David Mamet
speaker
324 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Jun 2025
last heard Jun 2025
David Mamet’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I would have thought it was to put the fucking water in the fire hydrants.
No, I don't know. I mean, you know, as Lennon says, it always starts in the schools, right? That the schools got taken over by the— Horrible. Yeah, terrible. And so now we have people like Randy Weingarten and so forth clumping for the right of the schools to teach whatever they fucking want. Yeah. in contravention to the wishes of the parents and common sense.
So if you get the kids young, those kids are going to become the teachers, and if you get them young and you get them into the elite institutions, they're going to become the levers of government. And then you're in a lot of trouble.
Yeah.
Well, exactly so. I don't understand how any— Not a good person, but a rational person who wants to run for re-election can say we have to have men and women's sports and expect people to vote for them. And maybe they're right. I don't know. I just don't get it.
That's a good question. And part of the answer is, as always, who benefited? Exactly so. And the answer is the mice who could play while the rats away, the cats away, the mice could play. So a lot of people have a very good time having a lot of power with absolutely no responsibility and thinking that they were secure from any oversight because of the press. And they were. But now we'll see.
No, the business is over. You know that. Oh, but it's more that the business is over. Well, no, no. A, the business is over. B, I'm real old. And C, I'm working a lot. I'm just, you know, I'm not working as I was working before. 40 years ago in the last decade of the studio system. That's all gone. Right. But I'm making movies, I'm doing plays, I'm writing books.
Sure. Why not? Why not? I mean, the worst thing in the world for me was having to sit in a room... With a bunch of idiots, right, who knew nothing about movie making and explained to them what the script meant, right? And so through logic, you know, I didn't do it. I said, you know, make the movie or play me or trade me.
But the only worst thing that I was to sit in a room with a bunch of idiots who don't know what the script meant and have no idea who I am. It's like Joe Mankiewicz. He came in when he was an old guy, and the studio executive said, what have you done? And Mankiewicz said, you first.
Well, I got this movie, Henry Johnson, and I got that book. But you wrote that. Yeah.
Well, I'm working on the Confidence movie, and I think I got somebody who's going to make it. And we got some really interesting people involved in that. And I got a couple of the little books coming out that... Over the years, especially during COVID, I did so much stuff that now it's all jammed up. And I made a huge mistake many decades ago.
I realized that because I like to write a lot that I needed to create other identities and names. And I should have done it, but I never did. You mean like...
Oh, Simenon.
Oh, I don't know. They seem to like my work a lot in Italy, and I got a lot of supporters. In fact, that Henry Johnson movie premiered at the Tarmina Film Festival. That was a world premiere. Other than that. I've always been very interested in education, and I wrote this novel that's coming out soon called Some Recollections of St.
Ives, which is a false memoir of a guy teaching for 40 years at a New England prep school. I'm very, very happy with that. So that's coming out next month.
Yeah, it's about education. It's about a fellow looking back and saying, really, what is education? What did we do with this school that's different than other schools? What have I learned? And so years ago I said to my wife, I want to write a book about education. She said, please, please don't. So instead I wrote a novel about a school.
Well, I think so. But see, the other thing is the contributory factor is the internet because kids are addicted to these, you know, I got a bunch of kids and they came into the end of the addiction. They're addicted to this stupid fucking machine. which means that they don't see the world.
And you walk around my neighborhood, you see not only teenagers on the stupid fucking machine, but guys pushing a baby carriage, and the fucking baby's on the stupid fucking machine. No, not a baby. Yes, indeed. I have pictures.
You're saying babies have cell phones? No, not a cell phone, whatever they are, the little games, right? So the thing about all these machines is that they're hypnotic. So they're just like cigarettes, right? They get you all jazzed up, and so they make you want to... Smoke more cigarettes because you're jazzed up. The periodicity of the machines is hypnotic. You can't look away.
So you have to give yourself a reason that you've been hypnotized. And you say, oh, it's because I like secession rather than the Game of Thrones, or because I need to stay involved, or because I need this, or because I need da-da-da-da-da. But to me, the giveaway phrase, I think I put it in the book, is I just have to. What are you doing? It's 10 o'clock. I just have to do this, right?
Showing 261–280 of 324 · page 14 of 17
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