David Mamet is America s greatest living playwright and screenwriter, and the author of a brand new book called Chicago. We ll get right into it with Mr. Mamet in just one second. First, let s talk about your impending death soon. We all know it. But soon enough, you probably want life insurance. Second, if you ve been avoiding getting life insurance because it s too confusing or you don t have the time, check out Policy Genius. They re the easy way to compare top insurers, find the best value for you, with no sales pressure, zero hassle. And they can cover it right now. Go check it out right now! You can compare quotes while sitting on the couch watching TV, and you can compare it while listening to this podcast. Try it! Policy Genius has helped over 4 million people shop for insurance, placed over $20 billion in coverage, and they can even compare quotes in just five minutes when it s that easy. Check it out! And if you care about any of that, you can t wait to compare quotes, when it becomes a lot harder, you re gonna have a lot of fun. And a lot more fun than you thought you d have in life insurance, right now, right here, in five minutes. You ll get a discount on your first appointment with a professional life insurance broker. Thanks to my good friend, Michelle, for helping me find a quote. - Michelle, I ll tell you how to rate the quote she got from a guy who can help you rate it in the next episode of the show. Thank you, Michelle s good at it, too she s got the best deal on the place you can help me out there, too you can get the best of it, she s awesome, so she s gonna give me that s got it all that she s not going to say it, so you can really get it, right she s really good, she says it, I s not gonna say it so it s not that s gonna be it, yeeeeeeeeeeeedeedeedeeeeeedeedeeeeedeeeedeeedeee and she s a good deal, she really does it, you really is that s not even that, she's not gonna be that kind of thing, right he s not really that s really she s actually saying it, he s really like that, right?
00:00:00.000I mean, you look at a movie nowadays, if it lists 18 producers, that's not out of the ordinary.
00:00:06.000I've been in the business 50 years, I have no idea what a producer does.
00:00:19.000So, here we are on the Sunday Special with David Mamet, America's greatest living playwright and screenwriter, and the author of a brand new book called Chicago.
00:00:26.000We'll get right into it with Mr. Mamet in just one second.
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00:02:02.000So David, let's start from the very beginning.
00:02:04.000How did you get into playwriting, screenwriting?
00:02:06.000How did you get into writing from the very start?
00:02:09.000Well, I was a ne'er-do-well kid, and I used to teach a lot of colleges, and they'd say, we want to have a special group of kids who just want to talk to you, so how would you like us to pick them?
00:02:19.000So I'd always say, well, just give me the ne'er-do-wells, because they're the only people ever going to amount to anything.
00:02:24.000But the college was never capable of doing that, because, of course, they're set up
00:03:28.000And it was houses half the size of this studio over there.
00:03:33.000So then we moved to the south side, and I grew up on the south side of Chicago.
00:03:37.000Okay, and where did you go to college, and when did you actually start the writing?
00:03:40.000Was it in high school when you were being a class clown, or how did that get started?
00:03:43.000Well, I started writing in high school, and I actually covered sports for the Park Forest Star.
00:03:51.000They paid me like four bucks to cover the high school sports I wrote for them.
00:03:54.000And then I wrote for my other high school
00:03:57.000Literary magazine and I went to college and it was a hippie dippy school called Goddard College in the middle of Vermont and there was no school there I mean there was literally no school there because all the kids of the baby boom generation were trying to go to college and trying to stay out of Vietnam and The school expanded so rapidly that there were no dormitories and there are no classrooms so they housed us in northern Vermont and
00:04:23.000Okay, and so you started writing there and you were writing your own plays, or...?
00:04:42.000As a kid in Chicago, I was connected with Second City, which was the first improvisational theater group after The Compass.
00:04:49.000Compass was Elaine May, Shelley Berman, and Mike Nichols, and then it became Second City.
00:04:54.000And so as a teenager, 13, 14, 15 years old, I worked there as a piano player.
00:04:59.000for the kids' shows, and I worked as a busboy, and so I used to watch these great comics every night, doing sets, right, one after the other, and everything was a seven-minute blackout.
