Bambi vs Godzilla
by David Mamet
Simon & Schuster, HK$144
Reading Bambi vs Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose and Practice of the Movie Business is like eavesdropping on a tough Hollywood visionary in the sexually segregated Turkish baths Saul Bellow celebrated as one of the last playgrounds of primeval man. Here, the old values reign.
'A relationship of 20 years,' playwright, screenwriter, director and author David Mamet laments, grieving for the long-term colleague who, after forming a coalition with 'the Eurotrash money folk', no longer takes his calls. In this anthology of essays - brilliant, musical - Mamet shucks himself of anger to emerge as something altogether more graceful: a screenwriting sage.
Now 60, Mamet, one of the most celebrated dramatists, teaches at the Yale School of Drama and New York University and lectures at the Atlantic Theatre Company, of which he is a founding member. His prose here is significantly less angular than the dialogue that won him, among other prizes, the 1984 Pulitzer, and his tone is jovial.
Ever sweet on individualism, modesty and effort, Mamet praises Hollywood's 'workers' throughout Bambi vs Godzilla. He hurls thunderbolts, but always from Mount Olympus. He reviles the near-exclusive commercial emphasis of the big studios, whose executives 'bet their all upon the big-tent franchise film, which is to say, upon appeal to a self-selected, pre-existing audience'. The paradox? These 'big-tent' films reflect the aspirations of the very 'workers' he admires, almost all of whom will champion James Cameron over Preston Sturges.