“DEI is garbage,” Pulitzer Prize-winner David Mamet told a delighted crowd at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books. “It’s fascist totalitarianism.”
DEI = Didn’t Earn It.
Mamet was at the festival to talk about his recently released Hollywood memoir Everywhere an Oink Oink (my review is here), the far-left Los Angeles Times wrote.
The playwright and screenwriter’s latest “gripe,” wrote the Times, is those stupid “diversity rules that the Academy of Motion Pictures instituted for Oscar-eligible films to help advance the representation of LGBTQ+, women, ethnic minorities and disabled people.”
The idea that the Academy “can’t give you a stupid fucking statue unless you have seven percent of this, eight percent of that … it’s intrusive,” Mamet said.
“The [film industry] has little business improving everybody’s racial understanding as does the fire department,” he added. Creatively, he said, “there’s no room for individual initiative.”
After the fascist Times tut-tutted Mamet for his use of the “outdated term ‘transsexuals,'” we’re told he is no fan of gender-neutral toilets. “It politicizes the human excretory function,” he said to a delighted packed house. There were “guffaws.”
Currently, Mamet sees the film industry as one in the late stages of the “growth, maturity, decay, and death” cycle that “happens to everything that’s organic.”
More:
Although Mamet acknowledged that discrimination barred groups from participating in Hollywood for years, he thinks the pendulum has swung too far in the opposite direction. In his book, Mamet describes the leaders of these diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives as “diversity capos and diversity commissars.”
Mamet said he’s been pushed out of Hollywood less by his politics than by his age. Young directors want to work with friends of their own generation.
“Nobody’s going to pay me a lot of money anymore,” Mamet said. “Nobody’s going to let me have a lot of fun.”
It’s funny how DEI doesn’t include older folks who have been discriminated against in the movie industry since it first became a movie industry.
How broken is Hollywood today? How close to the “death” part of the cycle? Three new wide releases were ranked over the weekend: Something called Abigail, something called The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, and something called Spy x Family Code: White. All three movies combined grossed around $25 million total. And here’s what the sycophants at Deadline blamed this breathtaking failure on:
What gives? Why? It’s the same old, same old post-pandemic excuse: Many cheap out on their marketing, avoiding solid box office figures so they can slide a title into home entertainment windows and profit ASAP. We’re clearly in a world now where profitability and the optics of success mean two different things.
No, the problem is that movies suck, and the science proves people know that.
Oh, and the stars also suck. “Cheap” marketing? It’s more like insane marketing, having your star run around insulting half your customer base the week before your multimillion-dollar product arrives in theaters.
And yet, David Mamet, the man who wrote The Verdict, The Untouchables, House of Games, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Spanish Prisoner, The Edge, Wag the Dog, Ronin, and Heist, can’t get work.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go gay-marry my Blu-ray collection.
John Nolte’s first and last novel, Borrowed Time, is winning five-star raves from everyday readers. You can read an excerpt here and an in-depth review here. Also available in hardcover on Kindle and Audiobook.