00:05:10.000And then I started reading plays, and I read that the people that really most influenced me were Chekhov and Pinter, because I realized what Pinter and Chekhov were doing was exactly the same thing they were doing at Second City.
00:05:21.000They were saying, life is a serial comic
00:05:44.000So I started writing sketches, and then I wrote sketches while I was at college, and one thing led to another.
00:05:50.000Well, one of the things you're obviously very well known for is the hard-nosed nature of your writing.
00:05:54.000The fact that everything you write has a real edge to it, and that's not a pun about the movie you wrote called The Edge, but it actually is true that when you read your writing, it's very edgy stuff.
00:06:03.000Where did that hard-nosed sensibility come from?
00:06:05.000Well, I mean, not everything I write is in the Dionysian vein.
00:06:11.000I've also written a whole bunch of Apollonian bullshit.
00:06:14.000But, as I say, I grew up on the South Side, and my dad did very well, eventually, as a lawyer.
00:06:23.000We were a staunch middle-class family, and I was a nice Jewish boy.
00:07:10.000Everybody knew somebody who knew Al Capone.
00:07:12.000Everybody had an uncle who was maybe a little bit bent, or maybe your dad or mom had been a little bit bent.
00:07:18.000And Chicago was a machine town, right, which is things got fixed after you went up and saw the captain, as we used to say.
00:07:27.000And if you didn't go up and step up and see the captain and turn out the vote or kick back two weeks of your salary, which happened to my stepsister, she got a job working on the Illinois toll road, and she came back one day and said, they want me to kick back two weeks of my salary.
00:07:53.000I mean, it works better if you're a white guy than if you're getting killed on the South Side.
00:07:58.000But it was a working man's town, and it was a machine town, and it became clear that if you want the government to do something for you, you gotta do something for them.
00:08:08.000Yeah, well, and that's something even I knew about.
00:08:11.000My parents are both from Chicago, and when my dad was growing up there, he said it was still the kind of place where you could wrap a $20 bill around your ID when you were pulled over for a traffic stop, and you might be able to get away with it.
00:08:23.000I mean, when I was a cab driver, we were getting harassed by the cops all the time.
00:08:27.000I'm sure that that's completely changed.
00:08:30.000So let's talk a little bit about your political point of view, because of late, you've been in some political controversies in the last few years.
00:08:37.000You're obviously incredibly well-known for your writing, and that means that a lot of people who are on the left, a lot of critics who tend to be on the political left, were very complimentary of your work for years and years and years.
00:08:47.000Do you find that since you've become more overtly conservative politically, that that's had any impact on how the critics treat your work, or have they been fair?
00:09:15.000All they know is the price of the ticket, right?
00:09:16.000They might say I like it or they don't like it.
00:09:18.000I don't have the right to ask them why, right?
00:09:21.000So if they don't like it, that's 15 years down the drain, especially in the theater.
00:09:27.000It opens in New York, they don't like it, you're dead.
00:09:30.000Interjected into this, as all human endeavors, are hangers-on and parasites and camp followers, which is what critics have traditionally been.
00:09:41.000They've been, you know, some good-willed people.
00:09:42.000I was a beneficiary of a lot of goodwill, for example, from Roger Ebert and also from Richard Christensen, Chicago's
00:10:16.000Sometimes they come down in my favor, sometimes they come down on the other side.
00:10:20.000But trying to be a good Jew, I say, wait a second, you know, if I'm going to kvetch, when they toss my work onto the ash heap, I shouldn't read the other reviews, which I know, through my sixth bad sense, are good.
00:10:35.000Generally, you can't survive in the United States as a playwright until you please the people in New York.
00:10:43.000And since a political conversion, the press in New York, especially in the New York Times, has been vicious.
00:10:52.000It's a peremptory challenge, in effect.
00:10:57.000And in effect, I wrote this book, which is on everybody's bestseller list.
00:11:01.000And the question is, how did the New York Times review it?
00:12:11.000Approval ratings, as he says, are lower than Gandhi's cholesterol, okay?
00:12:15.000He's about to get kicked out of office.
