Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin - David Mamet

Episode Date: May 7, 2025

David Mamet is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright, screenwriter, and director. He first gained acclaim in the 1970s with plays like Sexual Perversity in Chicago, American Buffalo, and later the landmark Glengarry Glen Ross, which earned him both a Pulitzer and a Tony nomination. A founding member of the Atlantic Theater Company, Mamet’s prolific career spans theater, television, film, and essays. Mamet’s most recent play, Henry Johnson, premiered in 2023 and is currently being adapted for the screen. Starting May 9th, Henry Johnson will be available for rental directly through the film’s website - and will also be screening in theaters across the country, including stops in Dallas (May 6), Santa Monica (May 9), and a weeklong run at Bryn Mawr Film Institute in Pennsylvania (May 9–13). ------ Thank you to the sponsors that fuel our podcast and our team: Athletic Nicotine https://www.athleticnicotine.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Squarespace https://squarespace.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ LMNT Electrolytes https://drinklmnt.com/tetra Use code 'TETRA' ------ Sign up to receive Tetragrammaton Transmissions https://www.tetragrammaton.com/join-newsletter

Athenaeum is a new podcast on the Tetragrammaton Network. you knew about the Manson murders was wrong. Join Ayesha Akambi for a once-in-a-lifetime, in-depth conversation with Tom O'Neill, author of the runaway bestseller Chaos, Charles Manson, the CIA, and the secret history of the 60s. In this limited deep dive series, Tom O'Neill unpacks his 20-year investigation into the CIA's mind control program, linking it to Charles Manson and the disturbing secrets buried in America's history. From missing FBI files to Hollywood cover-ups,

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Tetragrammaton I think I've been very fortunate because I never got an education, so all I did was read all the time. What are your thoughts on education in general? Well, it's interesting that you should say that because I, for years I wanted to write a book about education. My wife said, please don't. So I did. And I imagined this school, prep school in New England. And I wrote the memoirs of a fellow who had been the headmaster for 50 years and who knew the... Fictional story. It's all fictional.

And so I put all my ideas about education into the. What's it called? It's called Some Recollections of St. Ives. I'm very, very happy with it. I'd love to see it. Yeah. I spent my life thinking about education because I didn't have any.

And I went to the Chicago public schools. It was very traumatic for me because everyone said I was stupid and they kept putting me in remedial reading classes and never opened a school book. And so I grew up thinking it was really, really stupid. But at the same time they were putting me in remedial reading classes. I was reading all the time,

but I never put the two things together, that I was actually getting an education, but I wasn't getting it in the schools. You weren't getting their education. You were educating yourself. So what were they educating me to do? Looking back, it would have taken about a thousandth of the energy in the psychic reserve to just do the stupid fucking exercises. But it never occurred to me.

And I think it didn't occur to me because my main trick was being stupid. That's what everyone told me what I was. And so I was very good at it, right? So I said, okay, I can- You used it to your advantage. It was a world I was comfortable in. So would you say it gave you freedom? I don't know if it gave me freedom, okay, I can. You used it to your advantage. It was a world I was comfortable in. Would you say it gave you freedom?

I don't know if it gave me freedom, no, but it was bearable. It was more bearable to think I understand the world, I'm stupid, rather than I don't understand the world and everybody who's in a position of authority is wrong. Yeah. So then I spent a lot of time thinking about education and I went to an acting school and

thinking about the way that education took place because I didn't understand what they were doing and it didn't make any sense to me. And then I started a couple of acting schools, did a lot of directing. And so I've always been thinking about how people learn, how I learn, what is education. For example, one of the things you'll see in the book, it's all anecdotal, and the guy shows up and he says he was a prisoner of the Japanese in World War II, and then he was in Manchukuo, and he goes, a prisoner of the Russians, and he learned Japanese and he learned Russian, and because they let him

get some books, he learned Greek and Hebrew and Latin. And he shows up and he says to the guy, I'd like a job at this school teaching languages. And the guy says, what language can you teach? And he said, I think I can teach whatever you want. So the guy says, well, do you have any degree? The guy says, I don't have a degree, but he says, I'll tell you what, he says, the classical languages. Tomorrow morning, he says, you choose Latin or Greek. I says, okay, Greek. He says, good. He says, give me your worst students

at eight o'clock in the morning. Just have one stipulation. Don't feed them anything. I just have one stipulation, don't feed them anything." The guy says, okay. He says, come back at four o'clock, they're going to be speaking Greek. So the students come up and they haven't eaten anything and they're sitting there. And the guy's got a big plate of scones. He looks at the scones and he says, food, food. He says in Greek, food, food. He says in Greek, food, food.

And he says in Greek, stand up. He points at the guy, the kid stands up. And he says, in Greek, you want food? You want food? And the kid says, yeah. He says, in Greek, say it. The kid says, I want food. And the guy says, good, come have a scone. And so the kid sits down and someone else says, I want food. The guy says, good, come have a scone. And so the kid sits

down and someone else says, I want food. So the guy says, in Greek, you want food too? The guy says, say it, I want food too. In Greek. In Greek. And so the kid eats the thing. And so he says to the kid, good? The kid says, yeah, good. So at the end of the day, they're speaking Greek. And what he does halfway through the day is he starts writing it down, the words in the Greek alphabet of food, and he writes down the word for that.

Good, he writes down the word for that. Because what the guy figured out is all prisoners must learn to speak the language of their captors immediately. And the way they learn is they don't eat. So they have to learn to speak the language of their captors immediately. And the way they learn is they don't eat, so they have to learn to pay strict attention. And the way languages are not taught, you can study French for five years and know nothing, but if you're there for three weeks, you're going to speak the language because the language that you're trying to learn is accompanied with gestures, and you understand the gestures, that the person who speaks the

language is trying to communicate with you, trying to help you communicate. And so the headmaster says, they learn the alphabet too, isn't that hard? He says, every 15-year-old boy loves codes. It's just a code. So my life as a teacher and as a thinker and certainly as a director is how to teach. How do we actually learn? What's the test? Like we send kids to college starting in my generation and they say, well, they're going to become more themselves. They're going to be open to the world or they're going to become more themselves. They're going to be open to the world, or they're going to become exposed to other. Let's bullshit because there isn't any test.

So if the test is you're going to be able to speak French, you're going to be able to do calculus, that's a test which can be applied to the school, to evaluate the school, whether it's you're going to become more yourself or you're going to become more open to other blah, blah, blah. The kid realizes it's nonsense. I'll go along with the gag, but it's just nonsense. So how does that apply to the arts? How does it apply to directing?

What applies to directing is you have to understand what you're asking the person to do, and it has to be something that can be done. The real trick to directing actors is you really don't have to do anything. The actor understood the script when he read it. There's nothing more to it than that. The actor simply shows up and says the lines with an objective somewhat like that. Is that all there is to it?

Yeah, that's all there is to it. And I've worked with the greatest actors in the world, and whether they're conscious of what they're doing or not, that's what they're doing. So people say, do you spend a long time directing your movies? I said, I don't spend any time directing my movies. The actors show up, but you know what the script is about, because they read it.

I say, you got any questions? No, okay, go. And works just fine. So I realized from working with other directors, myself as a playwright, that most directors have no idea what they're doing. They come out of the English department because what the director's job is, in addition to designing the scenery, is to keep the actors from tripping over the scenery

and to stage them in such a way to increase the audience's enjoyment through the staging. For example, if you're the audience, most directors have the actors talking like that to each other. Those guys can't see them, those guys can't see them. Everything should always be in a diagonal, and you can move the actor so that the person talking has the attention of the audience. And if you don't, you're not doing your job. So the job of the director used to be called stage manager.

Did the director start as the stage manager? That's what it evolved from? Yeah, and the job of the stage manager was to make sure that no one's gonna upstage the star and to move them around. It's a very, and the job of the stage manager was to make sure that no one's going to upstage the star and to move them around. It's a very, very simple job. And the whole thing changed in the end of the 19th century with Stanislavski.

And he thought that we had to investigate the character and find the inner meaning of the character. There isn't any inner meaning of the character. There isn't any inner meaning of the character, it's just actors saying lines. It's just like, you know, after you listen to Glenn Gould play Bach, everyone else sounds like bullshit because his unspeakable genius is to the best of his ability playing the music and getting himself out of the way.

So the idea of interpreting music or interpreting. I feel like Glenn Gould interprets Bach because if you listen, other people play Bach, they play it more just the notes, and he's playing the notes, but he seems to be reinterpreting it in a way that others don't. Yeah, well, yeah, one can certainly make the case. Yeah, but that's how I understand it.

So the job of a director is basically to say, pick it up and knock it off, right? Because the actors get it. Yeah. Would you say the words of the play, that's it? Is it all in the words? Well, where else would it be? I'm asking. Well, my question is a rhetorical. Where else would it be? You say the words of the play, that's it. Is it all in the words? Where else would it be?

I'm asking. Well, my question is rhetorical. Where else would it be? If you pick up a script and shake it upside down, the character's not going to fall out. It's just words. So people talk about how difficult it is to do Shakespeare. Quite the opposite is true. It's the easiest thing in the world.

