actors that do David Mamet justice

No one.

Joe Mantegna.

I'll check your Joe Mantegna and raise you one Danny Devito

William H. Macy

Mamet's method doesn't allow actors to impose their personalities; the blanker the actor, the better he'll be, usually.

Keanu Reeves would work marvelously.

He does it so well, he took it to Sorkin's SportsNight and did it there, too.

Hah just kidding. I think his original set (Mantegna, Macy, Crouse) probably do his schtick the best. At least his first couple of films were more watchable than his last oh twenty.

alec baldwin, famously

gene hackman is good, as mentioned.

mamet's book on acting is really interesting, but it boils down to 'stfu and do what i tell you you prancing fucking pony'

I disagree about Macy, I'm not sure I could tell you why though. I also disagree about "blankness" being some kind of good quality, especially with Mamet's dialogue. It's often so blank already that it needs a huge personality to fill it up, i.e. Devito.

stage/film: Mantegna

film: Steve Martin

goole to which book on acting are you referring?

http://www.amazon.com/True-False-Heresy-Common-Sense/dp/0679772642/

^^ this one

ed o'neill

rebecca pidgeon lol

Yeah, Martin was good in The Spanish Prisoner, he would have been my next choice.

lol no Rebecca Pidgeon hahahaxp

macy

philip seymour hoffman's ok

ricky jay!!!

God Mamet can be such an idiot. Leave it to him to take the Atlantic Theater Co.'s hard-won and quietly revolutionary discoveries about acting and blow them into an exaggerated farce of themselves.

If actors don't bring their own analysis of the script and situation and character to bear on their part, then they'll bring less intelligence and life to it. Yes, the words are often the biggest tool in an actor's toolbox but not always - especially when the lines aren't written very well. All the actor's knowledge of how to to seduce, cajole, intimidate, arouse pity, etc can be just as important to telling the story, if not more so. And that's something the author has no knowledge of.

Um, anyway..

Keanu Reeves? Costner in The Untouchables was pretty dire, and Keanu ain't no KC.

It seems to me that Mamet's words & MO require an actor to be professional to a fault -- a 3-piece-suited sort of "blankness," maybe, but also keeping in mind that the sparse no-bullshit curtness on the page means that every word is BIG and IMPORTANT (sort of in line w/ what Tracer's saying, but not quite). In a way, maybe making the actors just work off the page forces them to be more actorly than they would be otherwise? At any rate, it allows folks that work the white space on the page to really shine, and it makes me wish that more old pros (like Hackman & & Pacino & Jack Lemon) worked w/ Mamet. (If they have, please set me straight.)

As for the ladies: only other woman I can recall faring well w/ DM's work besides Crouse & Ms. M is KRISTEN BELL, of all folks. (I like State & Main just fine, but Sarah Jessica Parker not so much.)

(xpost)

The stuff Mamet says about forgetting about character, emotions etc are all very well - to a point - his contention is "if you put on a top hat and a beard and your character is called Abraham Lincoln, the audience will believe you're Abraham Lincoln - they're there to see a play about him for god's sake, not be impressed by your fastidious research into what Abraham Lincoln's relationship with his mother was like; the words will tell the story so just go with what the author gives you" - but that can be turned around, too: the actors are all going to say the words ANYWAY, the script will get spoken REGARDLESS, so why not fill it all up with as much life and inventiveness as one can, as long as one stays faithful to the character's goal as expressed in the script?

there is a difference between finding the subtextual through-line and getting into all the offstage backstory methody shit. i forget how or even if he differentiates that in his book.

Bill Macy once said something to the effect that "acting is about two things: showing up and saying your lines very loud" and I think that sort of encapsulates their fuck-you-buddy macho don't-think aesthetic. Where that breaks down for me is that I think it's the people who DON'T really think that who do best with Mamet's scripts.

i like his wife in his movies (Rebecca Pidgeon). I don't think she's probably a very good actress, everything she says sounds completely stilted, but for some reason she's really entertaining spitting out his lines.

i dunno, that sounds more like a throwback classical i'm-a-working-pro anti-method kind of statement and thus is fine with me! the essence of mamet's book (maybe i'm remembering it more kindly that it is) is to get out of the self and start thinking about what you're giving the audience as one of the moving parts on stage -- do your job, basically.

xp

related:

http://msgboard.snopes.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?/ubb/get_topic/f/30/t/002647.html

Remember the words of wise Rakim: don't sweat the technique.

Good actors don't need to be instructed to think in character.

get out of the self and start thinking about what you're giving the audience as one of the moving parts on stage -- do your job, basically.

The Atlantic Theater Co - where I have taken classes - says this is one half of the job, though. This part is "Acting before you think". It involves placing your attention lightly on the other person or people in the scene. The classic Repetition exercise is a big part of getting better at this ( http://www.performink.com/Archives/specialissues/MeisnerTraining.html )

The other half is "thinking before you act", i.e. script analysis, which Mamet always seems to give such short shrift to.

as a writer AND director maybe he views that as a turf thing

I just watched his actiony movie with Val Kilmer and Veronica Mars in it, and it was kind of...terrible. Somehow the Mamet delivery just wasn't working, at least for me. I don't have any way to think about this in great detail, though, not really being a fillum person.