00:12:16.000And so he has this plan where he's going to... It's... Both the election's coming up and Thanksgiving's coming up, so he's going to pardon all the turkeys.
00:12:46.000So they asked me to write a piece for the New York Times, because back in the days when I was a pre-non-person, that's what they did, if you were.
00:12:54.000So I wrote a play, a piece for the New York Times called Political Civility, based very much on the teachings of my great friend and great teacher, Rabbi Mordecai Findley.
00:13:05.000And he said, okay, we have to be civil to each other.
00:13:08.000I said, we have to be able to state the other person's point of view in such a way they say, yes, that's what I mean.
00:13:14.000And then they ask me, and I have to be able to state their point of view, and they say, yes, that's what I mean.
00:13:20.000And then we're going to reduce facts upon which we can agree.
00:13:23.000We say, we can't agree on the term off the table.
00:13:26.000is facts upon which we agree, and then we'll reason from those facts.
00:13:30.000In effect, come let us reason together to see if we can arrive at some mutual understanding.
00:13:36.000So I wrote this thing about political civility, and I said, I find it's also important to be civil to myself because all my life I've referred to myself as a brain-dead liberal.
00:13:47.000I said, you know, there's a lot of truth in jokes.
00:13:50.000So I said, I have to stop and say, wait a second, why are you maligning yourself?
00:13:55.000Is this platform something which you believe or not?
00:14:01.000You know, it was this great middle-of-the-road piece, blah, blah, blah, New York Times, you know.
00:14:06.000As we say, we can deal with the Christians, God help us with the German Jews, right?
00:14:11.000So I wrote the piece for, oh wait a second, it was for the Village Voice.
00:14:32.000New York Times comes back and re-reviews the play November, gives it a worse review, and I find myself out in the cold.
00:14:43.000And I said, well, okay, I've got to figure this out.
00:14:46.000So I sat down for a couple of years and I wrote a book called The Secret Knowledge about politics and did a whole lot of reading, a whole lot of thinking, trying to reason my way
00:14:58.000through to an understanding of the political process, which hurt like hell, because I had to recognize that what I had accepted as the way things are were simply prejudices, and examine them to see if there was any truth in them or not.
00:15:15.000So, I wrote that book, and I found that my friends turned into acquaintances, and my acquaintances crossed the street.
00:15:24.000And Ruth Weiss said something great about the great Ruth Weiss.
00:15:28.000Somebody at Harvard said, you know, Dr. Weiss, what will I do if I tell people what I really think?
00:15:37.000So we'll talk about that in just one second.
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00:16:53.000Okay, so, in the secret knowledge, what did you actually discover when you delved into the political system and you say that you learned some things that you hadn't thought about before?
00:17:02.000What exactly were those things that hadn't occurred to you?
00:17:05.000Well, nothing had occurred to me because I was a red diaper baby and grew up in the bubble.
00:17:09.000You know, it was great to hate all the Republicans and great to be a peacenik and all these things.
00:17:15.000What I went back and what I understood, I think, was the biblical underpinnings of the Declaration and the Constitution, which basically goes back to the Torah on one foot, right?
00:17:26.000If it's hateful to you, don't do it to your neighbor.
00:17:45.000Let's see if we can agree on the least amount of rules that will get us free of King George III and allow us to keep an eagle eye on each other, to allow us freedom from government.
00:17:59.000So this was a concept that, you know, I might have heard the phrase, but I didn't understand what it meant.
00:19:18.000They say, okay, anybody who had a hedge that's been there for 22 years or more, and you can prove it through blah, blah, blah, you can keep your hedge, but
00:19:29.000We now have a new organization which is the Hedge Police.
00:19:33.000And the Hedge Police will come every year and they will take a surveyor's transit to make sure that the hedge is not higher than it was 22 years ago.
00:19:43.000It's like I said to my kids, all government comes down to the Hedge Police.
00:19:49.000Well, it's really interesting because when you watch your movies, there are a lot of, and see some of your plays, there are some lines that have become just part of sort of the American parlance.
