February 25, 2007
Prisoner of Hollywood

By WALTER KIRN
BAMBI VS. GODZILLA

On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business.

By David Mamet.

250 pp. Pantheon Books. $22.

Why most Hollywood movies stink is a big question, but why we go on eagerly inhaling them is a bigger one. David Mamet thinks he knows the answer. In “Bambi vs. Godzilla,” a collection of tough-minded essays about the film business, the award-winning playwright turned screenwriter and director posits a “repressive mechanism” to account for our appetite for dramas that have ceased to be dramatic and entertainments that barely entertain. “The very vacuousness of these films is reassuring,” he writes, comparing them to the expensive weapons systems whose presence makes us feel secure in other ways. These filmed extravaganzas send the message that “you are a member of a country, a part of a system capable of wasting $200 million on an hour and a half of garbage. You must be somebody.”

Whatever the merits of Mamet’s assertion, his decision to write it down and publish it suggests another mechanism at work — the same one behind such exposés and satires as Budd Schulberg’s “What Makes Sammy Run?”, William Goldman’s “Adventures in the Screen Trade” and countless similar books. A writer heads off to Hollywood, gets rich and then, with his career secure, avenges himself on his employers by charging them with abandoning art and truth (except, perhaps, in their decision to hire him, which we’re left to infer was their last enlightened act before they gave themselves over to full decline). The strength of the form is that such charges are almost always warranted, but its weakness derives from the complainant’s pretense that he’s leveling them out of shock and disappointment. Did he really not know what he was getting into?

Since so many of Mamet’s beefs with Hollywood are familiar and indisputable — that its blockbusters emphasize spectacle over story, that its bigwigs do too little work for too much money, that its market research techniques dilute its artistry and that its reliance on group decision-making fosters mediocrity — one suspects that his interest in restating them is technical, aesthetic. In his script for “The Untouchables,” he used his signature staccato dialogue and stripped-down sense of story to refresh the classic gangster film. Here, the idea seems similar: to bring new rigor and snap to an old genre, the screenwriter’s lament.

It’s as a stylist that Mamet is best known, and it’s his style that distinguishes these essays. He puts things differently from others, and he does so in two distinctive registers. One is clean, commonsensical, straightforward. “Moviemaking is an appallingly simple process. One needs a camera, film and an idea (optional). The business of the movies, similarly, is simple hucksterism: find an attraction, present it as engagingly as possible, take the money and guess again.” Mamet’s other manner is less speechlike. Professorial, fussy and overbearing, it reads at times like a parody of something — perhaps the internal musings of a supercomputer. Unfortunately, it rules the book.

Here is Mamet decrying the use of test screenings as a tool for predicting a film’s appeal. “We may note further that the executive, in forming a lay and random group into a committee supposedly capable of forecasting dramatic success, indicts, and in fact unsays, his protestation of his own possession of superior financial or mercantile powers.”

Which Supreme Court justice is Mamet addressing here? To come across such inhuman legalese in a book about the movies is as jarring as spotting a satellite antenna sprouting from a teepee in a western. Is Mamet’s intention to elevate the subject matter, or to elevate himself? It’s a mystery. It’s also a shame. For while his prose sometimes obscures the fact, Mamet is a clear, exacting thinker. His objections to test screenings, for example, are sound. They relieve the moviemaker of responsibility for his product and they encourage the viewer-juror to watch his own reactions to a film rather than the film itself, rendering his opinions less than useless.

Also useless, for Mamet, are the scads of producers attached to movies nowadays. Theirs is the industry’s most misleading title because they produce almost nothing, in reality — nothing but trouble for the folks who do. These people include the screenwriter, of course (the Bambi of the title, presumably, who’s always being crushed by giant feet) and the members of the unionized crew, whose stamina, patience and ingenuity contribute more to the movies, Mamet feels, than the public has been allowed to understand. He demonstrates this with examples from his vast trove of cinematic anecdotes, many of them gathered from old-timers with whom he’s dined over the years.

The movie world, Mamet keeps reminding us, is not only a small one but a relatively new one — so new that in the 1980s, while working on his first picture, “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” he was able to confer with Samson Raphaelson, whose play “The Jazz Singer” was turned into the first talkie. The evident pleasure Mamet takes in belonging to this upstart circle is his most endearing trait. In recounting a lunch with the great Otto Preminger (whom he holds out as a rare example of a good producer), Mamet conveys to us his heady sense of penetrating a longed-for inner sanctum, of being acknowledged by movie royalty.