You just say the words. You say the words. The purpose of the words is to have the speaker affect something in the other person. It's not to communicate ideas. So if I'm trying to get something from you, which is what all drama is about, if I'm smart, I'm going to tell you to the best of my ability what I think is more likely to get a response out of you.

Most people say, I'm gonna get a response out of them. I'm using my words to make them understand what I want out of you. So if you just focus on the character you're playing against and say it to them, that's the actor's job. Yeah. You don't even have to focus.

Just do it. Well, you have, listen, it's like, I always say people sit and watch a television show in a bar, and somebody comes up and says, oh, what's happening? And the other guy says, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. She was just discovered cheating on her husband, and that's her best friend.

And she's trying to get him to tell her it's okay. That's all you need, right? They aren't going to say, well, as I know and you don't because I saw the first hour, she had a very difficult childhood and she has all these characteristics, see. For example, so if you look at movies and television, almost all of it is narration. It's people talking about something that happened before. You know, jeez, I know why I'm telling this. When I was young, my kitten got run over

by a dump truck and da, da, da. Well, we really need to do this, Jim, because as you know, if we don't, the blah blah people are going to take over the thingy over there. They're explaining to each other. Understanding drama is really understanding what the audience wants, which is actually kind of easy

because we were an audience before we were dramatists. Do you write like you talk? I hope so. I have a bit in my book, Recollections of St. Ives, where one guy wants to teach history. He says, here's what we're going to teach history. He says the best history book in the world is a flea market. He says, here's what we're going to do.

I'm going to take the kids to the flea market. I'm going to give them each a $5 bill, and I'm going to say, buy something. Tomorrow, come in and tell me all about it. So they come in and tell me all about it." So they come in and tell me all about it and he says, okay, he says, then if I say to them, stand up and just tell me about it in your own words. And I say, good, right, now write it down. They just learn creative writing,

because that's all creative writing is, right? It's telling it in your own words. So when you're writing a script, do all the characters speak the same way? No, of course not. My mind is a raging fire. Everybody speaks different, you know, because I get to dress up like they do.

But if you think about it, when we fantasize as we all do, all the characters in our minds speak differently, don't they? Yes. Same thing. It's just writing down fantasies. When you imagine a character, do you have a person in mind or an actor in mind when you're writing or no?

No. Just picking it up. No imagery in your head? No. Tell me your process, how it actually works. I write it down. I'm making it up and I'm writing it down. And I was thinking about Bach, you know,

if you listen to the Partitas and so forth, as a musician, tell me if I'm wrong, it's obvious that he's just transcribing an improvisation. Right? So does he say, oh, da, da, da, this and that? I think all music is, most music is written that way. It all starts as improvisation. It doesn't start theoretically, if that's what you're saying.

It's not intellectual. Right, but I'm saying it. I don't think he wrote down, and so then go to the treble clef, and then do the bass clef. Oh, what happens after 16 bars? No, no, no, no, no. Sounds to me like he's sitting down at the piano fort and then writing down what he's playing.

And that's your experience of writing, same thing. I think so. What do I know? Before you start the story, how much of the story do you know? Sometimes I know a lot and that's wrong. And sometimes I know a little, I gotta figure it out. Because at the end, it has to be an equation.

One thing is I found very upsetting about modern music because it doesn't resolve. Most of it is just, it's a chant where it's the same four bars played over and over and over again. Yeah. So okay, it's elevator music, but we miss our beloved cycle of fifths, don't we? We miss our resolution. If there's an extraordinary resolution of music, it's just like an extraordinary resolution in dramas.

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athletic nicotine offers the lift you've been looking for. Learn more at athleticnicotine.com slash tetra and experience next level performance with athletic nicotine. Warning, this product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. Tell me, what do you remember about the idea for House of Games? I was doing this movie for Bob Raffelson and Jeff Nicholson, Postman always rings twice.

We were shooting in Santa Barbara and I was living over here, and I would commute back and forth to my wonderful little 1968 Carmen Ghia, best Carmen made. And I was listening, speaking of Glenn Gould, to Glenn Gould play the C minor toccata, and it's six notes, right? It's C minor from C to A. It's all da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da- I wish I could write like that. So that was kind of my inspiration. The idea for it being about conmen? Well, I spent a lot of time in that world by accident

growing up in Chicago. I spent a lot of time playing poker with criminals and I also spent a lot of time working in phone rooms. What's a phone room? A phone room is a boiler room in the old days. You're sewing, for example, imaginary land in Arizona, which is one of the places I was working. And there's 25 guys there to reach on the phone

and they're given very bad leads, sometimes actually cold calling out of a telephone book. And they're trying to set up a date with you. They say, oh, Mr. Rumer, hi, this is Richard Rumer. Yes, thanks. Oh, my name is Dirk Bogard and I work with the Glenn Realty Company. I understand that you were someone in your family put in your name as someone who was interested in making a profit and land. Is that true? If

that's true, what I'd like to suggest to you, your name has been picked at random out of a pool, and the president of our company is going to be in town just this afternoon. And he'd like to talk to you to get your ideas about how to form this program. What would be a better time for you? Would it be four o'clock or six o'clock? And of course, your wife would be with you. So I did that, and I sold carpets over the telephone. So you had these jobs?

Oh, yeah. over the telephone. So you had these jobs? Oh yeah, and it was a really interesting world to me, because the salesmen, not the people in the boiler room, but the salesmen, they call them sales bums, right? A lot of them lived in a hotel, a lot of them were drunk and addicted. A lot of times no one didn't care what they were selling, they were just great at selling. And then I started playing poker with a lot of guys

who were criminals and hanging out with them and listening to them talk and stuff. How old were you at that time? I'm not 22, 23, something like that. And what were your thoughts going on at that time? Was it just, this is really interesting? Did it feel scary? What were your thoughts?

I was just living my life. It was never, I remember I went to this hippie-dippie school, it wasn't really even a college, but it pretended to be, and I went to visit a friend from high school who was at Harvard, this person I knew from high school. So I went down to Cambridge, I went into the Harvard yard, and it was one of the most stunning experiences of my life. I looked around, I saw all these people my age who had a life and they had support and they were made.

They didn't have to worry about, I always looked them in the mouth, you know, because I didn't have any career, I didn't have any skills, didn't have any contacts, but these people were just, they were made. That was it, and it was stunning to me. So, you know, I guess my great motivator has been two things.

One is I've given a gift, so I'd be a fool not to use it. And the other was I was always terrified of poverty. Yeah. When did you become aware of the gift? Well, I woke up one day, I started writing, and then I wrote these little sketches. I used to work at Second City in Chicago, not on stage. I worked as a busboy, and I worked as a piano player for the kids' shows. And I saw the sketches that they were doing, improvisational comedy.

And then I started reading Pinter's sketches. And I thought, oh, it's the same thing. What they're both doing is writing this tragico-comito blackouts. And then I discovered Chekhov, and that's what he's doing. None of his plays have a plot. They have a setting, and they're all like

seven to 12 minute tragico-comitico blackout. So I said, well, hell, I can do that. So I did. And one thing led to another and I started writing plays and I liked it. Who were your contemporaries at that time? Well, my contemporaries at that time were the people that I was working with

in the theater in Chicago, among them, William H. Macy and among them, Malkovich, a little bit younger than I am, and Gary Sinista, both a little bit younger than I am. And a lot of those guys, they became very well-known. Macy among them, Billy Peterson, you know, did NCIS or Loan, or whatever the hell he was doing. And Meshach Taylor did Designing Women. And also Warren Casey, who wrote with Jim Jacobs, who wrote Grease.

So we were in a little theater the size of this, and he was in the garage across the street doing Grease, and then Stuart Gordon was there with the Organic Theater, and people from New York started coming saying, geez, what's going on here? How do you think it was different than what was going on in New York. It was completely different because none of us saw a career. It was just what we were doing. There was no money. There was no upside. No, there's no upside.

I didn't have no time of my life. And everybody was working a different job and putting the money into the theater companies. Cause why not? You know, it was the Beatles, you know, it was the greatest experience of my life. And we were in these rundown neighborhoods, transition, and the people started coming from the neighborhood.

And they'd come up to you on the street, they said, you know, Dave, I saw that play you did last week, it was really good, it was so wonderful. It's just like, that's the way that you talk to the plumber or the butcher or something like that. Fucking loved it. Good job. Yeah, good job.

Well done. That's very Chicago, right? Nobody's impressed by much of anything. My dad used to say, New York's the biggest hick town in the world, which I think has proved to be true. How else do you think Chicago informed who you are? Well, my parents were first generation.

They were born right off the boat. How did they end up there? Do you know? Yes, some of the mammoths went to Ellis Island and went to Brooklyn. And some of them went to Montreal and came down through the lakes and ended up in. But as usual, somebody knew somebody in the Lanzmannschaft,

right, the informal self-help organizations. But they used to say, if you can't work in Chicago, you can't work anywhere. So I don't know if that's true now, but it was then. They did every job in the world because you could always go get another job. But one thing about Chicago was that the American literature of the 20th century all came out of Chicago.