00:19:59.000Obviously, there's the whole Chicago Way speech from The Untouchables, or the speech that, in the movie version, Alec Baldwin gives in Glen Ross, the always-be-closing speech.
00:20:09.000And a lot of folks on the left tend to use these particular lines, actually, a fair bit.
00:20:13.000So, Barack Obama famously suggested that you don't bring a knife to a gunfight.
00:20:20.000And people on the left are constantly suggesting that capitalism is this dog-eat-dog business where people are attempting to tear each other down.
00:20:27.000And they use that as an excuse for government interventionism.
00:20:29.000But it sounds like, you know, your basic view of human beings, that all human beings are basically at each other.
00:20:35.000And that's why we have to come to these basic agreements to leave each other alone.
00:20:38.000Well, yeah, I was watching yesterday that the great Tucker Carlson, I'm crazy about him, he had some cockamamie, I think Democrat something or other, you know, congressman or something like that, and he says to the guy, the Democrat, he says, wait a second, he says, you guys got nothing left in the golf bag.
00:20:55.000So what in the world are you going to run on in the midterms?
00:20:59.000And the guy says, economic justice and social justice.
00:21:02.000So I said, well, okay, you know, let's break it down to the English language, right?
00:21:37.000At the end of the day, it's communism.
00:21:39.000And communism is someone's going to be in charge of saying what you have to give to me, and I'll keep what I think I want and give it back to you.
00:21:49.000Which brings me back to when I realized that the Marxian idea, from each according to his ability, to each according to his need, really begs the question.
00:22:02.000Because the term which is missing is, the state shall take from each according to his ability, which means the state's going to determine what your ability is.
00:22:11.000The state shall give to each according to his ability.
00:22:14.000I'm the state, I'm going to determine what you need.
00:25:05.000There's a guy who wrote a book, his name is Paul Ingrassi, and he wrote a book, I believe, called Crash Course or Crash Something, about the merger of Chrysler and Fiat.
00:25:14.000And what he says in that book is really important to me.
00:25:17.000He says, culture will outdo organization every time.
00:25:22.000Because culture is the oral Torah, right?
00:25:24.000Upon which, you know, our understanding of the written Torah is based.
00:25:28.000Now, so my wife, every year she goes back to visit the old folks at home in Scotland, so I spent like three weeks alone forgiving her, okay?
00:25:39.000I was watching the Turner Classic movies.
00:26:00.000I've just seen a couple of good movies over the last ten years.
00:26:02.000Most of these movies are garbage, and not only are they garbage, they're a form of cultural obscenity, because they're either kiss-kiss or bang-bang.
00:26:11.000They're either simulated or non-simulated sex, or they're a sadomasochistic fantasy of violence.
00:26:45.000Well, the reason is that the people who write these things don't have any skin in the game because they can't write very well.
00:26:53.000So if they don't get any joy out of figuring out a plot, what they're going to do is they're going to put, you know, Adolf's meat tenderizer in everything, which is either sex or violence.
00:27:04.000How do you think that that impacts the culture?
00:27:07.000Do you think that that has an impact on politics more generally, or do you think that it's sort of just the background noise?
00:27:12.000Like when people go to see a movie, do you think that that actually has the capacity to shift how people think?
00:27:19.000It's a good question because it doesn't have the capacity to make people better, which is the other obscenity that movies are supposed to raise our consciousness, right?
00:27:27.000By saying deaf people are people too, black people are people too.
00:27:45.000With all of that said, do you think that the obsession that people on the right have with sort of left-leaning and bias in Hollywood, do you think that's overstated?
00:27:52.000Because if it turns out that culture doesn't really
00:27:55.000Change people's minds on various issues or play into politics all that much.
00:27:59.000Should we stop worrying about the sort of movies that we see quite so much?
00:28:46.000I went into all of these producers in town wearing a Harvard Law baseball cap with the last name Shapiro, and they obviously assumed that I was on the left.
00:28:53.000And then I would ask them questions about whether they discriminated against conservatives in Hollywood.
00:29:03.000My theory is that because the left has taken over the commanding heights of culture, because they've basically decided they're going to sneer down their nose at everybody who disagrees with them, the entire middle of the country, that because of that, the right has responded by saying, we're going to respond politically.
