Horton Foote and David Mamet in Conversation, part II

Here is another page of my notes on the program Horton Foote and David Mamet gave at the 92nd Street Y in 1986, the first part of which is here. I will post additional material if I find more pages.

Mamet: [In Hollywood] if someone gets shot in Act III, they don’t see why they can’t get shot in Acts I and II also.

Mamet: More and more, the kind of movie I like is a silent movie.

Mamet: Wait a second—you’re writing about human beings and I’m writing about Chicago?
Foote: I mean, human beings in Chicago.

Mamet: ...wishing they hadn’t sent the limo because you know you’re going to pay for it at the story conference.

Mamet: They always invite me to come on the set... they never mean it. Sure, I’d love to stand on the corner for three hours feeling like a damn fool while they massacre my screenplay.

Mamet: It’s like the mother of Moses—you just watch your baby go [when you sell the copyright].

Mamet: All you can put on the screen is the narrative line or what Aristotle called the ‟structure of the incidents.”

Foote: Couldn’t your work [About Last Night, based on Sexual Perversity in Chicago] have been done correctly?
Mamet: Yes, but it was done by venal and unpleasant people.

Foote: I wanted to be an actor in the worst way.
Mamet: I did too. I was an actor in the worst way.

Horton Foote and David Mamet in Conversation

When I moved to New York in 1980 I went a little bit wild. Yes, I did, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. After years of relative deprivation in Denver, I subscribed to concert series like they were going out of style, joined Manhattan Theater Club and the Public Theatre, and even became a member of the 92nd Street’s Poetry Center. Those were the days, my friend! I heard Eudora Welty, Eugene Ionesco, Bill Murray perform in a Yeats play, Robert Merrill, Salman Rushdie, and so on.
And there, on October 6, 1986, introduced by Lindsay Crouse, Horton Foote met David Mamet for a conversation on writing for the theater and the movies. I took notes, either to share with a friend who couldn’t be there or for my own amusement. When Horton Foote died earlier this year, I looked for the notes but couldn’t find them. It would have made a nice commemorative post, I thought. Since then, one page of the notes turned up and even though there’s more Mamet that Foote in my notes, I’m going to share them in Foote’s memory.
Mamet: Their idea of the craft of screenwriting jingles when you put it in your pocket.
Foote: Nobody is writing plays, stories, or poems much — they’re all writing screenplays. I quickly try to discourage them from that.
Foote: I was an actor and I started from the most terrible reason: I wrote myself a part.
Mamet: Why should one go back to that other hell-on-earth unless one’s wife needs a new kitchen?
Mamet: Tolstoy, I kind of think, was a Russian Dreiser.
Mamet: I just kind of write down what people say to each other. That’s where I think the theater differs from the movies.
Mamet: Dodsworth was one of the greatest American movies ever made.
Mamet: Sandy Meisner told me I’d starve in the gutter if I became an actor. And well I would have, if any gutter would have had me.