that you made, you know, you changed your, you became more committed at some point.
Yeah.
Marc:What was the catharsis that leads to that?
Guest:Well, this is a very good question.
Guest:The catharsis, my wife, Rebecca, I got married to Rebecca about 91, right?
Guest:Second wife.
Guest:Second wife, right.
Guest:And I call her my birth wife, okay?
Guest:Why is that?
Guest:Well, because I'm crazy about her.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:I don't know what I was doing the first time, but I did it.
Guest:I got a couple nice kids out of it.
Guest:So anyway, and she's so...
Guest:Her parents, a family on one side had been Jewish a couple generations back, but they grew up, her dad's a physicist, her mom's a yoga teacher.
Guest:They grew up kind of nothing in Edinburgh, Scotland.
Guest:No religious affiliation, whatever.
Guest:So she started questioning me about, oh, we're going to get married, we're going to have a religious ceremony.
Guest:And so coming from a completely assimilationist background, you know, being a red diaper baby, I said, oh, why?
Guest:She said, well, why not?
Guest:So we started talking to a wonderful rabbi named Larry Kushner outside of Boston.
Guest:And he said, okay, Rebecca, you're going to convert immediately.
Guest:And she said, well, wait a second.
Guest:Isn't it the Jewish tradition?
Guest:Because she reads everything that the rabbi is supposed to pull with one hand and push with the other hand.
Guest:He said, it may be the Jewish tradition.
Guest:It's not my tradition.
Guest:So you're going to convert.
Guest:You're going to have a Jewish wedding.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So she converted?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, there we went on a pre-wedding trip.
Guest:We're in Israel.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we were both studying from the, you know, I didn't read any Hebrew at that time.
Guest:We're both studying to for... So, because she was converting, you got involved.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because she went to a whole bunch of classes called, it was just a wonderful movement, called Jews by Choice or Judaism for people who'd like to convert and learn about Judaism.
Guest:So, I started going to these classes with her.
Guest:I realized I didn't know a thing.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so then we started, Larry Kushner, such a great rabbi, we started going every week.
Guest:She had her bat mitzvah.
Guest:And so Larry Kushner said, you know, you'd be a lot happier if you learned how to read Hebrew.
Guest:So he said, oh my gosh, you know, it's so difficult.
Guest:He said, no, it's really simple.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:We learned how to read the Hebrew and we got really interested in Judaism and in the Torah and in the language.
Guest:Then we moved out here to Los Angeles and we met a complete genius, a guy named Mordechai Finley, who's our rabbi now.
Guest:So we're crazy about him.
Marc:But as a young man, when you were coming up, did you have a belief in God?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:That's a very good question.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I think I must have because I started scratching the surface and I said, I've kind of always understood that God exists.
Guest:I questioned my own existence.
Guest:I knew God was there.
Guest:I questioned whether I was here.
Guest:And if I was here, why?
Guest:So the next question would be, what kind of a God on an off day would create somebody like me?
Guest:So that was kind of my entry to...
Guest:To religion.
Marc:A classic existential question.
Guest:I think so.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, it's well documented.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So anyway, so we moved out here.
Guest:And one of the reasons we moved is Larry Kushner left the community Sudbury outside of Boston.
Guest:And we went, oh boo hoo.
Guest:You know, we ain't got a rabbi.
Guest:So, we moved out here and everybody said, well, okay, there's this shul, there's this shul, that synagogue.
Guest:And then there's this other guy who is an ex-marine and grew up in Compton in a black neighborhood.
Guest:And he's not like anything you've ever met before.
Guest:So, he said, well, okay, let's check that out.
Guest:And you're at his temple?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, that's the word of Istanbul.
Marc:And is it orthodox, conservative, what is it?
Guest:Well, he calls it kind of neo-reformadox.
Guest:But he's a very interesting guy.
Guest:He's really a Talmud Chochem.
Guest:He knows all the literature inside out.
Guest:A lot of Israelis are there.
Guest:After the morning study and so forth on Saturday, a lot of times he'll take them aside and he'll just talk to them in Hebrew.
Guest:But he's a Hasid.
Guest:He's trying to figure out.
Guest:I always say that there's only one question in life, right?
Guest:The question was formulated by the greatest of all philosophers, Daffy Duck.
Guest:And the question is, Faye, what's going on here anyway?
Guest:In fact, I came out here to visit you in Jehovah'sville today, and I said, well, I got some time afterward.
Guest:What's near here that I wouldn't go to regularly?
Guest:And what'd you find?
Guest:Forest Lawn Cemetery.
Guest:I thought, well, I should go and visit Mel Blanc's grave.
Guest:and put a stone on Mel Blanc's grave.
Guest:Are you going over there?
Guest:I might.
Marc:Sure, why not go to the source?
Marc:So you grow up in Chicago, and where does theater start for you?
Guest:Well, that's a great question.
Guest:The first thing was my uncle, Henry, my dad's brother, was one of the two kids came over from Rush.
Guest:In fact, he was born in Poland.
Guest:So you're Russian-Polish?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Me too, yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:From my grandmother used to call it the Russian Poland, which is also known as Volhynia.
Guest:And it was the Ukraine, you know.
Guest:So, one year would be Russia, next year would be Poland.
Guest:So, on her passport and on my mother's side, on their passport, it says Warsaw, Russia.
Guest:And on theirs, it says Kubitsch, Russia.
Guest:So, my uncle came back.
Guest:He was in the army.
Guest:He was in the Battle of the Bulge.
Guest:And he came back and he was an actor and blah, blah, blah.
Guest:So, he started working for the Chicago Board of Rabbis as their director of entertainment.
Guest:Imagine that.
Guest:Yiddish theater?
Guest:No, it was like what they used to call the God Ghetto, right?
Guest:It was 6.30 a.m.
Guest:on Sunday morning, radio shows and television shows.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:And so, my sister, and I didn't have any actors, so my sister and I at age like 7, 8, 9, started doing these shows for him, portraying Jewish children.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Typecasting exactly so okay, so that's where you start show business.
Marc:Yeah, absolutely I was it was a kid actor.
Marc:Yeah, but what about when you know as you got older what what compelled you to?
Marc:To start expressing yourself like in you know through plays and whatnot.
Guest:What did you see that how it would work?
Guest:Well, I think the answer was best given and most conclusively given by Stanislavski, who said, that's where the pretty girls are.
Guest:So, there was that.
Guest:And so, then I started off in what they called, at that point, they called it community theater.
Guest:In Chicago.
Guest:In Chicago.
Marc:You didn't get involved with the, like, because there's always a good tradition of improv and sketch and stuff there, the second compass player, Second City.
Guest:Well, that was after that, but I started getting involved with the community theater, this guy called Bob Sickinger, who kind of worked at Hull House, and he created this magnificent theater.
Guest:You know, instead of doing the House of Bernardo Alba and the women, he was doing the Brig, and he was doing Three Penny Opera.
Guest:It was fucking great.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And then I became friendly with the family that owned Second City in Chicago, and so I started as a kid, like,
Guest:15, 16, working at Second City as a busboy.
Guest:So I'm working at Second City and seeing, you know, three shows a night.
Guest:Who was there then?
Guest:Like, who was there?
Guest:Were you a kid?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I'll tell you who was there.
Guest:It was Peter Boyle, David Steinberg, Fred Willard,
Guest:Bob Klein, Mina Cole, Judy Grobart, Bill Matthew played the piano, Fred Kast played the piano.
Guest:And I'm going to forget a few, but they were great.
Guest:Robert Klein?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He was there?
Marc:I think it was his first gig.
Guest:Wow.
Marc:Peter Boyle.
Marc:So it was the same, it was improvisation, comedic improvisation mostly?
Guest:Yeah, it was comedic improvisation.
Guest:So what they would do is they would, a lot of the stuff they'd work off stage and then come up and so a lot of it was bait and switch.
Guest:They'd say to the audience, give us an idea and then the audience would say,
Guest:and they'd remember they got a sketch that something like that.
Guest:So I was exposed to the whole idea of a seven-minute scene with a payoff, which was extraordinarily influential in me because that's what every scene's got to be.
Guest:You know, if you look at...
Guest:What passes for a lot of improv comedy, though, some of it's pretty funny, but it doesn't have a punchline.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You mean like sketch comedy?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It just dwindles off.