For Mamet, it helps that Preminger was Jewish, and that he is, too. Casting himself as a straight shooter who isn’t deceived by political correctness, Mamet contends that Hollywood movies are profoundly, genetically Judaic: the product, via the minds of their creators, of certain distinctive racial traits that arose in the ghettos of Eastern Europe and transported themselves to Beverly Hills. Mamet makes this connection by associating these traits (two of which are “ignorance of or indifference to social norms” and “high intelligience”) with a form of autism known as Asperger’s syndrome that, he writes, “has its highest prevalence among Ashkenazi Jews and their descendants” and “sounds to me like a job description for a movie director.”

Mamet’s willingness to advance this crackpot thesis is more interesting than its legitimacy or lack of it. He’s a man of fearsome certainties, and he wears on his sleeve a sort of brass-tacks populism that leads, in the essays, to frequent asides about such conspicuously earthy topics as how to sharpen a knife, how to aim a firearm and how to win respect from Teamsters. (Lots of hard-nosed gambling wisdom gets thrown in, too.) In a book that abounds with helpful, pragmatic shoptalk aimed at the aspiring screenwriter, the fundamental lesson seems to be: stand tall, kid, and don’t whine or compromise. The suits might not like it, but they’ll respect you for it.

Given his achievements in the movies, Mamet has our respect from the outset in these essays, but his insistence on coaxing yet more respect from us through a combination of lofty locutions, abrasive pet theories and brawny folklore causes one to wonder after a while if he’s as tough and disgusted as he makes out or if he’s putting on an act. As books like this one have proved through the decades, a Hollywood writer is only an old hand when he gives the moguls his middle finger.

Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His new novel is “The Unbinding.” The film version of his novel “Thumbsucker” was released last year.

KnoxNews

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Barnett: In Middle East, enlarge solution, not just the problem
By THOMAS P.M. BARNETT, tom@thomaspmbarnett.com
February 25, 2007

Vice President Dick Cheney states the long war against radical Islamic extremism will "occupy our successors for two or three or four administrations to come." He's right. But the Bush administration's refusal to launch a regional security dialogue is dead wrong. When we don't give all interested parties - both internally and externally - a chance to steer strategic outcomes, we simply invite their counter-productive meddling.
The Bush administration's "big bang" strategy of toppling Saddam Hussein was designed to shake up the Middle East and set in motion transformational change. Done well (the hope going in) or done badly (today's inescapable reality), change is clearly unfolding. But it's arrogance of the worst sort to expect the world's other great powers to follow blindly America's lead in the numerous resulting scenarios - e.g., Iraq's break-up, Iran versus Saudi Arabia in Iraq, Iran versus Israel on nukes, Syria and Iran versus Israel in Lebanon/Palestine.

America's strategic relationships encompass only a fraction of the chessboard currently in play. We have serious influence with Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan and - now - Iraq. But the Europeans take the lead in Syria, Iran, Lebanon and Turkey, whereas Russia is the primary actor throughout Central Asia, its so-called near abroad. China's growing economic network connects it to Pakistan, a long-time ally, and Iran, its new best friend on energy. Then, there are India's longstanding ties with Iran and the Gulf States plus Japan's rather extreme dependency on the region's energy.

A regional security dialogue that involved both internal and interested external players is the obvious alternative to the Bush administration's currently dangerous course of enlarging our Iraq problem to include Syria and Iran. It should be modeled on the approach we employed decades ago in another long war - the Cold War in Europe.

In 1975, America helped create the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE), which in the years since has become the "primary instrument for early warning, conflict prevention, crisis management and post-conflict rehabilitation" for its 56 member states stretching from Vancouver to Vladivostok. For the first 20 years of its existence, the OSCE was merely a conference where direct adversaries and interested third parties met continuously on issues such as human rights, political reform and security confidence-building measures.

How important was the OSCE to the Cold War's peaceful denouement? Without it, it's hard to imagine figures like Poland's Lech Walesa or the Czech Republic's Vaclav Havel rising to the forefront of revolutionary political change, eventually becoming inaugural presidents of their country's post-Soviet governments. It's also hard imagining the relatively successful processing of the break-up of the former Yugoslavia. Chortle if you must, but "Dayton" 10 years later looks pretty good.