Really? Yeah, every out of Chicago. Really? Yeah, every bit of it. So that was the tradition that I grew up in. I'm not aware of that. Yeah, that's the tradition that I grew up in. And I used to go cut school and go to the library and downtown just read. And I loved the Chicago ones, you know,

Willa Cather and Dreiser and Frank Norris and Ben Hecht, who wrote the front pages, you know, the transformative American play, and on and on and on. Nella Larsen, who wrote Passing, and Richard Wright, I mean, Black and White. And, for example, B. Traven, who wrote The Jungle Nights.

How many White came out of Chicago, for Christ's sake? I didn't know that. Yeah, that's all Chicagoan. I always hear the expression, the machine politics in Chicago. What does that mean? Well, Chicago was always a machine town. It was run by the dailies,

and it was a democratic machine town. The question is, you know, as Joey Montegna and I say, you don't want to live in a town where you can't fix a parking ticket. Who do you got to talk to around here was always the question. You know, working as a cab driver, you know, we're always getting shipped down by the cops. And it was clear if you worked for anything in the city, you had to kick back part of

your salary, right? And if you wanted to get the streets cleaned, you had to vote Democratic and blah, blah, blah. It was very clear. But there was nothing hidden about it. So when I grew up, it became, I found it odd that people didn't understand how politics worked, right? That it was A, people with a good idea who are gonna get taken advantage of

by the people who got into it for the money. And then it was all about power and that the purpose of the Constitution was to protect us from the government. It was not the job of the government to do good, because I don't know how to do good. I think about it all the time, and I'm a huge sinner. Why would these schmucks who are getting into it to steal have a better idea about how to do good?

So it's kind of stunning to me that a lot of people don't, well, some are coming to realize it. What do you know about the Great Chicago Fire? Well, one of the things I know is that because of the Great Chicago Fire, I think it was 1903, 1906, it was impossible to build a theater in Chicago. We couldn't do it. The fire laws were too strict. Then, for some reason, in the 70s,

the fire laws were relaxed. And because they were relaxed, our little neighborhood, right around the corner from Wrigley Field, these little theaters sprang up. You know, 50 seats that were, ours was an abandoned car bar, and one of them was an abandoned dairy, one was in a garage.

These little theaters sprang up. Folding chairs? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. It was a space. It was a space. So even today, anyone who grew up in the theater, if you show them a black room, their eyes light up.

They say, well, this is great. I could do anything here. And indeed you could, because one of the other secrets that we learned was that stage design is very, very difficult. There was a guy called Adap Apia, a great designer and a great researcher. He said the set doesn't make any difference. He said what makes a difference is the correlation between the stage and the audience. It's an amphitheater, right? In fact, if you look at an amphitheater, what set could you put on the amphitheater to make it better?

So is it possible to do a set which is better than a bare stage? Yes, but it's very, very difficult. So my thing has always been if you can do it on a bare stage and keep the audience's attention, it's gonna be hard to beat it. In fact, if you can do it right and do it and keep the audience's attention, it's going to be hard to beat it. In fact, if you can do it right, you can do it on a radio. You don't need a set.

And we had a little theater, the Goodman Theater. A guy called Greg Mosher came in. The Goodman was an old death house in Chicago. And Greg took it over and turned it into a great theater and hired all of us. And he had a little space, the second space theater, which was, I think, 80 seats. And it's always true that if you have a theater with a big space and an experimental space,

nothing good is happening on the big space, right? It's all happening there. And I had a back wall. It was built in, like, 1920, a back wall. And it was plaster. And over the years they'd painted up, they'd put on paint, they'd taken it off, they'd put up a mastic and taken it off, they'd put up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up.

And we always ended taking the set away because that, for some reason, was the most magnificent, you know, it was like polygap, you could paint, and that was just stunning. Amazing. Amazing. Yeah. Have any of your works been used as radio plays? Do you know?

Oh sure, I did a bunch of them as radio plays. Yeah, yeah, yeah. In fact, I think I did a few as radio plays last year for the BBC, I think. Fantastic. Yeah. I'd love to hear that. You ever done therapy?

Yeah, I did. What a waste of time, Jesus Christ. Tell me about it. Well, here's the thing. I've known in various capacities therapists and psychologists and psychiatrists, and like any other profession, few of them were smart. Maybe one or two of them were wise. And I did a lot of reading about psychoanalysis when I was young, I got very interested in

it, I read everything. I realized that there's a cross-pollination between Stanislavsky and Freud, the co-evils, and that the quote method as adopted here in the United States was taken from the teachings of Stanislavski and practiced by people who all involved in therapy. And they were all communists, so they're also involved in the whole communist Marxist idea of self-revelation and sharing boob-dee-bob-dee-boo. But I realized that most therapy that I've either participated in or seen those close to me participate in was a recitation of grievances.

And it's like you said about the monk, right? You say, oh, I'm a bad monk. Yeah. Right? You're a fucking monk. Yeah, you either are or you're not. Yeah. So the recitation of grievances I saw cross-deck

from my experiences in the theater, it lead to nothing. I know how this person feels. I think, who cares? The audience don't care. I want you to say the stupid lines. If the play's written well, they'll get the idea. You're just there to get the idea. So I had terrible experiences with psychiatrists

and like that before I came to realize that absent the stuff you could get out of either Uncle Joe, don't worry, you'll grow out of it. Right? Or a good clergy person shut up and obey the rules. Or if you really fucked up some psychological drugs, they've got nothing to offer. Here's the thing, if you go into the theater, you have to pay something. You have to.

You can't put on a play for free. Seriously, it could be a nickel, but just like they say it when the Jews do the census, you have to put a half shackle in the box. Let them put a quarter in. That allows them to believe. It triggers them into being able to suspend their disbelief. They're investing in that experience. Exactly.

They're investing in the experience. If you don't invest in the experience, you don't believe, right? So they have to invest something. But the opposite is true, too. When you go to therapy, like most other people, and there are of course a few exceptions, you also invest in the right to believe in something which is not true, which is that complaining or finding the reason that you cheat on your wife is somehow going to free something.

It's also, it's just not true. People do not act badly and feel upset because of something they saw in the closet 45 years. It's just not true. So that's what I think about therapy. Your main character in House of Games was a therapist who had written a successful book. Yeah. And there's a scene at the end I wanted to ask you about. She looks different.

She's dressed in flowers instead of her old uniform. And her friend leaves the table, and she steals a lighter from the next table. Yeah. What did you mean by it? That's what I meant by it. That throughout the thing, Joey Mantegna is saying the broads bent.

Yeah. Right? If she weren't bent, she wouldn't be going on with this stuff. So she's proving him right. Yeah. Yeah, that's the old joke, right? There's a hypochondriac who goes to a little kid, they're taken to the therapist, he says,

I've determined the root of your son's problem, he's a thief. So there. Also, we see this whole idea of the primacy of therapy, which is completely self-referential. Well, there's nothing wrong with that. We're all self-referential all the time, unless we do a bunch of yogurts or what, because our mind is a monkey mind. But leeches over into identitarian politics and the criminal justice system.

Oh, I wonder why the guy did that. You see it every day on the news. You look like you're so healthy that you don't watch the news. I'm trying to- I don't watch the news. Yeah, I gotta stop, but it's just fucking bullshit. But they say, well, Dada went in and he killed his mother and father. I wonder what his motives were.

Well, A, it's who would know, and B, so what? So much of today's life happens on the web. Squarespace is your home base for building your dream presence in an online world. Designing a website is easy, using one of Squarespace's best-in-class templates. With the built-in style kit, you can change fonts, imagery, margins, and menus, so your design will be perfectly tailored to your needs. Discover unbreakable creativity with Fluid Engine, a highly intuitive drag-and-drop editor.

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Whether you're just starting out or already managing a successful brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create and customize a beautiful website. Visit squarespace.com slash tetra and get started today. At any point in your life, were you interested in magic? Like card tricks, magic? Sure, but I got interested in magic not as a practitioner, but through my associate Ricky Jay who was the greatest magician, maybe the greatest performer of the 20th century and I did many, many things with him. How'd you meet him? He was in the park, he was doing Shakespeare in the park and I saw him performing magic

and I was talking to Jules Fisher, the great lighting designer, he's a great friend of Ricky and I said, oh, I wonder if he'd come over and perform for my 30th, 40th birthday, something like that. They said, you're crazy, Ricky doesn't do that. But we called Ricky, Ricky comes over and performs. I fell in love with him. I said, this guy's a great actor. So I did many movies and television shows with him.

One of them you might enjoy is I did a funny or die called Lost Masterpieces of Pornography. And he's introducing the Lost Masterpieces of Pornography. And it's Eddie O'Neill and Kristen Bell in a porn movie from 1935 that takes place in the roving chambers of the Supreme Court. It's called June Crenshaw, Sex Kitten to the Supreme Court, and Ricky's introducing it. So we talked all the time about the difference between magic and drama,

and the Aristotelian idea that you have to use the mind to lead people to a conclusion which is both surprising and inevitable. So drama works the same way as magic, essentially. Yeah, absolutely. Tell me about the same way as magic, essentially. Yeah, absolutely. Tell me about the Phil Spector Project. You know, I ran into a long lost relative of mine.