00:29:17.000We're going to take over the politics of the country.
00:29:19.000In response to you, because we're so angry, we can't take over Hollywood, but what we can do is vote.
00:29:24.000We can get out there and we can vote our people in, and then the left responds to those votes by getting even more angry and making the culture even more degraded.
00:29:30.000It used to be that there was a common culture we all shared back in the 1950s where people only had three channels or two channels, and we all watched the same sort of stuff, and we all watched the same sort of movies.
00:29:40.000There was a common background to our culture, and now the culture has fragmented, but is essentially to the left.
00:29:45.000And people have responded to that left-leaning culture with a right-wing politics.
00:29:49.000Do you think that there is any hope that culture is infiltrated by conservatives anytime soon?
00:30:01.000I mean, I'm not that concerned about Hollywood culture.
00:30:03.000I'm very, very concerned about education.
00:30:06.000But there seems to be, maybe I'm crazy, a little bit of groundswell under the pre-millennials of saying, wait a second, let me think about this.
00:30:14.000You know, I don't want to have my head stuffed full of trash.
00:30:21.000I always thought as I get older that it's not that people change, but rather that they die so that
00:30:27.000My generation, you know, one generation passes away, another generation comes up.
00:30:32.000But the earth, in spite of global warming, ha ha, endures forever.
00:30:36.000So there's a new generation that's coming out of the center of the country and out of younger people, and we're going to have a different Supreme Court.
00:30:43.000And eventually, the people on the left have to stop screaming.
00:30:47.000I mean, I don't know what their program for this wonderful country is, other than hatred of Donald Trump.
00:30:57.000I mean, you and I were having lunch, sort of brunch, over in Santa Monica area, and we were sitting there, and I've observed this to friends, that we were sitting there, and it's beautiful.
00:31:05.000I mean, it's a really nice restaurant, and all the light's streaming in.
00:31:07.000I'm having a Coke, and you're having lunch, and everybody around is having $200 bottles of Chardonnay, sitting there, playing with their iPhones in the most prosperous, freest country in the history of the world.
00:31:18.000And if we had taken a poll of the room, people would have thought that we are living in the shadow of looming tyranny,
00:31:24.000When in reality, we're living as close to a heavenly existence as is possible to live on this earth.
00:31:28.000If you plunked somebody out from 1900 and plunked them down right here, aside from the general lack of values, I think that those people would look around and go, wait a second, if I have a baby now, I can expect that baby to live till 80 years old.
00:31:39.000If I have a kid right now, I don't have to worry about that kid dying in infancy, and I'm going to survive childbirth.
00:31:43.000And yet, here we are sitting in the richest area of the richest neighborhood in the country, and everybody, if you would pull the room,
00:31:51.000They would think that we were living in Weimar, Germany and the whole thing's about to collapse.
00:32:46.000Now you're optimistic for the future of the country, or do you think that... Yeah, I feel incredibly, you know, somebody said a long time ago, they said no democracy survives more than 300 years.
00:32:59.000I mean, I'm a little more pessimistic than you, just because I feel like the pendulum swings pretty far in this country, and it's swung from Barack Obama to Donald Trump, which means that it's going to swing back even further to the left the next time around, just because the Democratic Party, by default, has made itself into a Democratic Socialist Party.
00:33:25.000Kind of a European Democratic Socialist Party.
00:33:27.000And so when the pendulum swings, it's going to swing back toward a Bernie Sanders or an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, at least temporarily.
00:33:36.000I don't think that there are a lot of substantive conversations being had because people are so angry at each other.
00:33:40.000And I do think that has to do with a lack of a common base of values.
00:33:43.000It sounds like when you were growing up, you were growing up with the feeling that despite all the corruption in Chicago, if you worked hard, you could get ahead.
00:33:49.000And it was actually your obligation as a decent human being to work hard and make something of yourself.
00:33:55.000I feel like there are entire generations of people in this country who have been raised on the premise that America is actually a terrible place that is seeking to put its boot on your throat, and that anyone who proclaims that America is good is a perpetuator of this evil system.
