Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood

by David Mamet

Overview

Award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and director David Mamet shares his “smart, addictive, hilarious, and insightful” (Breitbart) tales from his four decades in Hollywood where he worked with some of the biggest names in movies.

David Mamet went to Hollywood on top—a super successful playwright summoned west in 1980 to write a vehicle for Jack Nicholson. He arrived just in time to meet the luminaries of old Hollywood and revel in the friendship of giants like Paul Newman, Mike Nichols, Bob Evans, and Sue Mengers. Over the next forty years, Mamet wrote dozens of scripts, was fired off dozens of movies, and directed eleven himself.

In Everywhere an Oink Oink, he revels of the taut and gag-filled professionalism of the film set. He depicts the ever-fickle studios and producers who piece by piece eat the artists alive. And he ponders the art of filmmaking and the genius of those who made our finest movies. With the bravado and flair of Mamet’s best theatrical work, this memoir describes a world gone by, some of our most beloved film stars with their hair down, and how it all got washed away by digital media and the woke brigade. The book is illustrated throughout with three-dozen of Mamet’s pungent cartoons and caricatures. Everywhere an Oink Oink is “nothing but wicked jokes, angry broadsides, and pointed gossip: in other words, the ideal Hollywood book” (The Wall Street Journal).

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781668026311
Publisher:	Simon & Schuster
Publication date:	12/05/2023
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	121,342
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

David Mamet’s numerous plays include Oleanna, Glengarry Glen Ross (winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award), American Buffalo, Speed-the-Plow, Boston Marriage, November, Race, and The Anarchist. He wrote the screenplays for such films as The Verdict, The Untouchables, Ronin, and Wag the Dog, and has twice been nominated for an Academy Award. He has written and directed ten films, including Homicide, The Spanish Prisoner, State and Main, House of Games, Spartan, and Redbelt. In addition, he wrote the novels The Village, The Old Religion, Wilson, The Diary of a Porn Star, Chicago, and many books of nonfiction, including Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood; Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business; Theatre; Three Uses of the Knife: On the Nature and Purpose of Drama; and two New York Times bestsellers The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture and Recessional: The Death of Free Speech and the Cost of a Free Lunch. His HBO film Phil Spector, starring Al Pacino and Helen Mirren, aired in 2013 and earned him two Emmy Award nominations for Outstanding Writing and Outstanding Directing. He was cocreator and executive producer of the CBS television show The Unit and is a founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company.

Editorial Reviews

09/18/2023

Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright Mamet (Recessional) documents his four decades working “bit by bit, much like a Missionary among cannibals” in Hollywood in this acerbic and entertaining series of anecdotes and sketches accentuated by his bitingly witty cartoons. Arriving in 1980 as a hotshot playwright commissioned to write a screenplay for Bob Rafelson’s The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981), Mamet witnessed the entertainment industry evolve from “an adventure” (“any next moment” could bring “love, sex, money, fame, artistic challenge, or an encounter with the highwaymen”) into a business ravaged by “corporate degeneracy” and policed by “Diversity Commissars.” Interspersed throughout are accounts of meeting such greats as Billy Wilder, Sue Mengers, and Bob Evans, as well as contemporary stars including Alec Baldwin, Denzel Washington, and Steve Martin. Elsewhere, Mamet dissects the inner workings of the movie biz, from on-set politics (“Executives have no place.... They don’t know what they’re looking at”) to the ills of filmmaking by committee, which “carries and transmits the age-old immutable lessons of bureaucratic survival.” The in-depth commentary on the nuts and bolts of screenwriting are among the most insightful (and least cynical) parts of the book (“the dialogue is of as little concern to a skilled screenwriter as the paint is to the mechanic. When the machine is correctly assembled, the thing can be painted whatever damn color pleases the money guy”). Cineastes will find this irresistible. Illus. (Dec.)

Publishers Weekly

10/27/2023

Chicago-born playwright, screenwriter, novelist, and director Mamet (Recessional) offers observations on actors and filmmakers as both an outsider (after success in the theater) and insider (since his move to Hollywood in 1980 to work in the industry). Famed as a writer who advises against narration in film in favor of simple imagery and fast, cynical dialogue, he confesses his love for movies. He directed 10 feature films and wrote more than 20 produced screenplays. He name-drops personal acquaintances Myrna Loy, Billy Wilder, Paul Newman, Denzel Washington, Gene Hackman, and John Malkovich and recounts their witty remarks. This is a breezy, anecdote-filled collection of brief essays that often extend to footnotes at the bottom of pages to continue tales. The book has a constant stream of stories and tangents, but readers will consistently be entertained. As a bonus, Mamet's own cartoon sketches decorate the text. VERDICT Mamet's staccato, derisive, episodic, raw-language writing will enchant fans.—Frederick J. Augustyn Jr.

Library Journal

2023-09-07
The frequently misbegotten experiences of a playwright in Hollywood.

"I did ten features as a director, the world’s best job; and wrote forty or so filmscripts, half of which got made," reports Mamet. His directing credits include House of Games and Oleanna, and he wrote screenplays for Wag the Dog, The Verdict, and the film version of his Pulitzer-winning play, Glengarry Glen Ross. He has rubbed elbows with several generations of Hollywood stars, from Myrna Loy and Billy Wilder to Denzel Washington and Val Kilmer, along with off-screen figures like David Geffen and Mike Nichols. The author’s anecdotes and ruminations on filmcraft are peppered with a constant fire of jokes and one-liners, many of them dated. Early on, Mamet offers a cold assessment of his memoir: "My life form, having succeeded in Hollywood and then aged out, scavenges some benefit from tell-alls, cartoons and captions." The cartoons, the most endearing parts of the book, include posters and storyboards for Hollywood brainstorms like "The Little Engine That Could Meets Anna Karenina"; a sequel to Titanic (“but this time, it's not the Titanic that sinks, but the iceberg—so: the story centers around two penguins!"); and a film called "Mutton for Punishment,” which "raises the baa on the sheep-action genre." Mamet characterizes his book as "a descendant of the Movie Mag," but if it is, it's one with quite a bit more attitude than its predecessors: Audrey Hepburn was "the sole actress more beautiful than Gary Cooper"; and F. Scott Fitzgerald, “who wanted to be liked by rich people,” also “wasn’t fit to puke into the same toilet as Hemingway." In general, a lot of Mistakes Were Made, some of which, the author acknowledges, were his own fault.

Cantankerous, scattershot, and often funny. Come for the celebrity anecdotes; stay for the cartoons.

Kirkus Reviews

Everywhere an Oink Oink is nothing but wicked jokes, angry broadsides and pointed gossip: in other words, the ideal Hollywood book.”

—Kyle Smith, The Wall Street Journal

“A smart, addictive, hilarious, and insightful look at everything from craven producers to the art of storytelling to the demise of storytelling to life.”

—John Nolte, Breitbart

From the Publisher