David Mamet tackles his 40 years in Hollywood

CHICAGO — My first encounter with David Mamet was not a pleasant one.

It began on the night of May 25, 1979, when I watched in increasing dismay, the world premiere of his latest play, a musical called “Lone Canoe.” Back at the Chicago Sun-Times offices, I typed my review, which appeared in the next day’s paper with the headline “Lifeless and full of holes, Mamet’s ‘Lone Canoe’ sinks.”

I was not alone in my critical contempt. Linda Winer of the Tribune wrote that the play was “about testing, exploring, and really getting lost. And so, for the moment, is Mamet.” Other critics were equally dismissive.

But time passes, bygones become bygones and over the next decades, not only did Mamet become the country’s leading playwright and a Pulitzer Prize-winner, he and I became pals and I have read or watched everything he has created since “Lone Canoe,” which he has long considered one of the few failures of his writing life and career, which are actually one in the same.

For the record, Mamet is Chicago-born and first became famous here for such early plays as “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” and “American Buffalo” and then a couple dozen more, including “Glengarry Glen Ross” (winner of a Pulitzer Prize in 1984); nearly 50 films such as “The Verdict,” “Wag the Dog” and “Hannibal,” 20 or so which he also directed (among them “House of Games,” “Homicide” and “The Spanish Prisoner”); some television work and more than 20 books.

He does not use a computer. He has no website. No email. Twitter is out of the question. He doesn’t text. He does most of his writing in a multilevel townhouse that functions as an office that he comes to five or six days a week. It is near the home he shares with British American actress-singer Rebecca Pidgeon. They were married in 1991. They have two adult children and Mamet has two older daughters from his first marriage.

Now, sitting on my desk is his latest work, dedicated to his wife. It’s a nonfiction book titled “Everywhere an Oink Oink.” It carries the subtitle “An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood.” Like most everything Mamet has ever written (and said publicly for that matter), it has attracted attention, controversy and wildly divergent opinions.

Its first sentence sets the tone: “I am willing to think ill of anyone, so I suppose I have an open mind” and the final sentence of its prologue informs us that its pages will contain “salacious gossip posing as information, and reminiscences that may astound and disturb and, should you love the movie, bring to your lips a wry, sad smile.”

True enough but a number of early reviews have not been kind, none harsher than that of local critic/editor Hugh Iglarsh, who writes in a recent issue of Newcity that this is “largely a book of (mostly nasty) anecdotes … [The book] sounds less like a memoir than one of those rambling farewell messages discovered too late on the mass shooter’s computer … hostile and downright toxic.”

But there has been some praise, such as this from Library Journal: “Mamet’s staccato, derisive, episodic, war-language writing will enchant fans.” And this from Kirkus Reviews: “Come for the celebrity anecdotes; stay for the cartoons.”

The book also features some lively footnotes and 40-some cartoons; my favorite is one with the caption “Who was the most fetching female in film history?” accompanying a drawing of Lassie.