There aren't too many mammoths, but there's one in New York who's working at Yeshiva University. And she's the granddaughter of my cousin, Eddie the Cop. Eddie Mamadou was a cop for 40 years, and he was there and asked me to speak at Yeshiva, and then Eddie's son came over and they started talking about

the history of my family in Poland. And they said, well, you know, we're actually specters. He said the Mamads were an offshoot, that the whole blah, blah, blah, Phil Specter. Some probably related to Phil Specter. When did you find this out? Two weeks ago. Really? Yeah.

So anyway, so somebody called me up, who was my, maybe Barry Levinson called me up, something like that. Said you wanna do this movie about Phil Spector. And then he took it to HBO, and I talked to HBO over there. And I said, yeah, okay, I'd love to do a movie about Phil Spector, What do with Al?

And the deal is you're going to leave me alone. I'll do it. Do the best job I can. See you at the opening. So they said, OK, the fools. So anyways, they're doing Phil Spector having a time of her life with Pat Midler and she threw her back. I was like, two weeks into the shooting, heart breaking.

We had to close down. I asked Helen Murren earlier if she would do it. She said, I'm busy. And then she said, no, no, no, I'm going on vacation with my husband. I'm beat. And with my husband on Bede. And I called her up. She was on vacation, Helen, in Spain with her husband on a Friday. And she said, I'll be there one day.

Wow. Yeah. Amazing. Did you write the script? Yeah. And did you ever meet Phil? I didn't meet him, but somebody invited me that I wanted to go see him. He was in the joint.

And I said, no, no, no, I'm making up a story. You know, I'm not recasting a story. And I asked Al, and Al said, no, I don't want to be in it. I want to do my own thing. How did you decide on Al? Well, I love Al. I mean, I've worked so often with Al. And I'm working on a new movie, trying to put together this movie, and he said he'd

take a part in it if he's free. That'd be great. It's the same old story, but this new movie is another confidence game movie about these two guys who find this rich Mark who's a dealer in Americana, and he's also gay. And so what they wanna do is sell him the Abraham Lincoln letter that proves that Abraham Lincoln was gay. And they've been waiting for years

to find this perfect thing as they go to the forger. It's pretty cool. It sounds great. Yeah, and John Malkovich said he played one of the guys and went to see who was going to play the other one of the guys. So when you're writing a story about a real person, in the case of Phil Spector, how do you research?

Or do you research? You just make up from scratch? Yeah. Shel Silverstein, who was my closest friend, he said, never do research. When you do research, you're just reading bullshit written by somebody who didn't do research. So the problem with biography is, you know, I was thinking a lot about in reading your book, the question is, what do you throw away, what do you keep? Right? I'm always working with this question. So I always knew that a good writer is going to keep what others throw away, but

it was also going to throw away what others keep. So, looking with a biography, there's all this stuff. It's very difficult because if you're dealing with someone who's putting up the money, they're going to say, wait, where does he chop down the cherry tree? Right? Or wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, where does he, blah, blah, blah, this or that, and the next thing.

So the problem with writing biographies is to throw this stuff away, to say what's the actual story? Yeah. And then take it from there and let your imagination work. And when you say story, do you mean story or essence of the character? There isn't any essence of the character.

It's just story. Yeah, Aristotle said that. He says there's no such thing as character. Character's just habitual action. That's no such thing as character. Character is just habitual action. That's all we know about anybody. Anything other than that is narration. That's how we understand, anybody understands.

What does the guy do? That's his character. So for the writer and for the actor, both, this thing is a character. The audience will get the idea. They imagine a character based on what the actor does and the words coming out of his mouth. So the people in the audience imagine a different character depending on who they are. Would that be accurate?

Well, yes. And it's very much like listening to a radio personality. It's an illusion. They think that they imagined something, but they didn't. It's much like listening to a radio personality. It's an illusion. They think that they imagined something, but they didn't. Because if you ask them, well, okay, describe it. Describe it, they can't. They can't.

So it's an illusion. You can leave it out. Because art is all about what can you leave out and it's still there. Do you think of yourself as spiritual in any way? Oh yeah, sure. Tell me how. Well, I mean, you know, God,

to amuse God to put me here, you know. So you're a believer. Oh yeah. Sure. Do you pray? Sure. How do religion and show business work together? They don't, but show business is the bastard child of theater, which is of course the bastard child of theater,

which is of course the bastard child of religion. So it all starts with religion. Sure, it all starts with exactly so, with connections, all metaphysics, right? It's a connection to something beyond our consciousness, which nonetheless we intuit is true. But it's true in a way different than fire burns, but it's true nonetheless.

Describe more. I think everybody believes in God. I think we just call it by different names. And some of them actually call it the devil, and some of them, it actually is the devil, whether they call it that or not. So if you read the Torah, which I do, it's all in the Torah. What does God want you to do? Do justice, love mercy, while humbly with God.

You want some extra tips? Okay, here's Ten Commandments. You want some extra tips in addition to that? Okay, here's several Jewish observances. These are all designed to calm our mind such that we're receptive to higher power. That's what they're designed for. If we, like your monk, you do them, you're going to get the benefit. If you don't do them, you're going to pay the price. So rational human beings devote so much energy to saying, that can't be true, right?

It's not that God doesn't exist, but he's doing a rotten job. I think I could do a better job than that. Let me make up all these laws and rules and regulations, and PS, I'm gonna throw out anything that says it's religious because that's irrational. But if you look at human beings, we're all irrational constantly.

If you look at what's on the news, which, you know, it's absurd and it's evil. So if you don't say God exists, then it's very easy to say, well, obviously, that evil doesn't exist either. But wait a second, how do I account for the fact that everything's screwed up? It's those guys over there.

Is there any benefit for rationality? Of course. Tell me. Well, to distinguish between this and that, right? If you can't distinguish between this and that, you're a vegetable, right? Is it reasonable to let women get beat to shit because someone says that men should

be able to compete against them? Is it reasonable? So reason is very, very important. So the Hebrew word for reason is v'na, which means between. I judge between this and between that. I use my reasonable capacity. But the other hand, we have the monkey mind. How do we deal with it? One way we deal with it is through art. Freud said that music is polymorphous

perversity, right? It affects us in this extraordinary way that feels very much like reasonable propositions, but it's not. So whoever rises from his prayers, those prayers have been answered. If we rise from experience of art, something beyond ourselves, our prayers have been answered. Right? It's not gonna cure world hunger. Right?

Or we become a little bit less devilishly insane for the four minutes of a song or two hours of a play. So you're describing it as beyond entertainment. Yeah. It has a higher purpose. Yeah. It does for me. Yeah, for me too. Listen, it's easy to entertain people to get their attention through sadism and pornography,

which is what most television and movies now are, right? But it doesn't have any affect other than the moment, other than its capacity to impel addiction. Because I mean, you have to do it again, you have to do it again, you have to do it again. Because yeah, okay, now they finally took off their clothes and they're engaging in X, Y, and Z, now what? Were they gonna take off more clothes? But because you can't, what's the next step?

Sadism, in effect, snuff films, which is what Luigi Mangione is, and what all the anti-Israel rioting is about. Right, it's, because we tried the best thing we know how, which is people fucking constantly. And it didn't work. What's next? Physical violence and murder.

Have you ever been censored? Oh, sure. I got blacklisted all the time. Yeah, sure. How? Well, people just lost my number. They said, we can't do his plays because he's a whatever. I don't know what that was. Have any works been banned? I don't know if been banned, I lost my number, right? They said, we can't do his plays because he's a whatever.

I don't know what that was. Have any works been banned? I don't know if been banned, but you know, they certainly been saw. I had some, somebody wanted to do some plays of mine the other year and they went out to all the theaters here, the Mark Taper Forum and the Kirk Douglas and blah, they said, I don't know, we can't touch him.

How is playwriting different from other kinds of writing? Finally, playwriting is reducing a unidirectional human interchange into dialogue. That's all it is. So it's hard to do. Somebody asked John Barrymore, what are your favorite ten plays? He said there aren't ten good plays. I love John Barrymore.

I love him too. Do you remember the first time you saw one of your pieces performed? Yeah, I think it was in Chicago. It was a piece called the Duck Variations in Chicago, a little theater, like a 50 seat theater. It was great. Yeah. What was the experience?

How did it change from the page to the stage? Well, it didn't change much from the page to the stage because the actors were really good. It changes from the page to the stage if the actors want to get a good idea. And Henry Fonda said that, they gave him his first Oscar, one of our great actors. Never got an Oscar, they gave him one for lifetime achievement award, means thanks to I Now, right?

He said, I want to thank all the directors who cured me of my good ideas. Yeah. Are you ever surprised by what you see on a stage? Oh, yeah, sure. And ever in a good way or only in a bad way? Well, no, no. Many times in a good way, people do something and say, my God, that's genius.

Like Hemingway, he's writing in Death in the Afternoon, and he and a friend are in Barcelona and they're watching the great bullfighter. I think it might have been Manolete. And Manolete performs a pass. The horns of the bull are so close, and Manolete moves so little. And he and his friend look at each other and they just shake their heads like that.

How could he do it? How could he do it? So I've had that experience many times watching actors. LMNT, elementlytes. Have you ever felt dehydrated after an intense workout or a long day in the sun? Do you want to maximize your endurance and feel your best? Add Element Electrolytes to your daily routine. Perform better and sleep deeper.

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Minerals are the stuff of life. So visit drinklmnt.com slash tetra and stay salty with Element Electrolyte. LMNT. How is a play different than a film? Well in a film you get to eat popcorn and in a play you get to read your program. Beyond that? Well it's completely different, right? Watching a film is a construction finally finally, by the director, working as the comptroller and as the architect

and as the designer. So the French come along with this auteur theory. I don't know what the fuck that means, of course. Who's making the movie if not the director? Except if the director's not making the movie and then the studio heads are, you know, in which case one would be better not to have been born. How did directing come into your life?

Well, I started directing because I went to the Neighborhood Playhouse School in theater in New York and studied for a year, and I had no idea what the teachers were talking about. It didn't make sense, and nobody could do it. The idea that you had to find something to substitute for blah, blah, blah, and that you had to relate to your own experience, and they had been doing these silly games that made people more self-conscious.

And so I saw that, and I learned so much watching the actors doing that. I said, no, no, no, this got to be a better way. And so I wanted to stay in the theater because I loved the theater. Loved it. I felt so at home there. But I couldn't get there as an actor. So I became a director with my own little theater companies, and there was nothing for us to do because we couldn't pay royalties.

So I said, okay, so I wrote plays for them to do. And then what was the first film you directed? House of Games. And how did that come about? How did you make the jump? Well, I worked with Ray Felson on Postman, and I followed him around. He said, follow me around, follow me around,

follow me around. And so I was watching what he was doing. A lot of it I understood, and a lot of what I said, you know, I think I could probably do it differently. And then I wrote these two movies for Peter Yates, great director, Peter Yates. And he was going to direct them, the first one was House of Games.

And at the last moment, he said, I can't do it, why don't you do it? So I met this wonderful producer on Places in the Heart called Mike Hausman, and he said, yeah, I'll produce it for you. I said, well, I haven't directed a movie before, so he shepherded me through the process. And good experience?

It's wonderful, it's absolutely wonderful. What were you doing with Raffleson on the Postman movie? I wrote the script. How did you realize you wrote it? Yeah, I wrote it. And we were shooting it. Typically, when you write a script and someone else directs it, do they want input from you or do they want you to go away?

Both. I mean, two mutually exclusive ideas. Raffleson wanted me there. He didn't change anything. He wanted me there. A lot of people have asked me, well, I want to be there, but I said, fuck no. And for the most part, I didn't want to be there. Anybody who's on a set who's not essential is deleterious, they're dragging it down.

You gotta be essential. So when I give the people a script, I'm saying, as far as I know, this is as good as it can be. If you shoot this, you paid me and you have my word on it, you're gonna go up with a pretty good movie. Maybe I'm wrong, but I don't think so. But I got really sick of people taking my, both as a playwright and as a film director,

people taking my work and misunderstanding. And it was pretty fucking simple. You know, show up, say the words. How has theater changed over the course of your life? Theater? Yeah. Well, it's died, but it's always dying, right? I was very fortunate because they changed the fire laws in Chicago, because none of

us had anything better to do, nor could we imagine anything better to do than putting on the plays. And so there we were, like 19, 20, 23 years old. All of us recognized, although we never said it, that that was the best theater happening in the English-speaking world that night. We're having a time of our life. And it spawned the whole Chicago theatrical experience of Steppenwolf and St. Nicholas

and the Organic Theater and Victory Gardens and Remains. The whole generation of people coming up. And then what happened, of course, is that things die because they're unsuccessful and things die because they're successful. So the neighborhoods became gentrified and went away. And the actors and directors and writers that became successful became gentrified and went away. And then New York became gentrified and went away

because New York was the clearinghouse for American theater because it had an audience. The audience was mainly middle class and largely Jewish and they knew what they would do and they patronized the theater. So when those people got priced out of existence, Broadway still existed, but who was gonna come? Tourists.

So because tourists are going to come, you're appealing to a very different clientele, so you have to get something that's going to attract them. You aren't going to say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember that guy did the designs last year for Othello. I'm going to go see him because he's designing. There's a strata this year. So you had to put stars in, so the prices went up. And so the advertising budgets go up, and so OK.

You know, it's like being the best boatman on the Erie Canal. Do you think in the good days in Chicago, in the theater, the fact that there were maybe not high expectations was helpful in it being good? No. What do you think allowed it to be as good as it was? We were on fire.

We're allowed the beetles to be as good as they were, right? Yeah. Was it the humidity in the cellar? No. They're just fucking on fire. They got lucky. They found each other. They'd all been gifted by God.

A little bit of symbiosis. Tell me about your Kennedy assassination film project. Oh, I wrote this great Kennedy assassination film that I put every, I was gonna direct it and put everybody in, everybody was in that film. Malkovich was in it, Shia LaBeouf was gonna play, Oswald, Al was in it. It was a dramatic film.

Oh yeah, so who else was in it? Viggo Mortensen was in it, John Travolta was in it, the cast just wanted forever, they all read the script and said, yeah, you bet. Courtney Love was in it, Rebecca Pidge was in it, everybody was in the book. Louis CK was gonna do a part at one point. And then these guys came out of nowhere,

they had a better idea than making a movie. They thought they just knew each other. I don't understand. Neither do I. Is there a chance it will happen in the future? I don't know. But it started out because Joey Mantegna called, he said, there's this kid, he grew up with, called Nicky Selozzi, who was a part of the Giancana crime family.

I think Giancana was his uncle in Chicago. And Nicky wrote this script about what was happening in Chicago when Ocardo and Giancana decided to kill Kennedy. So I read the script, I said, yeah, okay. It was actually terrific. So I got together with Nikki and I said, yeah, this is terrific, I said, I'm gonna have to rewrite it. If you wanna do that, we'll split everything,

blah, blah, down the middle. She said, sure. So I wrote the script and then I gave it to all my friends and they said, you bet. They said, I'll be in, do it for nothing. These great cinematographers and designers, yeah, I'll get in, do it for nothing. And then, exactly.

Tell me about the Zapruder film. I read this book. It was a compilation of articles by film historians, by cinematographers, and each one looks at this impruder film. And, you know, I spent a lot of time in the cutting room and so forth, and I'm reading what they're saying. They say, yeah, there's stuff missing. It's just missing.

The film disappeared. They took it and they shipped it from Dallas where there was a Kodak facility to LA and then they shipped it back. And then I wrote a wonderful movie for Kate Blanchett, she was going to do for nothing, about the Zap Ruder film. And that fell apart too, unfortunately. Oh, that's a good movie. It's about the guy, basically it's a guy called Slavko Vorkapic who did all of the montage and process shots in movies, the trick shots that used to have to be done either in a camera or in the lab.

And he dies and he leaves his money to this woman, his granddaughter who comes to the great house in Pasadena, finds out that he doesn't own the house, he has no money, he's getting $10,000 a month from some corporation. So the question is why did they pay him? And it turns out that he was the guy who fixed up the Zappert film. Why a book of essays now? Because I was going crazy.

This is my third book, this book, third book of kind of political socio-ruinations. First one was called The Secret Knowledge, second was called Recessional, and this was the third one. Because, you know, I'm getting old and I don't know if I'm retired or not, but the business has changed. It's more difficult to get stuff made because the people with whom I came up, who was a generation older than I, and now we're a generation the same as I, and now we're a generation younger than I, and so the reaction is, who? That's completely understandable. So I was looking around, I had too much time in my hands, so there's something I just, I don't understand.

What's happening to our society? So the answer is, of course, it's in the Bible. It's always happening to our society. Right, good is fighting evil and good intentions or fighting concerns for personal security and safety. And the people are turning back on God and they're screaming at each other and shooting each other.

In the new book, you compare yourself to Vanna White. Can you explain? Oh, Vanna White, of course. Because Vanna White would come out and she'd gesture like this at the refrigerator. That was her job. And so she did it for years and years and years. I thought, well, yeah, that's basically what I'm doing. I'm gesturing at the refrigerator and saying, that's basically what I'm doing. I'm just doing a refrigerating thing.

That's a refrigerator. So that's what the essays are about. You wrote that democracy is an outgrowth of the Torah. Well, sure. The whole idea of the Torah is they came to, I think, Hillel, the great sage, and they said, can you tell me the whole Torah standing on one foot? He said, yeah, I stood on one foot. He said, what's hateful to you, don't do to your neighbor, now go study. So the Torah really comes down to that. And one of the differences between Judaism and

our cousins, the Christians, is in the understanding of the golden rule. The Christians say, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. But to the Jews, that's a foreign and incorrect statement, because what they would say is, I'm not going to do unto you as you would do unto me. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. No, I'm going to turn it around. I'm going to not do to you what I want you to not do to me. Because that's more probative.

Right? I mean, who knows? I might be screwed up. I might want you to do this to me. That's not a very good idea. But I certainly know what I don't want you to do to me. I don't want you to malign me, hit me, sue me, lie to me, those things. I'm not gonna do that.

Tell me about the power of myth. Well, it's all myth, right? Isn't it? I mean, everybody believes in the myth. Part of what happened in the last election is people say, let's call a myth a myth, right? That we shouldn't be jailed for suggesting that something may not be an actual fact,

but a myth. That we should be able to differentiate between the two and make up our own minds about which is which. So you say, oh, you can't believe in Jesus. That's a myth. Or you can't believe in the fact that the Jewish people have always lived in, that's a myth. But on the other hand, you say, well, we need to apologize to the Mugwamp Indians because we're on their line. That's not a myth. That's a myth. But on the other hand, you say, well, we need to apologize

to the Mogwamp Indians because we're on their line. That's not a myth, that's a fact. And if you say that's a myth, you're evil. Yeah. You compare government to the mafia in the new book. Can you tell me more about that? I mean, you know, growing up in a machine town, which was basically a mafia town,

the Ocados and Genocas were in line with the Dems and with the Daily Machine and all that. But you say, what does the mafia say? Well, guess what? You have to pay me protection. If you don't, we're going to kill you, the mafia says. And the government says, oh, we're going to throw you in jail. Now, guess what?

You have to buy our products, the mafia says. You have to buy our light bulbs, and you have to buy our electric cars, and you have to buy our shower heads. Oh, you don't like that? Oh, you're going to go to jail. Guess what? We're going to tell you who you can hire, the mafia says. You're going to hire my cousin Vinnie over there.

You're going to pay him too much money, or else we're going to blow up your dry cleaning establishment. Well, how is that different from affirmative action? Oh, guess what they say, you're going to give me all your savings. I'm going to invest it for you and it's probably not going to be there when you get back. What are you going to do about it? Right? So the constitution and starting the declaration is to protect us against government being oppressive. It's not to do good, it's not to elect people to do good. The difference is the mafia doesn't say I'm going to do good, they just say do it, I'm going to break your kneecaps.

So they're similar except the mafia might be more honest or more direct. Well, yes, they're less hypocritical, certainly. Do it or else. What part of bang bang don't you understand? How much do you trust historical accounts? That's a very good question. I guess I don't trust them very much at all. I tried to read a lot of them, but if you say, where's the information coming from?

There were several really good books written about the South and the beginnings of the Civil War at that time. So I really enjoyed reading them. One of them was Frederick Olmsted who designed Central Park, was a great designer and building designer and invented the Red Cross, did all sorts of things. He wrote a book called A Journey Through the Southern Slave States in 1855. And what I realized from that was what people were missing in Uncle Tom's cabin is that the real evil is not Simon Legree, right? It's the people who said, well, what

are you going to do? You know, yes, these are my slaves, but I treat them better so that the horror in Frederick Olmsted's account and the horror in Uncle Tom's cabin is the way the good people treat these little slaves. The guy says to Uncle Tom, at the beginning, you know, you've worked for me your whole life. I'm going to free you when I die, which is already, if you think about it, bullshit. People say, Washington Jefferson freed the slaves when they died. What's good about that?

They rang them dry and said, well, I have no use for you. Fuck it off you go. So the guy runs into difficulties. He says, Tom, you're such a great guy. You basically raised my children. But what can I do? I'm going to have to sell you down the river. What can I do?

So that's... Oh, that expression, sell you down the river. I never made the connection. Yeah, so you heard it on the song. That's what sell you down the river means. Yeah. Tell me about the seven minute rule. Ricky studied for years and years with two guys.

He came out here to spend a week with a guy called Daryl Vernon in the 70s, who was the greatest stage magician of his day, and with a guy called Charlie Miller, who was a mechanic, which is to say he was a cheat at the card table. They're the two greatest card manipulators in history. And so Ricky studied with them for years and years and years and took care of them until they died. And Ricky was going up to the Magic Castle one day to meet Di, and he was late.

And he comes up and his Di is in the parking lot. And he says, Di, I'm so sorry I'm late. I'm so sorry. And Di says, that's okay. I've been watching the way people put on their coats. Right? Yeah. So watching the way people behave is fascinating.

I was talking to my wife yesterday, went to this restaurant. I said, you know what? I said, if you take two women who are available, where they aren't hooked up with anybody at this point in time, if they're out having lunch, they gesture more than people who are attached. And she said, oh, that's true, unconsciously. Did you just notice that? I noticed that.

I just noticed that I noticed it. In that moment, you noticed it. I noticed that I'd always noticed it. Oh, you always noticed it. I wasn't conscious of it. I did this movie with Cheyenne. He's talking about what's coming out called Henry Johnson, where it's coming out.

And he's talking to the kid, and he says, well, he says, a woman, you're looking down the street, a woman looks away like that, why does she do that? I said, I don't know, so she can get your attention, the movement gets you your attention, right? A woman puts her hair back or adjusts it, she doesn't say she's raising her breasts, they do it unconsciously, but I realized that all people

are reacting unconsciously to each other, but they're completely unconscious of it. Like if you look at guys walking down the street, you know, if you think you're more of an alpha male than they, a lot of them, they'll lower their eyes. Interesting. So I noticed that the question is why is a scene seven to 10 minutes long? And the answer is that unconsciously, we humans are programmed to check for danger at certain times.

And that we make a little check every seven minutes, which is the length of a show and they had commercials seven minutes, boom. Kind of the length of the scene, length of a comedy sketch, length of a show and they had commercials, seven minutes, boom. Kind of the length of a scene, the length of a comedy sketch, the length of a vaudeville sketch. And if you put three of them together, you make a much larger look at 20 minutes after the hour

and then at 20 minutes to the hour. And the French say, an angel passes at 20 minutes after the hour and 20 minutes before the hour. What does that mean? The silence descends because people are looking around. And if you go into a theater, most plays go up about seven minutes after the hour

and the audience quiets down, unconsciously. They aren't looking at the watch as they're talking, but at seven minutes after the hour, they quiet down. So that's the seven minute rule. So I was wondering about that because I was wondering what the springbok. The springbok is in a book. The springbok is an African large goat, like a cross between a goat and a giraffe, an antelope. It's an antelope. And they spring up in the air and look around. They spring up in the

air and look around and spring up. Like on their hind legs? They jump. They go right up in the air. And they're in flat lands. So they go up in the air and look around spring up. Like on their hind legs? They jump. They go right up in the air and they're in flat lands. So they go up in the air to check about what's happening. They're in a big herd and they check about what's happening. So I said, now we know why the springbok hops, right? But I started saying, when does it hop? When does it hop?

So I said, well, obviously, there are spring bucks that have built in this internal engine, right? And the ones that hit the number correctly are going to breed. And the ones that don't hit the number correctly are going to become proof of the lion. So that becomes over time inbred. Do you think the seven minute rule applies to everything? I don't know, maybe. It might.

Yeah. It might. Tell me about Carnival Barkers. Carnival Barkers? Well, Ricky was a Carnival Barber. Was he? Yeah. I loved carnivals.

When I was a kid in Chicago, there was this place called Riverview, which was an old carnival that became this huge amusement park. It was just filthy and full of all sorts of freaks. And they had all these carnival barkers. And the barkers, you would say, like, they're on the inside, folks, they're on the inside. See the world's living hermaphrodite. Adam and Eve, brother and sister, man and wife,

and one single body exhibited, not to be rude or vulgar, no, no, no, but to show you one of nature's curious mistakes. See the electrode lady, the electrode lady from Johannesburg, South Attica, she and her sister struck by 20,000 bolts of electricity. Her sister died and she lived. The doctor said she lived because she was immune to the shock of electricity. Ha ha ha!

Great. Ricky Houston knew that as part of the show that I directed. So the carnival part, the point is to get you inside. Why get you inside to show you the marvels that were inside. Is there any equivalent to the Midway today? I don't know. It's a good question. Might be.

I grew up on, there's this space just south of Chicago, in Hyde Park, this long, long park which was the Midway for the Colombian Exposition of 1893. And it's still there. And it's still referred to as the Midway. No, people don't realize that. That's why it goes back to the Colombian Exposition. What's signal 25?

Signal 25 is people know that the old carnies chant was, hey, Rube, which was the carnies would shout if the cops showed up or if the locals were turning on them, they would shout, hey, Rube. But that, like most jargon, by the time that became widely known, it was superseded by signal 25. But by the time we figure out that was superseded by signal 25, signal 25 has been superseded by something else. What do you believe that most people don't believe? I believe in the devil.

What do you believe today that you didn't believe when you were young? I don't believe that most people, including me, are good at heart. And you thought that when you were young? Sure. I don't believe that most people, including me, are good at heart. And you thought that when you were young? Sure. I was a red diaper baby. Was there an event that changed that opinion or just the wisdom of time? Live long enough and you get out of the bubble, you're going to see a few things. You know, and Rebecca West said,

nobody of a mature age looking around ever did not say, certainly the world is so evil that it must end soon. So there you are. You mentioned the 12-step program several times in the book. Yeah. What's your relationship to AA? My grandpa used to say it's the only great modern religion. Yeah. One of the wonderful things about it is to AA. My grandpa used to say it's the only great modern religion.

One of the wonderful things about it is that there's no infrastructure. Yeah. Tell me about God. Well, we don't know about God. I mean, that's part of the definition of God, right? That there is a reason that we're here. And my wife's father is a renowned physicist, and we talk a lot, and

he's a complete agnostic, right? We get back to the Big Bang. Where did that come from? Well, we don't know. Well, okay. I've heard it described as the first miracle. Well, yeah. And if you look at the ancient wisdom in the Torah, I mean, obviously it's Jewish wisdom,

but a lot of it goes back before that. I'm sure it comes from the Sumerians, and who knows where it comes from before that. As people intuited the growth of life on earth from the sea, right, to the crawling creatures, to the mammals to man, and they also intuited or observed the growth from the family to the state to despotism, and they also intuited the growth of technology to the point where it overrides devotion to God and kills us. It's called the Tower of Babel. It's extraordinary.

It's all in the Torah. It's all there. This is ancient, ancient wisdom that people said, oh, wait a second, ain't that funny? Let me figure this out. Would it be helpful for everyone to study the Bible? No, no, it'd be helpful for people to study the Bible if they want to study the Bible.

Are you always writing? I think I unfortunately am. You know, I just finished a movie, and I just finished just a couple of books. And I got a couple of books more I got to finish. And I'm sure my last thought whenever that's going to be is, well, wait, I'm not done yet. But someone else is going to be in charge of that.

Yeah. From the idea to the execution of a project, does it typically happen quickly, or might it take a long time? Takes as long as it takes. You know, some plays I've worked on for many years, batting my head against the wall as I couldn't figure it out. Some plays I wrote quickly.

But I think of the Plains Indians had a dance called the Buffalo Dance that ensured the return of the buffalo. And it never failed. Every year when the buffalo was supposed to return, they did the Buffalo Dance. And the reason it didn't fail is if the buffalo didn't show up that year, they kept doing the fucking Buffalo Dance until the buffalo came back. So that's why I think of myself, I'm going to do the Buffalo dance until the buffalo came back. So that's why I think of myself, I'm gonna do the buffalo dance until the buffalo comes back.

Are there any things that you have a notion to write but for whatever reason you don't bring yourself to do it? No. You follow up on all of the inspiration. Is inspiration the right word? I think so. What do I know? The whole thing is a mystery to me.

Sandy Koufax wrote some pamphlets explaining how to throw a fastball over 100 miles an hour. Right? You should take a look at them if you haven't seen them. And he has all sorts of diagrams and angles and that, okay. So it makes sense to him, right? Yes. Yeah. In story structure, is there any benefit to randomness? I always thought of randomness was like, you go to a mentalist, or you go to a psychic, there's one thing

that they'll always say, you know what it is? They'll always say, you know, you have psychic powers too. You've felt that, haven't you? Right? So a lot of people think they have a book in them or a movie in them or a poem in them, because they understand you can take random thoughts and put them together and they sound a little bit different than human speech. So perhaps they're poetry, but that's not what I do for a living. Tell me about campfire songs.

Oh, I love campfire songs. Yeah. Yeah. We love singing them songs. And I've been writing a lot of songs later, I write a lot of them with my wife and she does the music and a lot of them I love writing songs. And one of the songs I wrote was, I was thinking about Frankie and Johnny, which was a campfire song.

I'm thinking, okay, that doesn't make any sense. Where is it Frankie and Johnny? Because a lot of these songs that become part of our consciousness are adopted from the pornographic. For example, people saying it's a long way to Tipperary, right? But they really sung was, that's the wrong way to tickle Mary, right? And the people say John Brown's body lies at Molding. But what they really sang was John Brown's body.

It's a 14 inch long dick, right? And so I was thinking about Frankie and Johnny, and I said, well, obviously they're lesbians, right? So I rewrote that whole thing of Frankie and Johnny. Are those stories apocryphal or are those? No, those are, that's all true. Those are true. Yeah.

Like bless them all, bless them all. Of course, fuck them all, fuck them all. Really? Yeah. Is there any part of the system that isn't corrupt? Well, is there any human action which isn't corrupt? They used to say in Vermont, only two things money can't buy,

is true love and homegrown tomatoes. We're corrupt, I am and you are, because our mind is corrupt. Duh, it says in the Bible, it's not a good beginning. What's the snake doing there? Tell me the limits of language. How close can you get to saying what you really are experiencing? Or is that not important?

I don't know, but I was struck by what you said about if even if someone's wrong, that's information, right? So that's how I feel about me. I don't know what I'm really fucking feeling. I know what I'm writing. No one knows anything. about me. I don't know what I'm really fucking feeling. I know what I'm writing. No one knows anything. Well, as somebody said, how do I know what I think till I've heard what I say?

What is zero point? Well, zero point is something that one of the Russian film theorists, I think, Padovkin said. To some point where if you have a three-act structure, where the action has to stop. Between Act I and Act II and Act II and Act III, the hero runs out of ideas. That's the zero point. Prior to that, everything in the first act is one scene leading to a second scene,

which leads to a third scene. It all makes sense until they finally run out of ideas. So where's the new thing gonna come from? Because you're between the inhalations and the exhalations of the Buddha, something has got to emerge which changes the direction that the hero takes. So that's the zero point.

So it's very, very helpful concept because both the hero and the writer have to be out of ideas. Right? Because if you know what happens already, once in a while you, so does the audience. Yeah. Do you think about that when you're writing or no?

Oh yeah. You do? Sure. You focus on the structure. Oh yeah, it's all I focus on. Do you ever write where the first draft is too long? Sure. You do?

Oh yeah, I rewrite constantly. Because, you know, every time you write it, you say, that's great. Come back tomorrow, you say, it's garbage. And eventually, eventually, eventually, you get to something else. You say, okay, now I understand what the project wanted to tell me. Now I've gotten away from my preconceptions. You start with preconceptions and then the project reveals itself. Yeah, it's like this.

I can play anything in the world in the key of F. I don't give a shit. The Star-Spangled Banner or the Mendelssohn E-flat. But my fingers are always going to go to where they know best, where to play and the key of F is, right? I gotta play an F sharp, I gotta rethink everything to break past the obvious. Yeah. Because my mind is gonna go to the obvious. Yeah.

So that's what we do. How did the Marines change you? Oh, it was just in for a summer, but I thought it was wonderful because I got to look at a different part of the world and you don't get the scene. And what was it like? What did you take away from it?

Well, I loved it. You know, I loved it. And one of the wonderful things was coming back into Chicago, down through the Sault Ste. Marie. When you're looking at Chicago, Chicago is very beautiful. The lakefront is very beautiful. And you're going from Chicago to East Chicago, Indiana. It's very, very beautiful.

And you put on your Gona shore clothes. But at a time you walk one mile to the gate of inland steel, you're stone black covered in soot and ash. But I've met some interesting people there. Tell me what you remember about Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross, from the original inception. I was working in a phone room selling lamb over the telephone. And at some point, I started writing about it. I was at a restaurant and I was listening to somebody at the next booth.

I couldn't see who they were. They were talking. I couldn't make out what they were talking about. I thought, wow, that's fascinating. So I wrote one scene about that and another one, another one. And so then the whole thing, I said, okay, now how do all these things come together now? But what I loved was the whole idea.

And people don't recognize because, and it's being played so well, that they're being asked to participate in a vocabulary and an organization that they can only understand by listening harder. The opposite is, well, here we are in a laundromat, right? So that was Glenn Gary, Glenn Ross. We did it in Chicago, which was wonderful.

Greg Mosher directed it. With the exception of Robert Prosky, no one knew who any of those people were. We went to New York and I just kicked everybody's tushy. How did winning the Pulitzer Prize change your life? You know, it was pretty great. It's the American equivalent of being knighted. So it's a nice thing to have. Sure, why not?

How do you say you learned your craft? The only way you can learn playwriting is through an audience. Anything else is a waste of time because you can't fool the audience. Billy Wilder said, you know, individually they're idiots. Collectively, they're genius. Oh, that's great. I never heard that. Yeah. I've never met a dumb audience.

They get it. Yeah, yeah. They paid, they showed up, they get it. They've suspended their disbelief. You always assume they understand what's going on. You never lower the idea for them to get it. Why would I do that? They're going to get it.

So much of what we see is done that way. Yeah, sure. Lowest common denominator. Yeah, it's done by idiots who imagine somebody dumber than themselves. But if they imagine that, there is nobody dumber than themselves. That's great. The verdict, you wrote the script, but it was based on a different story, yes? The story existed?

It was based on a book. The guy who was the lawyer for the woman that wrote a book, I wrote the script. How is that process different, writing a script based on a book instead of starting from scratch? Well, it's different, because you have to throw so much out. Because people don't know how to read scripts. Who should they? Even most people in the movie business,

I don't think they even do read scripts. They read coverage. So if they say, he came into the room and you knew immediately he was a doctor because he had that look in his eye, although you might deny your immediate impressions because of the incredibly expensive Gold Rolex watch. I was like, how you wondered,

could he put these two things together? They love that shit, right? But you can't, how do you film that? It doesn't make any difference. So if you take a book, the first thing you have to do is eviscerate it. You have to say, what is the actual story? So if I say to you, you read that book,

what's the story? You say, oh, this guy, you know, he found a million dollars in the thing and his son stole it from it. Okay, now I can write that story. You don't say, well, you really have to understand the town in which he grew up, right? We're gonna start with the description of his parents

and how they came to fuck Phil in 1902, and how he grew up in a dysfunctional family, but yet one day he married the rich woman who, so what's the story, what's happening, what's the story? So we know this because if we say, oh, I saw a movie last, what's happening, what's the story? So we know this because if we say, oh I saw a movie last night, say what's it about? You tell me the story. Yeah.

If you start saying it has great visuals, that means it's a cock of a poop. Have you ever seen a great movie that didn't have a great story? I don't think so, no. Here's something I realized. All of us know when the scene we're about to see is pointless.

How do we know? We get up to pee. Why do we get up to pee then? If the thing keeps our attention, we don't get up to pee. We know from the first second that nothing's going to happen. So audiences are super, super smart. How do you think your plays differ from the plays that came before you?

Milton Friedman says that culture is an absolute inheritance. That the way that we deliver the milk or install the plumbing or train the military is an absolute inheritance that we're building on what others have done and the same thing is true in the theater. So, I'm building on what others have done, the very fact that the theater exists. And as I say, I got certain inspirations, and also I have certain bad examples. I looked at, for example, the plays of Eugene O'Neill, and I saw the only thing wrong with

him is anyone who ever left wanted to kill themselves. You know? So you could learn by rejecting things from the past. Sure. So I still do it today, and I do it all the time. I'm looking at a movie, so wait a second. Why does this not work? Or why does this work?

Or how would I fix this to make this better? And I used to do that with Shell all the time. We'd say, yeah, I heard this joke, but it doesn't quite work, or blah, blah, blah. Or there's this song lyric that blah, blah, wrote, how do we fix it? The idea being that these entities exist in a metaphysical world independent of their

perception and that we can say, okay, I've got to tweak it a little bit. My wife, for example, my mother's a very famous yoga instructor. My wife grew up doing yoga. She does a lot of yoga every day. And so I hang her yoga. And so what she learned from her mother, do you do yoga? I've done it. Okay.

So what she learned from her mother and what she tries yoga? I've done it. Okay, so what she learned from her mother and what she tries to teach me, you know, the lummox that I am, is move the hip a quarter of an inch here, right? Okay, lower your shoulders a quarter of an inch there. Oh, now it begins to make sense. You keep a diary? I probably do.

You know, I have my little workbook, little workbook and I got 60 years of them. And I used to write like a 10, 15 page scene every day and I write movies and I also write, oh why was I born? Why have you deserted me, oh God, after everything I've done for you, and all that kind of stuff. Dear diary, I wonder if Jim really likes me. Why have you deserted me, oh God, after everything I've done for you, and all that kind of stuff, dear diary. I wonder if Jim really likes me.

Do you ever look back at them? No. Is the purpose of it, by writing it, you get to release it from your head? Maybe, yeah. There's gotta be some reason if you don't look back to do it. I know, I don't know why this,

I guess it's, I remember I've done something because it was just in my stupid head. But my hands are all shot, so it's very hard for me to type and hold this. So I just complain. Do you still play piano? Yeah, I play piano every day, yeah. Great.

How's your relationship to writing changed over the course of your life? Has it? Same. Yeah. How are you most misunderstood? I don't know. My wife said to me the other day, she said, you know, Dave, I think you really don't care about what other people think of you. So, well, that may be true.

May be true. May rather be liked than not liked. What the hell? You know, they're as fucked up as I am. Do you remember your dreams? I remember them until I forget them. Yes. Do you ever write them down?

No. No. Well, one of the things I learned from dreams and from reading Freud, who's mainly full of shit, he said he understood the meaning of the interpretation of dreams. Well, he's about 500,000 years too late. But one of the things I remember about my dreams that helps in the writing is it's always the overlooked something that doesn't belong that's going to be the key to understanding of the dream, the drama.

What have I left? What have I left? What have I forgotten? Why did I write there was a dog in scene two and I never came back to the dog? Either the dog was wrong and that place doesn't belong or it needs to pay off over here. Does it always have to make sense what you're writing? Sure.

But in life, things don't always make sense. Well, yeah, I'm not doing life. I don't know nothing about life. Does a story start at the beginning and work its way to the end, or might you start with something and you realize, oh, this is really the ending? Yeah, well, of course.

Could happen anyway. Yeah, it could happen anyway at all. So the idea is, what do I got? Where does it belong? And sometimes it sits in a drawer for 20 years. And sometimes I'm not going to get up until I finish it. Sure. How does a theater company work? Sometimes it sits in a drawer for 20 years, and sometimes I'm not gonna get up until I finish it, sure. How does a theater company work?

Well, the theater company, in its perfect form, you have to be young, right? Because people need to be devoted to the company more than to their families and more than to their other career. So these companies in which I grew up with were the only really legitimate socialist enterprises that I've ever experienced.

Everyone says, our devotion is to the company. We're gonna make money and support the company. If I write it, you're gonna act in it. If you write it, I'm gonna act in it. If someone needs to build a set, you gotta do it because I'm taking the tickets. Marvelous. The nice thing about it as opposed to a commune was Daddy was never paying for it.

Everybody was completely mature and devoted member of a group. What do you think drew you to the theater in the first place? The girls, certainly, and the fun. Also people used to say, nobody likes a smart Alec, nobody. And the fun. Also, you know, people used to say, they hear, nobody likes a smart aleck, nobody likes a smart ass. And that's the first thing that I knew from the development that wasn't true.

Because I liked smart alecks. I liked being a smart aleck. So you get to go on stage and be a smart aleck and entertain the people. How great. Did you go to the movies a lot when you were a kid? Oh, all the time, yeah. What were things that you remember, favorite movies?

Well, you were very fortunate in Chicago because on Skid Row, on Clark Street, there was a theater called the Clark Theater, and it was Sponsor and Derelicts and Homeless. And it was open 24 hours a day, and they changed the double bill every day. And the guy who ran it was open 24 hours a day. And they changed the double bill every day. And the guy who ran it was a cineophile, he was a genius. Every day?

Yeah. That's amazing. Double bill every day. So we'd say, now we're going to have a week of Ginny Cagney film. Wow. We're now going to have a week in which titles were done by Saul Bass. Wow. Right? And now we're going to have a week in which Saul Polito did the cinematography. That's your whole education.

Oh, man. So we all used to go all the time in high school. They couldn't sleep in the middle night. They just go down and watch the movie. Great. It was magnificent. Great. Any other experiences you can think of like that,

that you were lucky to experience? Sure. Oh, my movie, Hustle Games, premiered in Chicago, around the corner from there at the Fine Arts Theater and I was up watching it in the projection room and the guy said, yeah, this is an arc light projector, or actually it's flame going through two blacks of light. What the fuck it is. It's the last one in America.

Wow. I gave such a magnificent project. So if you go and look at restorations of black and white phones, for example, they did stage color to the arrow and it was completely restored. And she realized what all that black and white was really about. And what it was about was the blacks, because they had this nitrate stock, silver nitrate, it was silver, that eventually it all just blew up or disintegrated. Actually, I'm premiering my new movie at the Arrow.

Do you know about that? No. Oh, I did this movie with Evan Jonikite and Shia LaBeouf, and we did it as a play in Venice, and I shot it as a film called Henry Johnson, and it premieres at the Arrow Theater on the 9th of May. Amazing. And it's really good. I think you can also get it online, Henry Johnson film or something like that.

Taking something that starts as a play, how do you reset it in a film? Or do you just shoot the play? No, you don't just shoot the play. You gotta say, okay, let me start from zero. All I got is what the people say. What are the people doing? Because if I shoot it correctly,

it can turn off the sound. Like with any movie, if it's a good movie, you don't need to hear what they say, right? That goes against everything you've said up until this point. Yeah. No, no, the words are important in the theater. The words are much less important in the movies.

Really? Sure, it's about pictures. It's about pictures. Think about it, you know? Guy shows up on stage, he says, Jesus Christ, you know, right? I would do anything for a cigarette, I do not know why, yeah.

Speech can go on forever, right? Guy shows up in a movie, he takes out a pack of cigarettes, finds it's empty, right? Which is more effective in the film. Yeah. Yeah, opening the drawers, looking for the match when you realize there are no matches left in the matchbook. Yeah.

So if you think about it, if you start thinking in images, there's nothing left to think. He tears it up, right? He sees half a cigarette there, a bottle like, almost, he takes it up, right? He sees a half a cigarette there, a bottle of like, almost, and he takes it out. And now he doesn't have a match. He opens the drawer. He's looking through the matches and he sees a little box over there.

And he takes the box. What are we all wondering? What's in the box? Yeah. This is right actually out of The Last Tycoon by F. Scott Fitzgerald. That's how he describes it. He's called movies, and he's absolutely right. Is it harder to take something from words to pictures or to take something from pictures

to words? It's a little harder, except it's easier. As somebody said, it might have been Curtis Leay, he said, everything in war is simple, but everything that's simple is hard. That's great. Yeah. Athenaeum is a new podcast on the Tetragrammaton Network. Do you know about the connection between Charlie Manson and MKUltra, the US government's mind control operation?

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