00:34:08.000That's true, but all these generations who were raised in the bubble, I don't think Starbucks can open outlets sufficiently enough to keep pace with that growing population.
00:34:19.000So what are they going to do for a living after their parents die and they're sitting on the couch and working as a barista?
00:35:09.000So, my belief is sort of the belief from the book of Genesis, which is that you are put on the earth to cultivate it, and the minute you stop cultivating it, there's no reason for you to be here anymore.
00:35:18.000But I think that there are a lot of people who actually believe that they are put here on earth for leisure time and enjoyment, and the more that we require of you, the harder you have to work.
00:35:27.000That's an inherent flaw in the country.
00:35:30.000According to Bernie Sanders' logic, we're so rich, why should anybody have to work?
00:35:34.000Well, Bernie, I think I met him in the old days because I spent a lot of time about the same age overlapping in north central Vermont.
00:35:39.000I don't think he's ever worked a day in his life.
00:36:01.000Well, all the government can do is either tax you or steal it from you, or waste it, or spend money on either things that everybody needs but nobody wants to pay for, or things that nobody wants.
00:36:11.000Those are the only two things the government can spend the money on.
00:36:14.000So the young person doesn't say, where does the money come from?
00:36:17.000I mean, what I worry about, I'm not sure that we have a problem of economics as so much as, you know, a lot of folks on the left think it's a problem of redistributionism in the economic system and all this.
00:36:25.000I really don't think that's the problem.
00:36:26.000I think we do have a problem of virtue and heart.
00:36:29.000I think there's a giant hole in the middle of the American soul that has been carved there by 40, 50 years of dependence on government and a belief that
00:36:38.000There is no higher calling for you, that your job on this earth is basically to experience the most pleasure possible and then die.
00:36:46.000And I don't know what replaces that other than a return to some sort of centralizing values.
00:36:50.000Well, I don't know either, except that I have a difficult time controlling myself.
00:36:57.000I mean, I'm not talking about compelling people, but I do think that the appeal of a moral lifestyle has always been a hard sell, and it's a particularly hard sell when there are no consequences to immorality.
00:37:10.000Well, there's a very good book on the subject, you know, which is called the Torah.
00:37:13.000You know, what's the consequences for morality?
00:37:15.000It's a, it's a plague or 40 years in the desert or, I don't know, think twice about it.
00:37:20.000So let's talk about your Jewish philosophy because you came from, you said, a red diaper doper baby kind of background.
00:37:27.000They were very, very secular Jews, and they went to Sunday school, and I mean, let alone a Talish, you never saw a Yarmulke.
00:37:36.000I mean, someone who went to Yarmulke, there was like these Episcopal Reformed temples that would have been lynched.
00:37:43.000And I thought a lot about it, and two things occurred to me.
00:37:48.000One is that Arthur Hertzberg, in his wonderful book, The Jews in America, talks about the Ashkenazi abandonment, that at least a quarter, maybe more than a quarter of the men who came over abandoned their wives.
00:38:09.000And his dad came over from Russian Poland, just left them.
00:38:13.000And so my grandmother's single woman, hardly spoke English, raised two kids during the Depression.
00:38:20.000But if you said to your dad, my dad, oh, you know, your dad abandoned you, he'd say, no, no, no, he didn't abandon me, and I always knew where he was.
00:38:27.000So, as Hertzberg says, it was the father who took the kids to show.
00:38:32.000So if the father's not there, who's taking the kids to show?
00:38:35.000The other thing about assimilationist reform was these young people wanted to be American.
00:38:43.000They didn't want to be European, they wanted to be American.
00:38:57.000So if there's no upside to being a Jew, which is Judaism, and the Torah, and the wonderful Yiddishkeit, all there is is downside.
00:39:08.000The people in my Episcopal Reform upbringing went to temple the same way one might go to the dentist.
00:39:15.000They say, I don't want to, but I know it's good for me.
00:39:18.000And you see that today in a lot of the Reform synagogues around here.
