Hollywood highs and lows highlighted in Mamet’s new film

Leading playwright and director David Mamet has the latest satirical take on Tinseltown in Mamet’s film State and Main. Not since Robert Altman’s The Player in 1992 has Hollywood held up a mirror to itself and taken such wicked delight in its foibles. Mamet, known for dark, searing stage plays and movies such as Glengarry Glen Ross and American Buffalo, had 20 years of material to draw on for his affectionate comic parody.

“I adapted a lot of my adventures in Hollywood to characters in the movie,†Mamet said. “Some of my adventures as a director were joined to the character of Walt Price, just as my adventures as a writer, to a certain extent, went into the Joe White character.â€

In State and Main, a big-budget film crew wreaks havoc on a quaint New England town where it descends to make a movie. Locals start reading trade newspaper Daily Variety, one lowly hotel scrambles to make costly renovations to accommodate celebrity whims, and the film script has to be hastily rewritten when it is found that the town’s old mill burned down 30 years ago a big problem for a movie titled The Old Mill.

Woven into the plot are references to the 1946 Frank Capra classic It’s a Wonderful Life and a tender love story in which the movie’s characters have a second chance to get things right.

If Mamet’s take on Hollywood is more jaunty than jaundiced, it could be because the intertwined plots seem to capture the mysterious magic of the movies.

Actor William H. Macy, who plays chameleon-like director Price, has seen enough ‘asshole directors’, chaotic big-budget movies and ‘glacially slow’ shooting schedules to turn any actor into a cynic. “But then there will be a moment that will bring all of us to our knees, and it suddenly turns into a Frank Capra movie where we all literally can’t sit still we are so childishly delighted in the magic that just happened,†he said.

“Hollywood is corrupt, there is no question about it. But once in a while one or two movies make it through this system which are just pure joy,†he added.In State and Main, Macy’s director charms and snarls his way through the melee of petulant stars and sensitive writers and the ceaseless ringing of mobile phones with a single objective to get the shot in the can.

The movie is not, he insists, a portrait of Mamet, the revered ‘actor’s director’ with whom Macy has worked on both stage and screen for nearly 30 years. “You’ve never seen a fellow happier than David Mamet directing a movie. There is no place he’d rather be. He just loves it. He cackles with glee.â€

Sex and the City star Sarah Jessica Parker also insists she is nothing like her screen character the leading lady who, after a career of baring all, decides she will not remove her top for a crucial scene.

“The environment is very familiar but I have never behaved that way. She feels incredibly foreign to me,†Parker protested.

Mamet’s movie, his funniest by far, may add little of substance to Hollywood’s take on Hollywood over the years, but it throws a sometimes vicious spotlight on its absurdities.

“The idea of a movie star chasing young women feels a little bolder and newer. And I howled when it turns out that Sarah Jessica Parker is actually playing a nun and she had a nude scene,†Macy said.

“Only in Hollywood would there be a nude scene in a nunnery.â€