I know our history books say it all came down to Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II and Star Wars, but the locals actually involved in Cold War's dismantling routinely cite a host of smaller, nonheadline issues that got hammered out - month after month and year after year - in the OSCE. Granted, it's boring stuff compared to decapitating air strikes, but it's how the lasting victories are actually secured.

Right now there's nothing in the Middle East that compares to the OSCE (forget about the Arab League), and there should be. Yes, it would mean Washington couldn't call all the shots, but frankly, it's hard to argue that would be a bad thing given our recent record.

In its absence, expect more Russian complaints and meddling by the day. Also expect China to expand its own regional security policy, selectively favoring certain local dictators over our own - feel free to call that kettle "black," for what it's worth. Meanwhile, Europe drags its heels on anything that enables another American-instigated war and regional powers Iran, Israel, and Saudi Arabia wage pointless proxy struggles with one another, begetting nothing but more instability and death.

The saddest thing about the anti-war chant of "blood for oil" is that it's mostly our blood and somebody else's - as in, Asia's - oil. That glaring strategic imbalance will only grow in coming decades, making our painfully unilateral approach to "fixing" the Middle East all the more untenable.

George W. Bush was right to lay a big bang on this calcified political landscape, but it's now clear to everyone concerned that this long war is not ours alone to wage.

That inescapable truth awaits the next two or three or four administrations.

Thomas P.M. Barnett is a visiting scholar at the University of Tennessee's Howard Baker Center and the senior managing director of Enterra Solutions LLC. Contact him at tom@thomaspmbarnett.com.

Sound familiar?

CAIR: Ibrahim Hooper; Feeling Sorry for Himself?

On February 16, deseretnews.com posted an article, “Vitriolic e-mails zero
in on ‘Muslim’ by Elaine Jarvik and Deborah Bulkeley. In the column, the
writers are lamenting the reaction of so-called “ultraconservative”
Americans in reaction to the recent religiously motivated murders at a Utah
Mall:

http://deseretnews.com/dn/view/0,1249,660195692,00.html
http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54247

The writers, who obviously know very little about the Council on
American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a Washington, D.C. based Islamic hate
group with proven ties to Islamic terrorism go to pains to demonstrate just
how the murders affect Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the hate group. They
quote Hooper’s reaction to receiving angry e-mail:

"Welcome to my world," said Ibrahim Hooper, communications director of the
Council on American-Islamic Relations in Washington, D.C., about the angry
e-mails. "I get tons of it every day."

A young Bosnian Muslim terror-murders five people and the best the
deseretnews columnists can do is drag out a self-serving quote from the
spokesman for America’s leading Islamist hate group that attempts to paint
Hooper as a “victim”, completely ignoring the actions of the young
terrorist. This is what passes for objective news in the mainstream media
today?

CAIR has contributed exactly nothing to North America’s battle against
Islamic terrorism and has led the pack in opposing every common-sense effort
by the United States and Canada to enforce laws, enact new legislation, and
generally provide for the common defense by both civil and military
authorities against Islamist terrorism.

Yet again, we find CAIR playing the victim card, with the complicity of the
deseretnews.

Is it any wonder that vast numbers of Americans are turning their backs on
the mainstream media who seem to have adopted the attitude that Muslims, no
matter the nature of their crimes and terrorist acts, are to be painted as
victims, regardless of the truth?

When did “journalism schools” stop teaching truth and ethics courses?

Andrew Whitehead
Director
Anti-CAIR (ACAIR)
ajwhitehead@anti-cair-net.org
www.anti-cair-net.org

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Andrew Whitehead
Director
Anti-CAIR (ACAIR)
ajwhitehead@anti-cair-net.org
www.anti-cair-net.org

SUDDEN JIHAD SYNDROME (SJS)

Ms. Sarah Fathy, who bills herself as “a local Muslim,” (letter to the editor, January 27th) follows precisely the Islamacists “taqiya” propaganda playbook.

She deals the standard “Muslim-as-the-victim” card in responding to a series of historical facts that I cited in a column entitled “The Crusader Canard.”

Instead of bothering to deny the events wherein I recounted historic Muslim aggressors systematically invading, looting, and, slaughtering various populations for religious reasons, she undertook instead unfounded personal attacks on me. “Cry then vilify” seems to be her tactic.