00:39:21.000You know, people will sit there, you know, as if they're watching paint dry, and nod and nod, and then give all their money to the building fund.
00:40:35.000So this is a magnificent compilation of folk tales and literature and how-to and humor.
00:40:42.000And it's just, it's the history of the West.
00:40:46.000And if you said this was, you know, all the Jews they used to call about the Judists, right, or the Buddha Jews, right, they want to become Buddhists, they want to become Wiccans, they want, because they're searching for meaning, of course they are.
00:40:57.000But there's a lot, the meaning is right there, it's the history of our people, and it's what made America what it is.
00:41:03.000Because all of these people, they read two books in their life, a lot of them, they read the Bible, they read the collected works of Shakespeare.
00:41:10.000And they came up with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution.
00:41:15.000So I was getting married to my wonderful wife, Rebecca, and she said, oh, we have a Jewish wedding.
00:41:21.000And she was raised by a physicist and a yoga teacher in Scotland.
00:41:26.000So people thought religion was nonsense, but a generation back, a lot of them were Jewish.
00:41:31.000She said, we have to have a Jewish wedding.
00:41:36.000So we found this great rabbi, Rabbi Larry Kushner, who's now in San Francisco.
00:41:41.000We started going to his show in Sudbury, Massachusetts, and at one point he said, he said, oh, he said, you guys should really learn Hebrew.
00:41:49.000We said, oh, no, no, we'll learn Hebrew and foreign language, blah, blah, blah.
00:41:55.000He said, you know, on a scale of difficulty, if English is an eight and Hungarian is a nine and Mandarin Chinese is a ten, Hebrew is a two.
00:42:15.000I'm going right back to the actual word that was written 3,000 years ago.
00:42:20.000I think what you say about the impact of biblical kind of foundations on Western civilization, that's one of the reasons why I don't think it's the people reject the Bible and therefore they reject kind of the American tradition and the Western tradition.
00:42:32.000I think they reject the Western tradition and the American tradition and therefore they reject the Bible.
00:42:36.000They don't like how America turned out, and they're upset about things as they are, and so they say, well, then I don't like any of the foundations for America either.
00:42:42.000And it seems like they're angry at the current status.
00:42:44.000It's not that they decide they're going to be secular and they don't believe in the Bible.
00:42:47.000It's that they decide that America has too many flaws, that it was based on a bad system, and that bad system was based in turn on the Bible, and therefore we have to be against the Bible if we want to build something better, which is a sort of Marxist take on history, I think.
00:42:57.000Well, yeah, I mean, and also, I mean, I haven't been to a lot of, I haven't been to church in decades, but I go to a few synagogues around the world, and most of the reformed synagogues, I mean, I'd rather drop bowling balls on my feet, you know?
00:43:32.000He says things that you never thought about before, because he's devoted his life to trying to understand that document.
00:43:38.000Well, understanding history, I think, as an Orthodox Jew, you know, somebody who takes it very seriously, understanding history and understanding where we came from, I think if you don't understand that history, you're not going to understand, as you say, America, and you're not going to understand what makes America a wonderful place and how we got to this place in civilization in the first place.
00:43:54.000It's easy to pick off the fruit of the tree after having burned down the trunk, which is, I think, what so many people
00:44:55.000You put a nickel in and it showed you a couple of pictures, and the earliest pictures were pictures of a train coming toward you, or people walking down the thing.
00:45:01.000We'd go, ooh-ah, ooh-ah, they were selling an experience.
00:45:08.000Then, they started, as films in the late teens went from being a one-reeler to being a full-length movie, they said, Jesus Christ, you know,
00:46:10.000Then as film became more and more big business, the suits took over.
00:46:16.000And they said, wait a second, we have a franchise, we can't
00:46:21.000put this franchise in jeopardy by having a plot.
00:46:23.000So if you look at the late 50s into the 60s, American movies, and into the 70s, versus European movies, there's nothing very much happening.
00:46:33.000You know, it's the big franchise, and it's Doris Day, as opposed to Sophia Loren.
