David Mamet went to Hollywood on top—a super successful playwright summoned west in 1980 to write a vehicle for Jack Nicholson. He arrived just in time to meet the luminaries of old Hollywood and revel in the friendship of giants like Paul Newman, Mike Nichols, Bob Evans, and Sue Mengers. Over the next forty years, Mamet wrote dozens of scripts, was fired off dozens of movies, and directed eleven himself. In Everywhere an Oink Oink, he revels of the taut and gag-filled professionalism of the film set. He depicts the ever-fickle studios and producers who piece by piece eat the artist alive. And he ponders the art of filmmaking and the genius of those who made our finest movies.
A collection of observations, stories and aphorisms about Hollywood from one of America’s foremost writers and, these days, provocateurs. It is virtually unreadable ... This is a book that resembles the idled rantings from a feverish, unsolicited email stuck in your spam folder. There are weird capitalizations, uneasy conclusions and the rat-a-tat of non-sequiturs all held together by bad faith. It’s illustrated by Mamet’s own cartoons, which echo a middle schooler’s sense of humor and maturity ... Throughout is the stringent waft of misogyny.
A short, chatty, discursive book padded with the author’s comic doodle ... Mamet has a fine cache of Hollywood quips and one-liners, passed along from one smart-aleck to the next ... Nothing but wicked jokes, angry broadsides and pointed gossip: in other words, the ideal Hollywood book.
It’s less funny than cantankerous, bilious and sardonically angry ... Some of Mamet’s complaints are reasonable-enough, even witty, jeremiads about Hollywood’s culture of greed and compromise ... [A] blinkered, unhappy book.