There is no freedom of speech under the law of “sharia” which Muslims such as Ms. Fathy are sworn to promote. Just ask the Danish cartoon artists.

Why should readers care what happened in ancient history? Surely those things don’t happen now or here?

Well, lets just look at the facts… again.
On Monday, February 19, the San Diego Union- Tribune Newspaper reported: “Dozens of Bombs Go Off in Thailand.” The story was that the day before, 28 coordinated bombs exploded “in Southern Thailand, an area plagued by a Muslim insurgency.”

The killing devices targeted Karaoke bars, hotels, power grids, and other public places. Three innocent civilians were killed and 50 injured.

What did peaceful little Thailand do to warrant the murderous Muslims moving in there?

Two pages later, the headline was “Sabotage Suspected in Train Fire.” This time the dateline was in New Delhi a long way from Bangkok.

A train traveling from India to Pakistan had been set afire killing 65 people. Arson investigators located the cause of the fire, which was two suitcases filled with incendiary material.

Railroad officials, long accustomed to similar security problems along that route, concluded that the fire was set by “Muslim militants” set on cooling an otherwise warming relationship between Pakistan and India, two countries allied with the United States in the war on Muslim terrorists.

What does that have to do with us? That doesn’t happen here does it?

Let’s just see.

American Islamacists, feeding off of Saudi money which pays for hate schools and mosques throughout the United States, are sowing as much anger as they can banking on the more excitable among their students to erupt in what one commentator labels the “Sudden Jihad Syndrome” (SJS): seemingly spontaneous random killings of Americans by domestic Muslims.

Cases in point include:

A recent shooting spree in a Salt Lake City Mall. There, Sulejman Talovic, an 18-year-old Muslim immigrant carried enough ammunition into a peaceful shopping center to kill dozens of people. He succeeded in killing five and wounding four before an off-duty police officer stopped him. Sulejman had spent the previous Friday evening deep in prayer at his nearby Mosque.

I wonder what they teach there?

In Seattle, Washington, Naveed Afzal Haq went on a shooting rampage at a Jewish Community Center while announcing, “I am a Muslim American and I am angry at Israel.” For some reason these guys seem to be angry with everyone.

In Los Angeles, Muslim Hesham Mohamed Hadayet killed two and wounded three others at a ticket counter at LAX.

Bearded 21-year Joel Hindrichs started attending a mosque in Oklahoma. One day he blew himself up with a satchel bomb he was wearing, thankfully, just before entering a packed Oklahoma University Stadium.

In Houston, 23-year-old Mohammed Ali Alayed slashed the throat of an erstwhile Jewish “friend” after he attended a local mosque and underwent a religious “awakening.” After the battery, he returned to his mosque.

In Washington, D. C., near the anniversary of 9-11, John Muhammed and Lee Malvo, both Black Muslim converts, picked off 13 innocent people in the Beltway suburbs which, Muhammad, who had praised the 9-11 attacks, said constituted a “prolonged terror attack against the United States.”

In Fremont, California, Muslim Omeed Aziz Popal, used his SUV to mow people down during a driving spree in San Francisco. He did so he said because he was a “terrorist.”

In Minneapolis, Muslim, Ismail Yassin Mohamed, first stole a car, and when that was wrecked, a van then rammed dozens of innocent people all the while yelling “kill, kill, die, die” saying later that he did so on orders from “Allah.”

Twenty-two year old Muslim Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar deliberately rammed his SUV into a large group of people at the University of North Carolina to “punish the government of the United States.”

At his trial he told the judge that he, the judge, was lucky he would learn more about Allah. Mohammed then went on to justify his conduct by quoting the Qu’ran.

I have written several factual columns relating to the violent threat of Islamism.

Muslims are quick to condemn me for telling the truth. But I never hear them condemn their co-religionists for the death and destruction they promulgate.

Why is that?

February 23, 2007
Op-Ed Contributor
What Scares Iran’s Mullahs?

By ABBAS MILANI
Stanford, Calif.

IRAN has once again defied the United Nations by proceeding with enrichment activities, the International Atomic Energy Agency reported yesterday. And yet, simultaneously, Iranian officials have been sending a very different message — one that has gone largely unremarked but merits close attention.