00:46:40.000So, okay, so now things start degenerating, degenerating, degenerating,
00:47:14.000Are there people who are in charge of making sure that we're going to keep the audience rather than people who get a kick out of making a movie?
00:47:22.000So here's a question because you mentioned sort of the 30s and 40s and maybe early 50s is sort of the golden era of movies and that of course is not just a common opinion.
00:47:30.000I think that it's pretty well accepted.
00:47:33.000How much do you think that has to do with going back to a point you made earlier?
00:47:36.000About the fact that right now every movie seems to be very reliant on sex and violence and basically from 1933 to 1960 the Hays Code was in place thanks to the Catholic Legion of Decency saying we don't want to see any of your sex and violence and so you had to operate around the rules.
00:47:53.000One of the theories has basically been that when there are all these rules in place with regard to writing that actually in some ways makes the writing better because you actually have to write around all the stuff that otherwise would be obvious.
00:48:05.000I really like the pre-code movies, as everybody does, because they're rougher.
00:48:09.000You know, the code comes in and all of these, you know, lechers and whores and pimps and blah blah, who then has now ruled Hollywood, said, oh, I'm going to get on my own high horse so I can get out of here and snort some coke and go have some illicit sex.
00:48:24.000There's a great energy to the pre-cut movies, but I don't know if that's a causal relationship or just things got too rich that people could not afford.
00:49:43.000The movie model itself seems to be collapsing.
00:49:46.000It's very difficult for a star to even hold a film anymore.
00:49:50.000Stars don't have the same sort of cachet in the United States that they used to.
00:49:53.000Are you excited about the future of where film is going?
00:49:56.000Or do you think that TV is where it's at?
00:49:58.000Where do you think the entertainment industry is going?
00:50:00.000Which trend lines should we be following?
00:50:02.000Well, the only thing I'm excited about my latter years is taking a nap.
00:50:07.000So I'm going to let things go on without me, as they will.
00:50:11.000But if you look at the 20th century, entertainment and the theater was always changing, right?
00:50:17.000Vaudeville came in and the people on stage looked down at Vaudeville.
00:50:21.000And then movies came in, and the people on stage looked down at movies, and so it was the second tier of stage actors who went into the movies.
00:50:32.000Radio came in, and the second tier of the stage people went into radio, and then television came in, and those radio people plus the second tier again
00:50:43.000They became the huge stars as people who basically see players.
00:50:47.000And every subsequent iteration of technology drove the other one, you know, we don't have much theater anymore, you know, except for Mamma Mia.
00:50:57.000And we don't have any vaudeville anymore.
00:51:24.000Because obviously you're a playwright as well.
00:51:26.000Who do you think are the, you mentioned Pinter and Chekhov before, but who are your favorite playwrights and favorite plays, if you had to name your top five?
00:51:33.000Well, I don't like going to the theater because there's no popcorn.
00:51:38.000So the thing about going to the movies, which is really great is, you know, if you really like popcorn, I love popcorn.
00:51:45.000You eat down to the bottom of the popcorn and you start crunching the kernels because you can't, because it's the current, it's the, it's the great human dilemma, right?
00:51:53.000I want some more popcorn, but I don't want to shame myself by going back to the popcorn thing again.
00:51:59.000So I'm getting, so what happens is the last little bit of kernel, you get that little thing stuck in your teeth, you know,
00:52:06.000And so do you spend the rest of the movie picking that out so that the movie doesn't have to be that interesting?
00:52:12.000Okay, well, you know, it's really a pleasure to have you here.
00:52:15.000And I'm so glad that you could make the time.
00:52:18.000Folks, if you've not read David Mamet's latest book, the book is Chicago.
00:52:20.000You should definitely go check it out.
00:52:38.000The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is produced by Jonathan Hay, Executive Producer Jeremy Boring, Associate Producers Mathis Glover and Austin Stevens, edited by Alex Zingaro, audio is mixed by Mike Karamina, hair and makeup is by Jeswa Alvera, and title graphics by Cynthia Angulo.
00:52:52.000The Ben Shapiro Show Sunday Special is a Daily Wire Forward Publishing production.