Who is David Mamet?
David Mamet To still wear a beret in 2004, that takes guts… (actor Val Kilmer on Mamet) Mamet is an author, cartoonist, director, Oscar-nominated screenwriter and Pulitzer Prize winning playwright. Most recently he has written and produced the hit television series The Unit on CBS and writing the Broadway comedy November . Mamet trained at the Neighborhood Playhouse in New York City with Sanford Meisner. Mamet was not asked to return for a second year of training but instead took his ideas and began reading The Russians as Mamet calls them. Reading Stanislavski s early work and Boleslavski s Acting: The First Six Lessons gave Mamet an idea that things weren t right and that the Method had taken too dominant a place in the American theatre. Mamet was also heavily influenced in his theories on acting by Aristotle. Mamet believes Most of the Stanislavski system is a practical aesthetic for the actor based on the Aristotelian idea of unity . Mamet named his approach to acting after this,
” You see Edmond, which is pretty awful, opened in the US two years ago, as far as I remember, and I can only imagine the delay and the squeezing it has suffered to get a play now. Not that Mamet has gone into decline or depression – at least, not as far as anyone can tell. He works hard, which means film and television, and he writes books occasionally about acting and directing and the film business. These books have a very crisp, know-all style, and he offers his authority as earned the hard way and beyond dispute. But I wonder how he gets away with it. Even now, he is preparing a new film, one he’s written, called Joan of Bark: The Dog That Saved France. This may turn out to be a masterpiece, but I can’t think of many more offputting titles. And I find that I have no way of accounting for what Mamet will direct next. There seems to be no pattern or purpose to it. I first got that feeling in 1999 when he made a new version of The Winslow Boy. Now, the film was OK – it had Jeremy Nor
David Mamet was born in 1947 in Illinois, USA. He is considered one of America’s, if not the world’s, greatest playwrights. His style of dialogue has become so recognizable that it is now termed “Mametspeak”. The language he uses is more than naturalistic; it is a poetic version of everyday street language. David Mamet is not only a playwright, but also a highly respected author and director.