I think I hate Mamet

it seems like the things I have liked with his involvement I like IN SPITE of his involvement

Not to derail the convo, but I'm surprised Campbell Scott hasn't been mentioned yet; was always more partial to his performance than Martin's in SP.

xp: that be SPARTAN. Laurel, & I agree 100% (tho I did like the scene w/ the scarecrow)

re-posting because i accidentally revived a thread on I Love Film:

i just saw The Edge after somehow overlooking it for years. pretty dope imo, basically you have Alec Baldwin being a dick, Anthony Hopkins as Bruce Wayne, and a giant grizzly bear as Jaws.

― Tracy Michael Jordan Catalano (Jordan), Saturday, January 10, 2009 6:25 PM (1 minute ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Al Pacino was far from the worst thing in Glengarry Glen Ross, which perhaps proves you can have a strong actorly personality and make out OK with his style.

i like lindsay crouse in house of games. and kevin spacey in ggr.

Basically the entire cast of GGR. This thread made me realize that I've been meaning to seek out Heist & Homicide, neither of which I have seen.

don't get yr hopes up. homicide is overwrought and heist is underplotted.

heist does have one of my favorite mamet throwaway lines. gene hackman: "i don't want you to be as quiet as an ant pissing on cotton. i want you to be as quiet as an ant not even thinking about pissing on cotton."

EVERYBODY wants money - that's why they call it MONEY

homicide is pretty excellent, lots of good relatively unknown mamet regulars filling up some nice roles

not on dvd though

I don't like Mamet-directed movies half as much as I like non-Mamet-directed Mamet movies. Edmond is directed by Stuart Gordon (who, in addition to Re-Animator directed the original production of Sexual Perversity in Chicago) and features truthful, un-stilted performances even by Macy and Pidgeon, let alone Mena Suvari and Julia Stiles, who are both fantastic at making Mamet's speech unaffected. I think the best performances of Mamet's words are in Vanya on 42nd Street -- the key is that the actors and director Andre Gregory completely ignore Mamet's italics.

(To me, Macy unfortunately acts like he's trying to teach me something about how to act. Whereas just last night I saw Felicity Huffman's cameo as herself in the Studio 60 pilot, and she was very natural.)

James Mason and Paul Newman in THE VERDICT. They share screen time throughout but only communicate directly face to face once. It's amazing.

i always forget he wrote that. i like that movie.

it's extremely un-mamet and my favourite movie of his

heist is great!

but i really want to talk about The Edge, i just didn't want to start a new thread for it

I saw The Edge in the theater and liked it a lot. Baldwin's a natural Mamet guy.

i remember liking it a lot

The Edge was the movie that made me realize that Mamet used to write about poor and middle-class folks, and at some point in the 90s started writing abotu millionaires (Spanish Prisoner, The Edge).

looove the Verdict so much

although the plot point in The Edge involving the watches is totally ridiculous and dumb

love watchin mamet flow so much

from ebert's review:

`The Edge'' is like a wilderness adventure movie written by David Mamet, which is not surprising, since it was written by Mamet.

:/

Having successfully negotiated almost its entire 118 minutes, ``The Edge'' shoots itself in the foot. After the emotionally fraught final moments, just as we are savoring the implications of what has just happened, the screen fades to black and we immediately get a big credit for ``Bart the Bear.'' Now Bart is one helluva bear (I loved him in the title role of ``The Bear''), but this credit in this place is a spectacularly bad idea.

bart the bear is an actor that does mamet justice.

http://deadline.com/2014/10/al-pacino-broadway-david-mamet-china-doll-853248/

Al Pacino is heading back to Broadway. He’s set to star in David Mamet’s China Doll, a play written specifically for him. Mamet describes China Doll as a “play about a wealthy man, his young fiancée, and an airplane. The man has just bought a new plane as a wedding present for the girl. He intends to go into semi-retirement, and enjoy himself. He’s in the process of leaving his office, and is giving last minute instructions to his young assistant. He takes one last phone call…” Mamet says the characters are Mickey Ross, a billionaire; Carson, the assistant, and a telephone. “I wrote it for Al. It is better than oral sex,” adds Mamet.

the reporter apparently didn't ask for whom

though Pacino did say "So Dave gave me China Doll, a new play he had written for me and it blew me away…" so maybe he meant for pacino, or maybe even anyone who reads it

so yeah i think china doll was a better play than the reviews made out -- not peak mamet, but the closing monologue of Act I was eventually pretty darn good, and it slid into it very nicely after some build that was subtle enough that it took me a minute to realize just how much had developed. there were some other great lines scattered throughout. its demanding on the audience and the actor both to have something delivered mainly on one side of a telephone convo, but its a high wire act that works better than one might imagine. i think they reworked the ending a fair amount since the early previews (if the wikipedia summary was ever accurate, it certainly describes a different ending) and it still doesn't play quite right, but it feels close.

time will be kinder to this than the reviews now are -- their gripes seemed to be on the level of "people didn't speak in complete sentences and i had a hard time following the plot" about which, christ this is hardly an experimental work or anything it just requires you to pay a modicum of attention throughout and fill in the obvious details as you see fit.

i liked how pacino sort of played it as jerry adler type.