Guest:Yeah, like sketch comedy and like a Saturday night.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:They just dial it out.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But you can't write, but what Second City said, they had to have an out.
Marc:Yeah, that was the idea.
Marc:You got a beginning with the suggestion, then you riff and then you got to have that.
Guest:Yeah, exactly so.
Guest:You got to get off stage.
Guest:So, that really taught me a lot about drama because if the scene doesn't have an ending, there's no reason to go on to the next scene.
Guest:The reason you go on to the next scene in a play is because the first scene didn't work.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Somebody found out something that made them go on to the next scene.
Marc:Right.
Marc:You can't just have nothing happen.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Then what's the point?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Before I forget, Jonathan Katz wanted me to ask you, how's your table game?
Marc:Tell him it's none of his fucking business.
Marc:I don't know what that is, but I'll take it.
Guest:Well, Jonathan Katz was in my first play I ever wrote.
Guest:We were at college together and I wrote a series of sketches influenced by Second City called Camel and they featured Jonathan Katz.
Guest:Really?
Guest:So, you knew Jonathan Katz in college?
Guest:Oh, I've known him for 50 plus years.
Guest:And you guys are still good?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, we talk every week.
Guest:We text each other gags, jokes back and forth.
Marc:Oh, that's great.
Marc:Oh, so did Second City had that much of an impact on you that you structured some of your first theater stuff around?
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:That structure, Seven Minute Bits?
Guest:Yeah, because I didn't know anything about a play, except the only thing I knew about a play was most of the plays I saw at the Government Theater in Chicago were unwatchable bullshit.
Guest:Like what?
Guest:Like classic ones?
Guest:Yeah, like classic ones, because they had...
Guest:At that time in the 60s, there were two things happening, three things happening in Chicago.
Guest:In the United States in theater, there was Broadway, and then there were the road companies of the Broadway shows.
Guest:That was one.
Guest:The second was community theater, which is, you know, people getting together in amateur theatricals.
Guest:And the third one was there were a couple of theaters that were cesspits of culture.
Marc:Yeah, which means what?
Guest:Well, they did... Hippy shit?
Guest:No, no, quite the contrary.
Guest:They did really accept... You know, it's like people go to the theater in Los Angeles.
Guest:They go like they're going to the dentist.
Guest:You know, it's been six months.
Guest:I really should go.
Marc:Right, right.
Marc:Like subscription people.
Guest:Yeah, old people.
Guest:Yeah, so they're like 70-year-old gray old Jews like myself.
Guest:You know, who come and the guys are looking at their watch and the women are thinking about whatever they're thinking about.
Marc:It's like a social responsibility.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Exactly so.
Guest:Which is very much, I think, part of the Jewish tradition.
Guest:Because I don't think anybody but Jews goes to the theater.
Guest:Very much in the Jewish tradition of reform.
Guest:I'm going to do it.
Guest:I hate it.
Guest:But I'm going to do it because it's good for me.
Guest:But there's something to be said for that.
Guest:I don't think so.
Guest:Because it's my racket.
Guest:That's my racket.
Guest:I get it.
Guest:What I get to make a living from doing is keeping the asses in the seats.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Other people could do something else, like they could put on a play that say, do you like this play or do you hate black people?
Guest:Do you like this play or you hate gay people?
Guest:That's a different racket.
Guest:That's not what I do for a living.
Guest:I mean, I could do it, but it would be wrong.
Right.
Marc:Well, I mean, the idea that people go, they force themselves to go to engage in culture because they think it's good for them is not a horrible thing.
Guest:No, I disagree with you.
Guest:I don't think it's a horrible thing.
Guest:I think it's not a happy thing.
Guest:Okay, fine.
Guest:I tell you, I used to love Robert Heinlein when I was a kid.
Guest:I read all the science fiction.
Guest:He wrote a book called Double Star about a guy.
Guest:It's basically a prisoner of Zenda.
Guest:It's about a guy who's...
Guest:pressed into service portraying the tyrant of a foreign galaxy to save the world.
Guest:He's got to be the tyrant of a foreign galaxy.
Guest:He's an actor in the year 3000.
Guest:And he says, my dad, he's talking about his dad is also an actor.
Guest:He says, my dad could make the audience scream with laughter and weep
Guest:in the space of 30 seconds.
Guest:So I read that, I'm 12 years old, I think, man, that's what I want to do.
Marc:Okay, so that's what theater looked like in Chicago at that time, but wasn't there also, what year are we talking?
Marc:We're talking in the early 60s.
Marc:Okay, so things hadn't broken open yet.
Marc:Like in terms of culturally, there wasn't out there kind of experimental theater going on.
Guest:No, but no, they were doing Eugene O'Neill and nobody cared.
Guest:I don't think anybody ever enjoyed looking at a Eugene O'Neill play.
Guest:Did you ever?
Guest:No.
Guest:No?
Guest:No.
Guest:You know, there was... Look at...
Guest:I went to the neighborhood Playhouse School of Theater in 1967 and Sanford Weister was running a theater and he'd grown up in the group theater.
Guest:So, he grew up with the place of Odette's.
Guest:Odette's in Strasburg too?
Guest:Group theater?
Guest:No?
Guest:Well, Strasburg had the theater across the town.
Guest:His was just a studio.
Guest:It's called the Actor's Studio.
Guest:And both of them were kind of the dueling tubas of the group.
Guest:They were the babies of the group and they couldn't act.
Guest:So, like all people who can't act, they don't want to leave the theater, they became directors.
Guest:And Strasburg became a teacher of the Actors Studio and Meisner became a teacher of the Neighborhood Playhouse.
Guest:I would think you'd like Odets.
Guest:He's not bad.
Guest:He's not bad.
Guest:So, what were you doing over there?
Guest:You said you're in 67.
Guest:Yeah, so I studied it.
Guest:So, we did all these scenes.
Guest:And we did the scenes from the plays that Meisner grew up with.
Guest:Odets and Elmer Rice and...
Guest:What else did we do?
Guest:We did Paddy Chayefsky.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You like him?
Guest:Yeah, I like him very much.
Guest:I knew him.
Guest:I knew him pretty well.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In fact, Al Pacino called me a year ago and he said he wanted to do a film version of The Middle of the Night, which is a play by Paddy Chayefsky.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was made into a movie with Frederick March.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Kim Novak.
Guest:So, I read it.
Guest:I said, yeah, okay, I could do it, but...
Guest:Actually, if you have the rights, I'm going to make it a little bit better.
Guest:So I rewrote it.
Guest:And so Al's supposed to do it now as a movie, I hope.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:It's going to happen?
Guest:I hope so, yeah.
Marc:So basically, when you started getting into theater, you were pushing back against the tedium of what came before you.
Guest:I don't know if I was pushing back against it.
Guest:I'm sure you're the same.
Guest:I could do anything in the world except be bored.
Guest:I could not fucking stand being bored.
Guest:I never opened a school book in my life.
Guest:You could have said the Nazis are going to kill your mom.
Guest:I wouldn't have opened that fucking school book.
Guest:I just could not stand being bored.
Guest:So when I found something that was exciting...
Guest:Being in the theater and having fun and making stuff up, that was like, honey, I'm home.
Marc:I just think it's interesting that you came out of really out of comedic structure, improv structure.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That it was about those beats and about the efficiency of it came from watching Second City in a way.
Guest:Exactly so.
Guest:And so, I've been doing a lot of thinking about it because, you know, when you...
Guest:That's the reason that you shouldn't go to school to learn anything about drama because you're not going to.
Guest:Because the only way you can learn about drama is from a paying audience.
Guest:Right.
Marc:So you consider yourself, you need to make entertaining things.
Guest:Yeah, exactly so.
Guest:Because if it's not entertaining, I mean, that's the only thing theater is good for is to entertain people.
Guest:It doesn't change the world.
Marc:But see, but some people want to have that belief.
Marc:I mean, some people, there's an idea that theater has a place in culture that facilitates change and moves the dialogue further along, which I think you would agree with that part.
Guest:No.
Guest:No.
Guest:I completely disagree.
Guest:And those people who think that are lying.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And here's how we know.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Here's how they know.
Guest:When they get done and they come out of a theater and they've nodded along and they say, yes, it's really true.
Guest:It changed my life.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I guess people with cancer have rights too.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Then they go home.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And what do they put on the television?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Kiss, kiss, bang, bang.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:Right?