After a meeting with the supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the leader’s chief foreign policy adviser, Ali Akbar Velayati, declared last week that suspending uranium enrichment is not a red line for the regime — in other words, the mullahs might be ready to agree to some kind of a suspension. Another powerful insider, Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, said much the same thing in a different setting, while a third high-ranking official acknowledged that the Islamic Republic is seriously considering a proposal by President Vladimir Putin of Russia to suspend enrichment at least long enough to start serious negotiations with the United Nations.

There have also been indications that the Iranians are willing to accept a compromise plan presented by Mohamed ElBaradei, the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. That plan calls for the suspension of all major enrichment activities but allows the regime to save face by keeping a handful of centrifuges in operation.

The mullahs are keen on damage control on another front as well. After his meeting with Ayatollah Khamenei, Mr. Velayati announced that the Holocaust is a fact of history and chastised those who question its reality. Ali Larijani, Iran’s chief nuclear negotiator, also declared the Holocaust a “historical matter” to be discussed by scholars (and not, he implied, by ignorant politicians). In short, there is a new willingness among the Iranian political elite to avoid the rhetoric of confrontation and to negotiate.

There are three ways to analyze this turn. Advocates of an American invasion of Iran say that last month’s strengthening of the American armada in the Persian Gulf has frightened the Iranian regime. What diplomacy could not do for years, a few destroyers did in less than a month. These advocates encourage more of the same, hoping either that the mullahs will accept defeat in the face of an imminent attack, or that a Gulf of Tonkin incident will lead to a full attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities.

A second camp attacks the build-up of the armada as dangerous saber-rattling at best, and at worst as camouflage for already settled plans to attack Iran’s nuclear sites. Such an attack, they say, might provide a much-needed feather for President Bush’s empty cap at a time when his Middle East policy has manifestly failed. According to this camp, what changed the minds of Iranian officials was only the United Nations resolution threatening economic sanctions, and the possibility of other resolutions and more serious sanctions.

Both camps are partly right and yet dangerously wrong. There is a third way of looking at the facts.

The mullahs have historically shown an unfailing ability to smell out and, when pragmatic, succumb to credible power in their foes. Indeed, the presence of the American ships has helped encourage them to negotiate. But no less clear is the fact that the mullahs’ attitude change began in late December, when the United Nations Security Council finally passed a resolution against the regime in Tehran.

The passage of the resolution hastened the demise of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s confrontational approach to the West. And the falling price of oil, leading to declining revenues for the regime, magnified the resolution’s economic impact. Top leaders of the Islamic Republic, from Ayatollah Khamenei to Mr. Rafsanjani, have made it clear that they consider sanctions a serious threat — more serious, according to Mr. Rafsanjani, than the possibility of an invasion.

In other words, what the unilateral and increasingly quixotic American embargo could not do in more than a decade, a limited United Nations resolution has accomplished in less than a month. And the resolution succeeded because few things frighten the mullahs more than the prospect of confronting a united front made up of the European Union, Russia, China and the United States. The resolution was a manifestation of just such a united front.

While the combination of credible force, reduced oil prices and a United Nations resolution has worked to create the most favorable conditions yet for a negotiated solution to the nuclear crisis, any unilateral American attack on Iran is sure to backfire. It will break the international coalition against the Islamic Republic’s nuclear adventurism; it will allow China, Russia and even some countries in Europe to legitimately side with the mullahs; it will lead to higher oil prices and an increase in Iranian government revenues; and finally, it will help revive the waning power of the warmongers in Tehran.

Those convinced that only the combination of credible might and diplomatic pressure will work worry rightly that the Bush administration, frustrated by its failures in Iraq and goaded by hawks in Washington, will do to Iran what it did to Iraq. In confronting Saddam Hussein and the threat of his weapons of mass destruction, the Bush administration insisted that amassing an armada in the Persian Gulf was necessary to frighten Mr. Hussein into submission. But once the armada was in place, they used it to carry out a long-ago planned invasion of Iraq.

Today, many worry that the plans for an invasion of Iran, too, were made long ago, and that the armada is there to make possible either another Gulf of Tonkin resolution or an Iranian act of provocation against American forces, which could then serve as an excuse for an attack on Iran.

War and peace with Iran are both possible today. With prudence, backed by power but guided by the wisdom to recognize the new signals coming from Tehran, the United States can today achieve a principled solution to the nuclear crisis. Congress, vigilant American citizens and a resolute policy from America’s European allies can ensure that this principled peace is given a chance.

Abbas Milani is the director of Iranian studies at Stanford and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution.