You or Someone Like You (10 page)

This is elitist language, I said to them, in that it is presented, it is calibrated. Who cares if you can hear it on the Staten Island Ferry. And by the way, you can't, actually; on the ferry you hear its raw material. Mamet mills that to manufacture an artistic product. He puts it in our hands and makes us think all sorts of things, and the rhythm of it is intoxicating. Nor is it lawless. It is, in fact, drowning in rules. Only idiots believe hip-hop kids are less socially cosseted than country club members. Rather the opposite is true.

Now, the mere flow, which is by itself narcotic, can be achieved any number of ways. One feels “So tits out to here so” inside these four lines from Samuel Johnson (I lift my book, preparing to read, and everyone in the garden lifts theirs), where as you'll see the flow is essentially imagery. It's Johnson giving us an elegant, proto-Mametian necklace of adjectives:

Mamet's flow is
rhythm
, I say to them. Meter. We are similarly borne, compelled, rushed forward by William Shakespeare's iambic pentameter (í-amb: from the Greek, “iambos”: a metrical foot of
two syllables, the first unaccented and the second accented, Ex. “to stríve + and nót + forbeár”). Each matches the two-stroke “lub-
lub
” of our hearts.

The meter is: Iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb, iamb. And repeat.

I pick up another book. From the close of
Julius Caesar
, I tell them.

Elitism personified. And here is Mamet, no pentameter in sight, only twenty-seven iambs jammed back to back in a single, opalescent, perverse, sickening unraveling string:

As if, said David Levy, we were listening to him through a stethoscope.

Exactly. And, I say to them—and this is truly wonderful—one can combine rhythm with yet another tool: syntax. Mamet takes syntax, twists it inside out, and uses it to reveal the interior of a mind. The character Teach enters. Page 142, I say. (They all flip to the page. So this is what it's like for Howard at UCLA, he speaks a word and books fly open obediently. Now that's fun.) Teach is furious at a lesbian who has insulted him for eating a piece of toast off his plate. A critic described it as “hearing a syntax that reels backward like his fearful scrambled mind”:

Mamet himself commented, “The beauty of the fugue comes from the descant.” (I put down my notebook and pick up the card on which I've jotted the note. Descant, I read quickly,
noun
, Latin
dis-+ cantus
song. “Music played at the same time as the main tune, but higher.”) Now. Words are aesthetic of themselves, but the auditory key to the music of this social class is not the notes (the words) in the piece but the counterpoint. I'm speaking personally now, all right? I simply believe that any human being of any class who can speak this beautifully, who displays the full range of human emotions, who suffers and bleeds and laughs and dreams, including the losers, including the formally uneducated, is self-evidently a three-dimensional person. Including the sociopaths.

A snob, incidentally, I tell them, is interested in a person because they are of high class. An elitist is interested in a person because they are interesting. That's the difference. At least in my view. Mamet, at his best, is interested in those who are interesting. And that's where he opens our eyes.

They are not UCLA freshmen, and I do not, happily, report to a dean, so I say to them, Here is one of Howard's favorites. A guy walks out of a theater on 42nd at Times Square and stumbles over a bum.

The bum says, “Spare a buck?”

“
Neither a borrower nor a lender be!
” snaps the man. “William Shakespeare.”

“
Fuck you!
” says the bum. “David Mamet.”

 

THE NEXT WEDNESDAY, DAVID LEVY
took a meeting with Lizzy Weiss on the Sony lot and was critical (extremely, accord
ing to Bob Balaban, who heard about it immediately afterward) of Lizzy's fourth draft.

Critical of what, exactly, her agent asked her.

Of her meter.

Your
meter
? her agent said to her. He thought perhaps it was bad cell phone reception.

Her meter was off, apparently. And so, she sobbed, was the entire project, potentially. (Wait. Your
meter
? said her agent to the phone.)

According to Chris Silbermann, who was actually in the meeting, David, who suddenly felt that his position as producer should touch on this, had simply raised the question of executing greater care with the rise and fall of the words. Iambic accents. Lizzy began by doubting that this would translate to the screen (an action-adventure). “Hello, it's a
Rob Cohen
movie!?” someone kept saying, where the hell this fucking sudden interest?

Anne Rosenbaum, said David simply, and explained.

Lizzy left the meeting, called her agent, who called Howard, who called me. I said yes, OK, although I'd never met her she could attend the next book club (I covered the receiver and told Denise that we'd be twelve now), though I said she'd have to start the next book immediately.

“Oh, I'm sure she will,” murmured Howard.

Actually, the more I looked at Lizzy's specific point, the more different it seemed to me from the question of Mamet's rhythms. Our next evening, I decided to bring up what irritated me and get it out of my system. I chose Houseman's meter, I told them, because some things he does drive me insane. I picked up “To an Athlete Dying Young” (they passed around the photocopies), and I said, Right, look here:

I realize I'm belaboring this, and Houseman's sudden shoving of the rhythm into reverse gear is not the end of the world for his poetry, but he does it
everywhere
. Here one is led to expect the “Af,” the first syllable of the second line, to be the up-beat like the “And” of the previous line, but it isn't; “And” is up and “si” is down but the “Af” is down and “ter” is up, and you find yourself head over heels, with the irritated sensation one gets when an unexpected German verb pops up at the end of the sentence like a demented gopher and makes you rethink the whole goddamn thing.