Guest:They don't put on stories about moderately interesting things happening to moderately flawed people.
Guest:They put on something which is exciting or funny.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, people tell me about the poetry in The New Yorker.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They love the poetry in The New Yorker, some people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, I say, oh, that's great.
Guest:Quote me one line.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:They can't do it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There's nothing there.
Guest:They like poetry.
Guest:Saying they love the poetry of the New Yorker.
Guest:Right.
Marc:Well, they can like it and not remember it.
Marc:No, absolutely not.
Marc:You have to remember poetry if you like it.
Guest:Hell yes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Of course.
Guest:If you can't quote me one line.
Guest:From a poem in the New Yorker.
Guest:Yeah, that you just read two days ago.
Guest:What the fuck are we talking about?
Guest:How did it have an impact on you then?
Guest:It didn't.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It just went in?
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:Made you feel better?
Guest:Yeah, that's right.
Guest:What it is, it's a codependent relationship, right, of somebody you can't read with somebody you can't write.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So when you started writing the plays that made you famous...
Marc:You know, the early ones.
Marc:Like, what was your intention was solely to entertain?
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:Because here's the thing.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, I had my own theater company.
Guest:I think it's 21, 22 years old.
Guest:Me and Billy Macy and Steve Schachter and Patty Cox.
Guest:In Chicago?
Guest:Well, at first we started out in Vermont.
Guest:We moved to Chicago.
Guest:The Atlantic?
Guest:No, that was before the Atlantic.
Guest:It was called the St.
Guest:Nicholas Theater Company.
Guest:And when you're sitting in the back of the room, if the people aren't entertained... Yeah.
Guest:You're like a little feral creature.
Guest:The one billionth of a second of lack of attention, you feel like a blow on the top of the head.
Guest:And if you wrote a funny line and they don't laugh, that line's not funny.
Guest:And if the people aren't entertained, you got to go back to driving a cab next week.
Guest:So, that'll teach you pretty quick.
Guest:You know, because you can sync with your good ideas, but if you'd rather succeed, you better learn how to entertain people.
Marc:When you started the theater company, were you aware of what was going on in other theater companies?
Guest:Of course.
Guest:I mean, this was back in the 70s.
Guest:I came back to Chicago, and the reason...
Guest:And a guy called Stuart Gordon had something called the Organic Theater that had in it Dennis Franz and Jack Wallace and John Hurd and Andre Deschutes.
Guest:It was a spectacular company full of... And they were doing brand new plays.
Guest:And they invented... Stuart was the director and invented this sui generis...
Guest:He got kicked out of the University of Chicago because they were doing Peter Pan as a kid's theater, but all the actors were naked.
Guest:So, he was there and a guy named Jim Shifflett was over the body politic across the street.
Guest:They were doing a play called Grease that just opened in a garage.
Guest:And I think what happened in Chicago was the...
Guest:fire laws that have been extraordinarily strict because there was a terrible, terrible fire in Chicago.
Guest:I think it was 1910 Iroquois theater fire.
Guest:Everybody burned to death.
Guest:And so, finally, in the 70s, they relaxed the fire laws sufficiently.
Guest:These little theaters just sprang up and we all worked with each other.
Guest:So, you all knew each other and you're watching each other's work?
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:And Steppenwolf wasn't around yet?
Guest:Steppenwolf was just a little bit later.
Guest:Laurie Metcalf, who was, of course, one of the stars of Steppenwolf, actually started working for us in the office.
Guest:She's great.
Guest:I talked to her in here.
Guest:She's marvelous.
Guest:What an actress.
Guest:I just did this play with her a couple of years ago called November.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Malkovich and Gary Sinise and those guys just came down.
Guest:When we left our theater space, me and Billy Macy, Steppenwolf took over our space.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah, so they're just a couple years younger than we are.
Marc:What is it about Chicago that, because if you really think, even mentioning Dennis Franz,
Marc:and John Heard, and then you think about Steppenwolf, and then you think about the type of work that you do.
Marc:There's an aggressive, persistent, kind of, you know, not angry, but just sort of a vibe to those theaters.
Marc:I think so, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marc:What do you think that is?
Guest:What is it about Chicago?
Guest:My dad always used to say, Chicago's a working man's town.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:He said, New York is the biggest hick town in the world.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Which, compared to Chicago, it's true.
Guest:The biggest hick town?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In terms of what, just people passing through?
Guest:No, no, the locals, they'll fucking believe anything.
Guest:I mean, Jesus Christ, some guy gave $5 million to Christo to wrap the trees in Central Park in red plastic.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, give me a break.
Guest:That wouldn't happen in Chicago.
Guest:I don't think so.
Marc:So, you think that it just comes from the kind of no bullshit working class nature of Chicago?
Guest:It might.
Guest:I mean, also, if you look at it, the literary tradition of the 20th century America is all Chicagoan.
Guest:Everybody came out of Chicagoan.
Guest:I don't know why.
Guest:I mean, to name but a few, Hemingway, Willa Cather, Dreiser, Richard Wright, Nella Larson, they all came out of Chicago.
Guest:And then later on, Philip Roth and Malinwood and Saul Bellow.
Guest:They were Chicago?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Philip Roth was Chicago?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Later on he was, but he wrote his first novel about the life in Hyde Park.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:Called The Letting Go.
Guest:He's a Chicagoan.
Guest:You like him?
Guest:I do, yeah.
Guest:He's funny, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Did you read Sabbath Theater?
Guest:I did, yeah.
Guest:That's a good one.
Guest:I actually knew that guy who he wrote, I've forgotten his, I think his name was Bill Baird, that he wrote, the puppet guy.
Marc:Oh, that was a real guy?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:So your new novel, Chicago, is called Chicago, and it seems like it's the first time you've been back to this era of Chicago since the Untouchables.
Marc:That's true, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What is it about?
Guest:Why this Chicago at this point in history for you?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:I was just thinking about it.
Guest:You know, I mean, the thing about being a writer is you get to imagine yourself into all of these...
Guest:Other lives.
Guest:It's marvelous.
Guest:So since I'd always, you know, I said to somebody the other day, you know, they said, what do you want to be?
Guest:And I said, you know, I wanted to be a black piano player in a whorehouse in Chicago in 1925.
Guest:That's what I want to be.
Marc:Yeah, I don't think that's going to happen.
Guest:But you can do it.
Marc:You can write about it.
Guest:I can write about it.
Guest:I can dream.
Guest:I can imagine myself back there.
Marc:But in terms of what is it that's fascinating about this?
Marc:Obviously, this era of Chicago.
Marc:It's amazing, right?
Guest:Oh, it's spectacular.
Guest:But see, the book is all about myths.
Guest:It takes a lot of the Chicago myths, which are all about crime and corruption.
Guest:Those are myths.
Guest:Well, it doesn't mean that they aren't true.
Guest:Right.
Guest:My rabbi would say a myth is a poetic myth.
Guest:telling of a basic truth.
Guest:So it doesn't mean it's untrue, it just means it's a poetic version.
Guest:For example, the Old Testament is a myth, right?
Guest:It's a poetic telling of some basic truths.
Guest:Which are retold in the New Testament is not so much a myth, but it's kind of a cautionary tale.
Guest:It's kind of a how-to.
Guest:Do this, don't do that.
Guest:The New Testament is.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, yeah, Jesus is God's patsy.
Guest:Yeah, well, Jesus shows up and says, be like Jesus, right?
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:But if you look at the Old Testament, there's nobody there you want to be like.
Marc:No, they seem like all, you know, having a lot of kids.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Oh, yeah, they're all screwed up.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And they're duplicitous and angry and wrongheaded and arrogant.
Guest:It's just like you and me.
Guest:Yeah, sure.
Guest:I mean, that's why the Bible is about people, right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And so what do Jews do today?
Guest:They argue about the Bible and...
Guest:I don't argue about the Bible too much.
Guest:Oh, good.
Guest:Well, a lot of people do, perhaps not even arguing internally about the Bible.
Guest:They say, oh, the Bible's a bunch of bullshit.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Which is just another way of being connected to the Bible.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because people don't say the critique of pure reason.
Guest:Oh, that's a bunch of bullshit.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Whoever got through that book, good for them.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Did you?
Marc:No.
Marc:But so you're taking on the myths of Chicago.
