Summary
Nothing stands in the way of their payday. But there is another script on [Bob]'s table, one doomed to rejection called The Bridge: Or9 Radiation and the Half-Life of Society. The two men mock its pretentious literary air, its artistic struggle for meaning. Bob uses it to bait a young office temp, Karen (played by a vivacious Taylor Thorngate), to read it and come to his house to discuss it- she doesn't know that he's made a bet with [Charlie Fox] that be can bed her. When she jumps at the "opportunity," Bob tells her, on her way out, to tell Charlie "he owes me 500 bucks." Neil LaBute has learned from [David Mamet].
Thorngate plays Karen as an ingenue, recalling Madonna, who first played the role at the play's Broadway premier. She has a nervous energy in her earlier scenes, as a new temp worker among forceful bosses would. When Bob tells her about the "prison movie" script, she asks, "Is it a good script?" Bob's stunned. He's never thought of that.The two Hollywood execs are combative, crass, greedy SOBs, but they retain recognizable strands of humanity like humor, pride, fear. They're not even villains. They make garbage that will make money. That's just what they do. Mamet's criticizing Hollywood through them, sure, but he's looking at the big picture. Where and when, in our lives, he asks, do we compromise what's right, what's difficult, what matters? What do we plow under, and what do we sow?See the full content of this document
Extract
Deep Digging
Deep Digging
Mamet's Speed-the-Plow hollows out Hollywood at Cherry Center.David Mamet is all about dialogue-a broken-up dialogue of interruptions and unfinished sentences, repetition and leaps across loosely connected ideas. It's tough-guy back...See the full content of this document
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