But wait. There's worse. Could you? Line 42.

“Uh,” says the person I've pointed at, someone from Weed Road Productions I don't really know, “where…?”

Runners whom.

“Oh.” He finds it.

Now
what
, I ask you, are we to make of this, I say to them.

“It's completely wrong,” murmurs Eric Roth.

It is, I say.

“The first line is dah-dúm,” Eric says, “but Houseman wants you to read it”—he frowns at it; like many writers, he heard about Lizzie's situation, so he's focusing—“I mean, the
the
is so weird—”

How would you do it?

I notice that it doesn't even occur to him to be fazed at the idea of reengineering A. E. Houseman. It's just another rewrite. Eric scowls for a second, calmly, everyone watching him, but they do this on location burning $450,000 a day with the DP breathing down their necks. “OK. How about

Ah! You see, rhythmically
that
scans, I say, delighted. Now, I want to be—

“Wait.”

Even better, I say. We all brighten and look around at one another. Now, I want to be clear, I say, that in some writing—less overtly classical, perhaps—a bit of this gear shifting is actually bracing. It works marvelously for Dylan Thomas (the single-page photocopy? that I handed out earlier? does everyone have it?), who starts out all satin and smoothness and then snatches the carpet from under us, all but holds a gun to our heads to make us—quite intentionally—say “
ass
-embled” and “
to
hear” and then, just below that, gleefully pushes us into a hole after the “Prisoners of wishes” phrase, willfully setting rhythmic stones (“In the jails”) in our path to make sure we trip about them. It's all on purpose. I nod at Noah Baumbach. Read, please:

The last line a minefield of arrhythmic beauty. We all sat back and, after a moment, exhaled and looked at one another with glistening eyes. One of them made a note to himself. You notice, I said, each syllable, because of what he's set before it, obligatorily a crisp, precise component machined to a zero tolerance, separate pistons
functioning seamlessly in the turning verbal engine block. It actually transcends iambs.

You'd have to shoot it as a period piece, someone grumbles.

So shoot a period piece! retorts someone else.

I was about to reply when a producer of particularly commercial blockbuster-type stuff said that this kind of rhythm could be “used
great
” in action-adventure. A development executive cleared her throat, shot him a withering glance, and looked away. He raised his shoulders: “
What?
” Apparently everyone knew everything about the dynamic between them except for me.

I cut in to say that in fact I agreed. And when she got a look of satisfaction on her face, No, no—I agreed with him (she raised her eyebrows), and completely. Consider that essentially William Shakespeare's
Julius Caesar
was
Lethal Weapon
in iambic pentameter and that to my mind the violence of
L.A. Confidential
was drenched in the balletic quality of its noir-prose origins: “He could muscle the money out of her,” writes James Ellroy, “glom some pimp scuttlebutt, close out the Cathcart end, and ask Dud to send him down to Darktown.” It was the art of subcutaneous violence.

It gave me an idea, and I rejuggled the schedule in my mind and told them their assignment for the next session—it's in the Library of America's Hammett collection, I said; they broke out their devices to write it down—was “The Scorched Face,” which Claudia Roth Pierpont and I agree is a perfect short story.

 

THERE ARE THINGS THAT I
would notice. But how does one, passing through the millions of touchpoints of one's life—a look, a particular word, a missed lunch, the click of a seat belt—pick out those that preface an event. Clues to the future seem to me to be particularly opaque.

It is four years ago. He is in his home office on a cloudy, gray
Saturday early afternoon. I come down the stairs and freeze, listening. Howard has a junior producer on the speakerphone. Shooting is going very badly, and the movie is generating serious overruns, and Howard is methodically, coolly flaying the man alive. Howard enumerates the studio's points—this had been promised, that date had passed, they had been told such and such, fucking lies, you little prick. With every thrust, there is an inaudible gasp from the speakerphone. Howard's back is to me. After three minutes I sit down on the carpeted steps, a ringside seat. I'm bringing him a FedEx package I've just signed for, and I watch, transfixed. The FedEx is another screenplay. Several hundred of them line the high shelves, neatly categorized, and I read their titles one by one as I sit there.

He stops for a moment, clicks over. It's Jennifer. So-and-so's rewrite just showed up at his office; should she messenger it to him? No, he says, just open it, put it on his desk, he'll get it Monday. He clicks back and continues.

Howard hangs up, turns around. He sees my face, which is ashen. He is a little bit startled. Somewhere we can hear a lawn mower.

“I'm sorry,” he says, slightly on his guard.

I nod.

After a moment, he says, “Is that for me?” He gets up, approaches softly, takes it from me. He sighs heavily and sits down on the stairs next to me. His body does not touch mine.