Marc:That's what this is.
Marc:Well, I'm participating in it.
Marc:Yeah, because you use real people in here.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You're moving through real people with your fictional characters.
Guest:Some of the people are real people.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Some of the people are the people.
Guest:And of course, like any creation of any artist, they're all the people I'd like to be or like to know.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And you had a good time writing it?
Marc:Oh, I had a great time.
Marc:Do you just not stop writing?
Marc:Is that how you work?
Marc:I mean, it doesn't matter.
Marc:You don't know exactly what you're going to write or you decide to write a novel or what?
Marc:Did this start as a novel?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, it started as a novel.
Guest:I mean, the whole thing's a mystery to me.
Guest:It's like, you know, I go to work and I sit around taking a nap and read a couple books and curse myself for being a lazy swine.
Guest:And at some point... You still do that?
Guest:Say what?
Guest:You still do that?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:It's all I do.
Guest:So, at some point, a work of some description shows up and I say, how did that get there?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, like, can we talk about The Atlantic a bit?
Marc:the atlantic yeah my uh my ex-wife my first wife took classes there and i remember like i i got like it's weird because like the the way you talk about theater and now the and i think the way you talk about acting is that like do you so shakespeare doesn't mean anything to you
Guest:No, I'm crazy about Shakespeare.
Guest:You like Shakespeare.
Guest:I love Shakespeare.
Guest:I mean, Shakespeare is the greatest artist of all time.
Guest:Shakespeare and the Bible.
Guest:Those are good stories.
Guest:I like the Bible, yeah.
Guest:Those are good human stories.
Guest:I think so.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But Shakespeare is not boring to you?
Guest:No, not at all.
Guest:Oh.
Guest:Because the guy could write.
Guest:Curiously, a lot of people don't know.
Guest:Some people know, but they refuse to admit it.
Guest:His real name was Billy Saperstein, but they wouldn't take the works by a Jew in the 16th century, so he changed his name to William Shakespeare.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That is not true.
Guest:It is true, and here's the test.
Guest:No Christian can write that good.
Marc:Well, I mean, I'd heard that maybe he didn't write them at all.
Guest:I've heard that too, yeah.
Guest:But I also heard that if John Kennedy had not smoked, he'd be alive today.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:So, okay, so Shakespeare, you're on board with Shakespeare.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now, The Atlantic, what were you setting?
Marc:There seems to be...
Marc:This sort of a practical approach that you have, like you demystify a lot of things.
Marc:You know, you're talking about Meisner, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Now that I would, what do you think, like, I would imagine that his process in his approach to acting was something that you decided was no good.
Marc:Yeah, I decided it was no good because it didn't work.
Guest:No?
Guest:Why?
Guest:Because everybody who loves acting and loves the theater and can't act becomes a theoretician because what they're trying to do, what I'm trying to do, I've written a lot of books on this subject, is understand
Guest:mysterious process try to get closer to a mysterious process acting yeah yeah because finally it's a mysterious process some people can act and some people can't that's it right at the core of it that that might be all it is I think that is all it is and the things which people might learn to make them a better actor yeah
Guest:stand up, stand still, speak up, and speak clearly.
Guest:But those are the things that the kids don't learn because they aren't mysterious.
Guest:They're just hard to do.
Marc:So, again, that's practical information.
Marc:You're not sitting there doing repetitions and colors.
Guest:It's a bunch of bullshit.
Guest:Because finally, nobody can do... Stanislavski said, no actor can do anything more...
Guest:Intricate than go over there and open the window.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because no human can do anything more intricate.
Guest:You say to a human, become more in touch with yourself.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The fuck does that mean?
Guest:Yeah, I don't know.
Guest:Nobody knows.
Guest:And men of my generation were driven nuts by women saying, respect my feelings.
Guest:It doesn't mean anything.
Guest:One can respond to a legitimate request if the legitimate request is capable of being fulfilled.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:For example.
Guest:Like be specific?
Guest:Well, you have to be specific.
Guest:I don't understand what you mean when you say respect my feelings.
Guest:You say, well, I don't like it when you don't do the dishes.
Guest:Well, then the request would be, would you please do the dishes?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right?
Guest:Rather than respect my feelings because it puts us at the level of one remove.
Guest:So, when you say to the actor, think about what happened in your childhood, how can you think about what happened in your childhood and play the scene with the other guy?
Guest:Right.
Guest:So, I got all that nonsense beaten out of me by Second City.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, really?
Guest:Yeah, because they didn't go through all this process.
Guest:They say, okay, here's what we're going to do.
Guest:You're a cabbage, right?
Guest:And I'm a cleaver.
Guest:Okay, on stage.
Guest:So, the whole idea of preparation is nonsense.
Guest:You don't have to prepare.
Guest:And I said at one point that the rehearsal process is all a process of a waste of time.
Guest:The actors spend four weeks pretending they don't understand the play.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the director spends five weeks pretending he does.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:When in effect, as we all know who've done summer stock, you got one week to put the play on from a dead stop.
Guest:You learn the lines, you put the fucking play on.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Is the play going to be better for rehearsing it for an additional three weeks?
Guest:No, it's going to be worse.
Guest:Because what you're rehearsing in the rehearsal process is...
Guest:is an approach to the material.
Guest:So, why is it going to be worse?
Guest:Because what you're rehearsing is indecision.
Guest:Oh, I see.
Guest:So, you're trying, but can't that process be an act of deciding?
Guest:No, there's nothing to decide.
Guest:The decisions have all been taken by the author.
Guest:So that's it.
Guest:So it's there.
Guest:The lines are there.
Guest:The story's there.
Guest:What didn't you understand?
Guest:I mean, you know, you read the play.
Guest:You understood the play when you read it.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But aren't there many approaches to a scene or a line?
Guest:I don't think so.
Guest:I think the approach to a scene or a line is say the fucking thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I've worked with all the greatest actors in the world.
Guest:You have.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And that's what they do.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You don't have to interpret.
Guest:People say, who would you like to interpret your work?
Guest:I say, I don't want anyone to interpret my work.
Guest:I'd like them to perform it.
Marc:So, but when I read Writing in Restaurants, when I read her, she brought her book, the Atlantic books home, you know, that it seemed to be that, you know, this is just, you know, just say the fucking line, right?
Marc:Right.
Marc:So on some level, though, not everybody can be an actor.
Marc:That's true.
Marc:So the school is the school and this is the process, but either you can do it or you can't really.
Right.
Marc:Like your process, the Atlantic process of, you know, where are you standing?
Marc:Say the line.
Marc:You know, that's it.
Marc:It doesn't mean that anyone can act.
Guest:No.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Very few people can act.
Guest:Okay.
Okay.
Guest:Absolutely so.
Guest:Like some people can just say the line and it sounds like me playing Chopin.
Guest:Some people can just say the line and it sounds like Glenn Gould playing Chopin.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because that's Glenn Gould.
Guest:Right.
Marc:So basically acting is either you have a natural talent or you don't.
Guest:Well, you have to have a natural talent and the talent can be developed or discovered through doing it.
Guest:But it can't be developed or discovered if you're not actually doing it, which means performing for an audience.
Guest:Because the lessons that you learn in school are lessons of subservience.
Guest:You say, let me please the teacher, right?
Guest:I have to understand the teacher's way of doing things.
Guest:And if I...
Guest:My test of success or failure will be if the teacher says good boy or good girl, right?
Guest:But the test of an audience is not mitigated through philosophy.
Guest:It's immediate.
Guest:They laughed.
Guest:They didn't laugh.
Guest:They were paying attention.
Guest:They didn't pay attention.
Guest:I lost their attention because I moved on that line.
Guest:Oh, you learned that?
Guest:I missed the gag because I moved on my laugh line.
Guest:I'm never going to do that again.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:When you write, is part of your process, will you run it in front of a crowd and then change it?
Marc:No, God, no.
Guest:So once the thing is written, it's written?
Guest:Well, that's a good question.
Guest:What I do is I write the best I can.
Guest:I say, this is perfect.
Guest:Then I put it in front of an audience and say, no, it's a piece of shit.
Guest:And I rewrite it.
Guest:So you do workshop it to some degree or you make changes?
Guest:Well, no, no, I don't workshop.
Guest:I just put the play on.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But you'll change it.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:If it doesn't work, I'll change it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because as I said before, I'm kind of harping on this.
Guest:I actually do it for a living.
Guest:I know.
Guest:It's just like saying someone has a wonderful idea of retail and they've studied the retail placement and how difficult it is to learn how to place things in the store.
Guest:So that you're creating an experience.
Guest:But if you own the store and the people aren't buying a t-shirt, you're not going to sync with that theory.
Guest:You're going to take the fucking t-shirts and put them in the back and try something else.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But so when you do those kind of plays, how do you run them?
Marc:I mean, you can't put them up on Broadway.
Marc:You just put them up in a small theater and see what happens?
Marc:No, I put them up on Broadway.
Guest:What the hell, in for a penny, in for a penny.
Guest:Why not?
Guest:Just have some fun.
Guest:And then rewrite it?
Guest:Sure.
Guest:If you have to?
Guest:Of course.
Guest:I mean, the rewrites, in most cases, are not going to be major.
Guest:Sometimes they are.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But in most cases, they're going to be minor.
Marc:I saw Pacino do American Buffalo in Boston.
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:A long time ago, yeah.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That was crazy.
Marc:Yeah, he's great.
Marc:So, in terms of the school, it's still going, right?
Marc:Oh, yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And you go way back with William Macy.
Marc:Yeah, I go back to 1971.
Marc:How did you guys... So, what was the process of putting the Atlantic system together?
Guest:That's a very good question.
Guest:I met Macy.
Guest:I was actually his teacher.
Guest:I'm about three years older than he.
Guest:We were at the school called Goddard College in Vermont, this hippy-dippy-sippy school.
Guest:He was my student.
Guest:I got hired as a...
Guest:Were you a hippy-dippy guy?
Guest:Kind of.
Guest:I couldn't smoke dope because it made me crazy.
Guest:I hadn't yet developed a fondness for alcohol.
Guest:So I hang out with Johnny Katz and played a lot of ping pong, played a lot of poker and put on plays.
Guest:You still smoke cigars?
Guest:No, I gave that up because of boxing.
Guest:But I guess now you can get Cuban cigars, huh?
Guest:I don't know if you can.
Guest:Yeah, you can always get them.
Guest:It just depends where.
Guest:You've got to have a guy.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:So, Macy was my student, and then...
Guest:We went to... What did we do?
Guest:We were in New York.
Guest:We were working in... Then we went to Chicago.
Guest:Macy and I went to Chicago.
Guest:From Vermont?
Guest:From Vermont and founded the St.
Guest:Nicholas Company.
Guest:And we kind of went our separate ways, ended up in New York.
Guest:And...
Guest:All the acting schools, probably all schools, are for the benefit of the teachers, the administrators, you know.
Guest:And if they can fool the students long enough, then the teachers and administrators can buy a summer house.
Guest:So that's what they do.
Guest:So anyway, Macy and I were in New York.
Guest:We're broke.
Guest:So we say, well, okay, what can we do?
Guest:I know, we'll teach acting.
Guest:So we went to this...
Marc:But was the idea as a racket or you actually had a concept?
Guest:Well, I mean, as George Bernard Shaw said, every profession is conspiracy against the laity.
Guest:So, what are you going to call a racket?
Guest:Is psychiatry a racket?
Guest:You bet it is, right?
Guest:So, is education a racket?
Guest:Oh, yeah, it makes psychiatry look clean.
Guest:So there we are when he goes, oh, let's teach these students.
Guest:So then we did something which was really kind of brilliant.
Guest:We said, because how are we going to pick the students?
Guest:Because a lot of people said they wanted to sign up with us.
Guest:We said, well, we're going to audition them.
Guest:So, you know, as myself as director, Macy's an actress, I said, no, auditions are bullshit.
Guest:It brings out the worst in everybody.
Guest:And after you've auditioned three people, you can't, you just go to the fourth, you can't remember the first.
Guest:It just doesn't happen.
Guest:So we said, okay, what do we want people to do?
Guest:We want them to be hard workers and we want them to really mean it.
Guest:I know, we'll test them.
Guest:So what we did is we gave a series of questions.
Guest:So anybody who wants to come, we're gonna be interviewing you.
Guest:We aren't gonna ask you to act.
Guest:If you answer these questions, you get in.
Guest:If you don't answer these questions, you don't get in.
Guest:And you must be on time.
Guest:So, a lot of people weren't on time.
Guest:They say, well, fuck it.
Guest:If you can't show up on time, I guess you didn't mean it.
Guest:Oh, please, please, please.
Guest:No, get lost.
Guest:And if you answered the questions, you got in.
Guest:And if you didn't answer the questions, you didn't get in.
Guest:So, we got people who actually said, okay, this is a stupid test.
Guest:But it's the test to get in.
Guest:So then we're teaching, teaching, teaching.
Guest:We said, OK, let's go back up to Vermont.
Guest:So we got rented some space at Vermont College in Montpelier and we took a bunch of kids up there for the summer and we worked them like 20 hours a day.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:We started off, we had dance, we had yoga, we had modern dance, we did plays, we did problems, we'd do plays in the evening and then go to the Montpelier radio and do a 12 o'clock midnight, we'd do a live radio drama.
Guest:We just worked the fuck out of each other for all summer, it was great.
Guest:And a lot of those people, many of them are still in the theater and very successful.
Guest:And so, did we teach them something?
Guest:I don't think we taught them something so much as we selected for seriousness.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Strasburg gets all the credit for the actors of the Actors Studio.
Guest:But this bullshit, you didn't know what the fuck he was talking about.
Guest:But what he did is he auditioned every actor in the world.
Guest:So, people who could actually act got into the Actors Studio.
Guest:And then as they went on to great careers, Strasburg took credit for teaching them.
Guest:And they were already made guys.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, they were people with great, great talent.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And your approach was to, like, let's take serious people and work the hell out of them and let them find their talent.
Guest:Exactly so.
Guest:Get them into the habit of... Because we wanted, not to get too icky about it, we wanted people who were really serious about the theater.
Guest:Well, there's a process of getting in touch with yourself.
Guest:Maybe, I don't know, maybe it's, or it might be a process of beating the fool out of you.
Marc:Right, but that seems to be like some recurring theme in your arc, personally.
Marc:Is it not?
Marc:I think so.
Marc:You know, because, you know, in terms of, if I think of you now, who I'm talking to, you know, doing, you're moving a group of students through yoga, modern dance, and all that stuff, and movement, would you ever do it that way again?
Marc:No.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:What I would say is if I had an act, like my wife went to RADA, Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and she got a full scholarship there.
Guest:And I asked her once, what are the acting classes like?
Guest:And she said, oh, no, we didn't have acting classes.
Guest:I said, what, the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art didn't have acting classes?
Guest:She said, no.
Guest:She said, they taught us dance, they taught us speech, they taught us movement.
Guest:And then they would bring in directors, the best directors on the English stage.
Guest:And the director would stage scenes with us.
Marc:So that's why Juilliard, I think, does the movement thing.
Guest:Well, Juilliard, I mean, if you look at the beginning, a lot of those people of the first classes went into magnificent careers.
Guest:Because John Hausman took over when he restructured Juilliard.
Guest:And he said, we're going to be serious.
Guest:The acting part was very, very small.
Guest:Speech was the most important thing.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Speech and diction.
Guest:And all of those people who came out of Juilliard in those early years speak magnificently.
Guest:Then the other thing he did is he took them and he threw them on the road after three years of Juilliard, the acting company.
Guest:And he said, okay, get the fuck out of here.
Guest:You know, here's a bus.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, you're going to sleep on the bus and you're going to have one year from a different small town every night.
Marc:Doing plays.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So let's talk about directing then, too, and also writing adaptations.
Marc:The verdict is I've watched that movie once a year, twice a year.
Marc:It's a great movie.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Did you like the way that came out?
Marc:Yes, very much.
Marc:And you wrote that was an adaptation?
Guest:It was a book, a guy called Barry Reed.
Guest:And I only met Barry Reed once.
Guest:It was at a screening of The Verdict.
Guest:Sid Lument was screening it in New York.
Guest:And I watched the movie, and I'm peeing at the urinal, and the guy next to me says, did you like that film?
Guest:I said, yeah, I liked it a lot.
Guest:He said, oh, I wrote it.
Guest:I said, whoa, great work.
Guest:So that was when I met Barry Reed.
Marc:Yeah, I didn't.
Marc:And when you... To write, like...
Marc:How do you approach a piece, like if you've got a book, how do you approach that to make a screenplay out of it?
Marc:What are the things you look for?
Marc:Do you just isolate the story?
Guest:Well, you've got to say what's it about.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Because a novel's a very, very different form.
Guest:A novel's basically an epic form.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You can get away with a novel with a lot of scenes on more or less the same theme.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Perfectly good novel, but a movie's all about plot.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's all about what happens next, that's all it is.
Guest:So when you make a movie, what you have to do is throw out everything that's not, you have to determine what the plot is, who wants what, who's the hero, what happens if he doesn't get it.
Guest:And I said to people, I used to write a lot of movies, I said, here's my deal.
Guest:You're going to pay me a fortune.
Guest:I'm going to do the best work I know how, and you're going to hate it.
Guest:And that proved to be true.
Guest:It did?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Generally, yeah.
Guest:They hated it?
Guest:Oh, they always hate it, yeah.
Guest:Usually they hate it because they say, where's the scene where he talks about his love for the kitten?
Guest:Why did I buy this novel?
Guest:With the look in his eyes.
Guest:Right, right, right.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:Where's that?
Guest:The guy sent me a script the other day.
Guest:He said, I think it needs some work.
Guest:The scenes, he paid a lot of money for it.
Guest:So, he said, are you interested perhaps in rewriting the script?
Guest:I think it needs some work.
Guest:I said, yes, I know.
Guest:What the fuck?
Guest:He says, well, no, no, no.
Guest:He says, we're very security conscious.
Guest:I'll send it to you.
Guest:Can you go to someplace that has a secure link?
Guest:I said, fuck, no, I'm not going to do that.
Guest:I said, I tell you what, if you don't trust me, send it to my house.
Guest:Have the messenger wait outside for 45 minutes.
Guest:I'll read it.
Guest:I promise no one will see it.
Guest:I'll give it back to the messenger.
Guest:Think, think, think.
Guest:He said, no, no, we'll send it to you and just send it back tomorrow.
Guest:So they send me the script.
Guest:And it's on red paper with light green printing.
Guest:I guess because you can't copy it, right?
Guest:And my name is oh, oh, oh, on watermark, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:Okay, so I start reading.
Guest:The phone rings.
Guest:It's my son.
Guest:So we start telling jokes on the phone, bibbidi-bobbidi-boo.
Guest:I looked down an hour later, the dogs have eaten the fucking script.
Guest:Is that true?
Guest:Yes, my dogs have eaten the fucking script.
Guest:And it's all in red shreds.
Guest:And I got to put it in a garbage bag and I packed it up and I have to call this guy and say, there's no good way to say this.
Guest:The dogs ate the script, but at least they got through it.
Guest:And the reason I say at least they got through it is the script for which they paid a lot of money, I don't know how much, starts off a light, but not the light you're thinking of, a black light.
Guest:And it's growing deeper and deeper, and you're getting closer and closer.
Guest:And what's that?
Yeah.
Guest:A sound, but no sound you've ever heard before.
Guest:Could it be a baby scratching at his crib?
Guest:A dog scratching at the screen?
Guest:Could it be the beating of drum's rain?
Guest:And this fucking thing goes on forever.
Guest:I'm thinking, what?
Guest:You paid for that shit?
Guest:So, most scripts read like that.
Guest:So, my great, great buddy Barbara Tulliver is my closest friend.
Guest:She cut all my movies, I know each other forever.
Guest:We trade scriptisms with each other, the scripts we get.
Guest:And one of them that she sent me was, outside the window, it looked like what had just happened.
Yeah.
Guest:Film it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, it's like an old joke, but it's true is words cannot describe the scene which then ensued.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Well, you know, getting back to like this idea, like I know you write entertaining things and that you're an entertainer, but it does seem that you like to, you're a provocateur as well, right?
Marc:I mean, you do like to push buttons.
Yeah.
Guest:I like to amuse myself.
Guest:I really don't get such a kick out of pushing people's buttons because it all, but it happens sometimes.
Guest:So, as Hemingway said, you know, write them like you see them and the hell with it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:But I don't do it on purpose.
Guest:But like with something like Oleana, you knew that that was going to drive people crazy.
Guest:I had no idea.
Guest:Really?
Guest:Absolutely no idea.
Guest:I had a friend, we were in Vermont or something like that, and the friend...
Guest:was a teacher in Vermont and he came over for dinner one night and I said, what's on your mind?
Guest:He said, well, he said, this woman in my class had a counselor, a woman counselor, and the woman in the class said something to the counselor and the counselor brought me up on charges of sexual something or other.
Guest:Who knows, impropriety.
Guest:He said, the woman went...
Guest:to the counselor and said, knock it off.
Guest:The woman's parents went to the counselor and said, knock it off.
Guest:Then I went to the school and he said, I'm going to lose my job.
Guest:So I started thinking about this.
Guest:I said, can that be true?
Guest:What did I know?
Guest:So I made up this play.
Guest:So the first...
Guest:performance of the play was at the Hasty Pudding Club at Harvard, Harvard Square.
Guest:And after, we had some young people up from Brown.
Guest:I think my brother was at school then at Brown and this theater class.
Guest:And afterward, I thought, wow, this is great.
Guest:It was Billy Macy and Rebecca Pidgeon.
Guest:I thought, this is fucking great.
Guest:And so, this first thing I ever heard about the play was this young woman from the theater class says, don't you think it's politically irresponsible to do this play?
Guest:And I was stunned because it never occurred to me that a play, any play could be, quote, politically irresponsible, that it was the point, the purpose of drama to be politically responsible.
Guest:And P.S., who the fuck was in charge of what was politically responsible?
Guest:Responsible to what?
Guest:So I was stunned.
Guest:And then we did it in New York and people would scream, literally every night did people scream back at the stage.
Guest:And every night there were fights after the play in the audience on the verge of the physical, generally men and women taking one side or the other, but the sides differed.
Guest:Every night.
Guest:And then one night, Mary McCann, who replaced Rebecca, was coming off stage out of the artist entrance.
Guest:And she got punched by an audience because it drove people crazy.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Just drove people crazy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And you had no idea it would do that.
Guest:No idea.
Guest:How could you know, I guess?
Guest:Well, because, you know, my good friend Billy Saperstein, you know, wrote under the name of Shakespeare.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And Hamlet says to...
Guest:Horatio says, I have heard that guilty creatures sitting at a play may be so moved to blah, blah, blah that they lose their fucking mind.
Guest:So I read that, you know, and I thought, yeah, okay, but not really.
Guest:But I saw it.
Guest:I saw it every night.
Guest:Was that the first time you saw that?
Marc:Yeah, it was great.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What happened with that?
Marc:Did that kind of stuff happen with race as well?
Yeah.
Guest:Interesting.
Guest:No.
Guest:Race was, I mean, it was just, it was all in the press about race because I loved doing race, man.
Guest:I loved it.
Guest:It was the biggest percentage of African Americans at the Broadway theater of all time.
Guest:Yeah, because people say, you know, we need to have a dialogue about race, but what that means is shut the fuck up.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, so...
Guest:Well, because nobody wants to have a dialogue about race because it's too much of a – we're having a dialogue about race.
Guest:It's called America.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Right?
Guest:So, to me, the dialogue about race is the commercials at the Olympics.
Guest:Because if you look at them, it's stunning.
Guest:Every commercial, everyone –
Guest:If there's a black person, there's a white person.
Guest:If there's a white person, there's a black person.
Guest:The large percentage of the couples in the commercials are mixed race.
Guest:Yeah, I've noticed that lately.
Guest:Yeah, because that's the country.
Guest:California has more than 20% of marriages are mixed race.
Guest:So the dialogue about race is not that people learn, because being people, we know that people don't learn.
Guest:But that people die.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And a new generation has a different view of race.
Guest:How are you feeling about where the country's going now?
Guest:Well, the country's always going down the tubes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, that's what it is.
Guest:That's the great experiment.
Guest:That's the definition of, you know, you've got to read Gibbon, you know, decline and fall of the Roman Empire.
Guest:That's what a country does is it falls apart.
Guest:So the question is not why is it falling apart, but what is residually keeping it together?
Guest:And the answer is the constitution and the culture.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And the culture evolves.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And there you have it.
Marc:Are you – do you feel –
Marc:What's exciting right now?
Guest:Well, the exciting thing to me is a Ford commercial.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Because the Ford is doing a series of commercials and the first time there are commercials featuring a guy in a yarmulke.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's stunning.
Guest:I mean, especially, you know, I was born two years after the Holocaust, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And my grandparents all came over from the old country.
Guest:Everybody who stayed there was either killed by Hitler or Stalin.
Guest:And here's a guy in a yarmulke, but he's a young father.
Guest:He's not a diddy, diddy schmuck Jew, you know, which is what we grew up with.
Guest:Anybody a yarmulke is a fucking fool.
Guest:He's an actual serious Jew.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:In the Ford commercial.
Guest:In the Ford commercials.
Guest:And when I was a kid, Jews did not buy Fords.
Guest:No Jew ever bought a Ford because Ford was the world's greatest anti-Semite.
Guest:Right.
Guest:A committed anti-Semite.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so now Ford is coming around and there's a guy in a yarmulke and nobody says anything about it, which is to me the real telltale of a cultural change is that it's unremarkable.
Guest:That's good.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:So let me ask you another thing about what what do you I was trying to think about how to how to how to frame it in terms of story and stuff.
Marc:But like, what is it about conspiracy minded?
Marc:You know, the sort of appeal.
Marc:of pseudo history and conspiracy thinking at this point in time and any point in time, because these stories that sort of manifest on the far right and sort of grab hold.
Marc:I mean, this is something this is a human condition thing, right?
Marc:The sort of locking on to those stories that almost in a religious way to explain things, even though they seem to be clearly crazy.
Marc:Well, it's not just the right.
Guest:It's the left, too.
Guest:It's the human condition.
Guest:It's like people say, oh, how can you believe in religion when so many bad things have been done in the name of religion?
Guest:Well, the bad things done in the name of religion were done by bad people.
Guest:It's not that religion is bad.
Guest:It's that people are fucking bad.
Guest:And it's not that the right or the left is bad.
Guest:It's that people are bad.
Guest:We're all crazy.
Guest:And we love to have something to hate.
Marc:Yeah, but doesn't it strike you... Do you have any sense of this nebulousness of established truth?
Marc:Like, yeah, maybe that's not maybe I'm not saying it right that that there's some it seems to be some sort of shifting to where everything's untethered.
Marc:And we don't we're not getting a sense of what that truth is culturally.
Guest:Well, yes.
Guest:I mean, but but, you know, they say that every that the great democracies don't.
Guest:they are to overcome, they commit suicide.
Guest:Because at some point, because the idea of freedom and the idea of responsibility are always warring on the right and the left over time and in each of us at every moment.
Guest:So the question is, what's true?
Guest:I was listening to my good friend Dennis Prager today on the radio, and he was having the time of his life because he just came across this study by some guy from the American Academy of Pediatrics about how to treat children on the beach.
Guest:They should not walk on sand.
Guest:They should not dig in the stand.
Guest:They should wear shoes that are ventilated and have hard toes to forgive them, get them, blah, blah, blah.
Guest:And they should not go in the water and blah, blah, blah.
Guest:And so he's saying...
Guest:It occurred to him years ago that anything which says studies show is either obvious or bullshit.
Guest:So he said, how does this stack up to our experience?
Guest:So when we put ourselves in the frame of mind of being philosophical, taking an overview, things look complex.
Guest:And because they're complex, they create anxiety.
Guest:And because they're anxiety, they create resentment and anger.
Guest:But on the other hand...
Guest:If we're simply walking down to the supermarket, we get along pretty well with each other.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I mean, it's a magnificent country.
Guest:It's the best country in the history of the world.
Marc:Well, you seem to be able to compartmentalize your political and religious and creative lives.
Right.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Well, you know what?
Guest:Here's what I think.
Guest:It's like you go to the dentist, right?
Guest:The dentist gives you laughing gas and they give you blah, blah, blah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You're in a different state.
Guest:You're in an altered state.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Your resistance is down.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You wouldn't think it correct that the dentist would start at that point talking to you about politics.
Guest:Say, listen, since I have you in my chair and since I have this instrument I just gave you laughing gas, I'm going to tell you some stuff that I think you may, dentist, you may know that, but this is not the place.
Guest:So that's how I feel about the theater.
Guest:I may have very, very strong political beliefs, but the theater is not.
Guest:You didn't come to the theater to hear my political beliefs.
Guest:You came to the theater, whether you know it or not, I know it, to have a good time, and that's my job.
Guest:Ricky Jay, he's in a lot of your movies particularly.
Guest:How do you know him?
Marc:How far back do you go with that guy?
Guest:We met a million years ago.
Guest:He'd been working with the great lighting designer and designer Jules Fisher in New York and it was maybe my 40th birthday.
Guest:And Jules said, what can I get you for your birthday?
Guest:He said, well, I love Ricky Jay.
Guest:to come to perform at the birthday party.
Guest:So Jewel said, no, and of course, Ricky doesn't do that.
Guest:No, no, no.
Guest:So ding dong, Jewel shows up and he brings Ricky and Ricky performed at my birthday party.
Guest:God bless him.
Guest:You like magic?
Guest:I'm crazy about magic.
Guest:Why?
Guest:Because, you know, well, because Jews love magic, you know.
Guest:All the great magicians of all time were Jewish and are Jewish because we love the idea of, I guess we love the idea of miracles and also we love the minutia of it, you know.
Guest:And also we love the idea that what you're seeing, what the audience is seeing is very important to a dramatist, is not what you're doing.
Guest:You're doing something very, very different than what they're seeing.
Guest:And in fact, a lot of magic books will say how the trick appears, how the trick is done.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So Ricky and I became and still are very, very close, and I directed a couple of his shows.
Guest:In fact, we're doing a talk at New Road School about my book.
Guest:We're flogging my book, and he graciously consented to be the interlocutor.
Marc:Oh, yeah?
Marc:He's going to moderate?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:What is this I read this morning about a Harvey Weinstein play?
Marc:You believe that?
Marc:No.
Marc:It just seemed like, could you have written that that quickly?
Guest:Yeah, I could.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, I was talking to my friend Jeff Richards in New York, who produced all of my plays on Broadway.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Wonderful guy.
Guest:And he said, oh, my God, why don't you write a play about Harvey?
Guest:So, I said, no, I don't want to fuck.
Guest:But then it was something I had to do, right?
Guest:Something I was contracted to do.
Guest:So, the best way to get a writer to write something new is to give him something he has to do because he'll never do that.
Guest:So, wait, he made you a deal?
Guest:No, no, not at all.
Guest:He just gave me an idea.
Guest:So, rather than doing this thing that I was contracted to do, which was late, I said, oh, well, I don't know.
Guest:I'll write a play.
Guest:I'll write this other play.
Guest:But it's not really about Harvey.
Guest:Is it a full three-act play?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's about another guy of that name.
Marc:Okay.
Marc:How are you reacting to this wave of this turmoil around harassment and inappropriateness?
Marc:How do you feel about what's happening?
Guest:Everything goes back to the 1960s.
Guest:Everything.
Guest:I mean, everything goes back to the Vietnam War and the birth control pill.
Guest:So if you take the genie of sex that people have been trying, every society tries to keep the genie of sex in the bottle.
Guest:And no society does very, very well at it.
Guest:And so...
Guest:A society with a strong and universal culture not only has ways of dealing with yes or no, but has ways of dealing with transgressions.
Guest:Here's what you do when you transgress.
Guest:But the introduction of the pill and the introduction of antibiotics
Guest:uncapped 10,000 years of, and changed 10,000 years of dealing with human sexuality.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:For the first time in the world.
Guest:No consequence.
Guest:There's no consequences, except of course, what do you have better, greater consequences than those things with no consequences?
Guest:The consequences were unforeseeable.
Guest:So the consequences are playing themselves out.
Guest:And one of the things that I think about is that one of the tenets of
Guest:Western culture, which is basically Judeo-Christian culture, is that women need to be taken care of.
Guest:That's the responsibility of the society and the responsibility of men to protect women.
Guest:Because why?
Guest:They have to have children.
Guest:Right?
Guest:They take them out of the workforce.
Guest:They walk around pregnant.
Guest:And something that always impressed me is the watching a pregnant woman, especially a young pregnant woman walk around with an aura of unassailability around her.
Guest:Which she understands and which she understands that the people, not to mean that God forbid she wouldn't be molested, but she is protected by the deepest cultural understanding of her necessity for protection.
Guest:We know that to be true.
Marc:So do you see this as a cultural contraction?
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:The question is, as is always, hypocrisy, which, you know, as Voltaire said, is the amend that pays the virtue.
Guest:But the women do need to be protected.
Guest:Well, they shouldn't have to see a dick at work.
Guest:Well, exactly so.
Guest:I mean, exactly so.
Guest:I mean, on the other hand, so we're going through a period that's somewhat of the terror because the other greatest change since the 60s is the computer age where there's instant communication, which in certain ways puts everybody on the same page and in other ways destroys the individual cultures.
Guest:Like I wrote a lot in my book where a lot of it takes place in a black whorehouse in Chicago.
Guest:where the madam is explaining to this guy why the Irish need their daughter to marry an Irishman.
Guest:And so the guy says, oh, of course, so that she'll carry on the traditions of the Irish family.
Guest:And the horse says, no, it's so she won't come home.
Guest:So the Irish share this tradition of, in this culture, here's the amount of times you, my son-in-law, are capable of cheating on your wife, past which we're going to beat you up.
Guest:Here's the amount of times you're capable of hitting me up for a loan, blah, blah, blah, bibbidi-bobbidi-boo.
Guest:You married her, you keep her.
Guest:So there's a certain amount of that which has gone away.
Guest:I mean, who knows, when I was a kid, we used to have these marriage ceremonies saying, I vow to respect your space.
Guest:What the fuck does that mean?
Guest:What was that?
Guest:Oh, that was when kids started writing their own marriage ceremonies.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:I vow to respect your space.
Marc:Is that, that seems, that means nothing to you?
Guest:It means nothing to anybody.
Guest:What does it mean?
Guest:How do you know when you're respecting somebody's space or not?
Guest:You say, I vow not to cheat on you.
Guest:Okay, I can tell.
Guest:I vow to have sex with you if you want.
Guest:Okay, I can tell.
Guest:I vow to pay the bills.
Guest:I can tell.
Guest:I vow to respect your space.
Guest:You can't...
Guest:It's like shitty poetry.
Guest:It's dreadful.
Guest:I was talking to my sister when she was married to somebody.
Guest:I'd say, what's the problem?
Guest:Your marriage falling apart.
Guest:She says, yeah, he doesn't respect my needs.
Guest:What needs are those?
Guest:The needs to be respected.
Guest:Respected about what?
Guest:Respected about my vision.
Guest:Vision for what?
Guest:Fucking what?
Guest:You know?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Did you get down to it?
Guest:I think no.
Guest:No.
Guest:No.
Guest:But, you know, as they used to say in the prisons, give it a name.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, give it a name.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My rabbi's just come out with a new book.
Guest:And one of the things is the 10 contrarian rules for marriage.
Guest:One of them is don't share your feelings.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I thought that's genius.
Guest:Because if we say, we need to share our feelings.
Guest:Well, you don't say we need to share our feelings of love for each other because you do not anyway.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So what feelings is it that you say that I need to share?
Guest:My feelings of resentment or disappointment.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was an idea from the 60s.
Guest:I can't keep those things in.
Guest:But that's what he says and he's correct.
Guest:That's one of the secrets of a good marriage.
Guest:Keep it in.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Shut up.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, just suck it up.
Guest:Oh, yeah, absolutely so.
Marc:Yeah, I mean, after a certain amount of time, I think as you get older, you realize that anyways, right?
Marc:Some people do.
Guest:Some people go wire to wire, you know.
Guest:Yeah?
Guest:What does that mean?
Guest:They just go wire to wire, they're just fucking stupid, you know?
Guest:And so, what I'm trying to do myself is not to be one of them.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So, I mean, one of the nice things about getting older is you say, well, that was dumb.
Guest:Yeah, right, right.
Guest:Oh, okay.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And also, one of the nice things about getting older is certain things don't mean as much as they used to.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Right?
Guest:Absolutely so.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:How do you feel about show business these days?
Guest:Well, you know, it's a shithole, as always.
Guest:I said to somebody the other day, I'm thinking of moving to D.C.
Guest:from California.
Guest:What for?
Guest:So I can be betrayed by a better class of people.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, are they?
Guest:Jesus Christ.
Guest:Are they a better class of people?
Guest:Well, no, it's kind of a joke.
Guest:No, that's the other thing, realizing about politics is that one can have political opinions which are separate from opinions of our representatives who are always...
Guest:and ever a bunch of fucking thieves and whores.
Marc:Every one of them.
Marc:Craven bunch, man.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That's just like unbelievable.
Marc:Every day I just sort of like, where do these people come from?
Marc:How do you decide that for a life?
Marc:I know, yeah.
Marc:Right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's just like, what is wrong with these fucking guys?
Marc:These are liars.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, if you think about it, you know, I sold carpet for a living over the telephone for a while and I sold land for a living over the telephone for a while.
Guest:I was very bad at it because in order to be a good salesman, you have to have no conscience.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Well, it's all about the hustle, right?
Guest:Well, yeah, because you have to make someone do something that you know is against their best interest.
Guest:Right.
Guest:That's how you're a great car salesman.
Guest:So, the two things that you either have to have no conscience or you have to develop a protective contempt.
Guest:Uh-huh.
Guest:A protective contempt.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:These stupid people.
Guest:So if you think of politicians, I mean, everything they say is a lie, but every once in a while they have to come back and lie to the people.
Guest:And then they see half the people say, oh, fuck you, go to hell.
Guest:And the other half are waving balloons and shouting, yay, yay, yay.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So of course they have contempt for the, you know, it's like they're playing poker.
Guest:We're the chips.
Marc:That's it.
Marc:Hucksterism seems to be at a certain level uniquely American.
Yeah.
Guest:Well, I think we've taken it to an art form, haven't we?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Like I was going back and I was reading some of the speeches of Kennedy and he says, we must move forward.
Guest:I'm thinking, what the fuck does that mean?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I don't know what it is.
Guest:Oh, I was reading a new biography of Nixon.
Guest:I was quoting the speeches of Kennedy.
Guest:We must move forward.
Guest:You were a Democrat at some point.
Guest:Everybody was a Democrat at some point.
Marc:Jesus Christ.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But when you read about Kennedy, you don't like Kennedy now?
Guest:No.
Guest:And my dad, who was an immigrant kid and a staunch Democrat, a labor lawyer, he didn't like Kennedy.
Guest:And if it was the first time, and I mean, you know, Kennedy was, God bless him, they were a bad lot.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You know, and you know, I mean, see, here's a guy and he's got the Pulitzer Prize for a book he didn't write and
Guest:He's fucking a Russian spy and then when he got done with that, he's fucking the girlfriend of the head of the mafia.
Marc:And Marilyn Monroe.
Guest:And Marilyn Monroe.
Guest:Well, okay.
Guest:And then doing business with it.
Guest:You know, he was a pretty dirty guy.
Guest:Right.
Guest:He came from that other thing that, you know, as corrupt as we Jews may or may not be.
Guest:I mean, it's got nothing on those Boston Irish.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Right.
Marc:How long did you spend time?
Marc:How long in Boston were you?
Marc:I think maybe 20 years.
Marc:Boston's in a pretty intense place, man.
Marc:Yeah, I liked it.
Marc:Yeah, I was there for a while, too.
Marc:Well, look, man, it was good talking to you.
Marc:Great talking to you, too.
Marc:You feel good about it?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Good.
Marc:When do we start the interview?
Marc:I'm going to turn it on right now.
Marc:Okay, real good.
Marc:Okay, well, that was me sweating through an interview with David Mamet.
Marc:I hope you enjoyed that.
Marc:You can pick up David's new novel, Chicago, wherever you get books.
Marc:And speaking of books, if you want a signed copy of Waiting for the Punch, Words to Live By from the WTF podcast, you can get one at podswag.com slash punch.
Marc:That's P-O-D-S-W-A-G dot com slash punch.
Marc:Okay?
Marc:I'll play some simple guitar.
Marc:I'm not going to make myself crazy with it.
guitar solo
Marc:Boomer lives.
Marc:Boomer lives.