Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Varun Begley

Critical Essay by Varun Begley

SOURCE: Begley, Varun. “On Adaptation: David Mamet and Hollywood.” Essays in Theatre 16, no. 2 (May 1998): 165-76.

In the following essay, Begley explores David Mamet's relationship to the theater and film industry, using one of the author's many adapted works as an example.

“If it's not quite ‘Art’ and it's not quite ‘Entertainment,’” says Hollywood producer Bobby Gould at the opening of David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, “it's here on my desk” (3). For more than twenty years, audiences have been similarly situated with respect to Mamet's work. The Mamet persona of the 1980s—evoked in plays, film scripts, films, GQ commentaries, essay collections, Madonna premieres, and innumerable critical articles and reviews—was cloaked in an aura of late-modern literary and mass-media stardom. The mishmash of adjectives required to delineate this peculiar celebrity suggests a complex set of mediations surrounding present notions of the literary, the artistic, and authorship itself, especially in relation...
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