Dogging the wag

A conversation with David Mamet

"It's the oddest thing that ever happened to me," says David Mamet about the strange fate of Wag the Dog, the satire for which he co-wrote the script and which became a buzzword for the misadventures of the Clinton administration during the Monica Lewinsky scandal. "Barry Levinson [the director] and I used to call each other up after the scandal occurred and kind of talk in whispers, in effect saying, `Am I going insane, am I hallucinating, or is this actually happening?' I still get stuff from Jane Rosenberg, the producer of the film; she just sent me some stuff a couple days ago about the Serbs giving some awards to the filmmakers of Wag the Dog. It's bizarre. It's cognitive dissonance, something that happens to you that's so flipping bizarre that all of a sudden nothing makes sense."

And so for his recent film Mamet has retreated to a saner time, Edwardian England in 1912, and more strait-laced material, the perennial stage favorite The Winslow Boy, by Terrence Rattigan. Based on an actual event, it tells the story of an average man who is determined to see that right is done and is willing to sacrifice everything for it.

"It's about heroism," says Mamet. "I think we see a similar situation around us all the time. There's a story in today's paper about a woman who's a member of the New York street-crimes unit who's been speaking out for a long time against the violence in her department. She got disciplined and ostracized, but she found it more important to hold true to ideals than she did to win approval of her peers.

"It's the same thing with Susan McDougal. She stood up to a vast, out-of-control jurisprudential monster. She thought it was right, period. I think it's a great story of heroism. It's one you see not frequently, but regularly."

Nonetheless, it seems these days that the stories that become bestsellers are those about Monica Lewinsky, not Susan McDougal.

"I think that's one of the things Rattigan's saying in the play," Mamet points out. "That the reward is not that everything's restored. You've gone through trauma, and the reward is that you got to tell the truth. "

People tell the truth in The Winslow Boy, but they don't need the trademark Mamet f-words to do so. London in 1912 seems far removed from the seamy contemporary settings of much of his stage and film work.

"I like the Victorian era and the Edwardian era and I do a lot of reading about it. I've been a great fan of Kipling all my life, of Victorian, Edwardian codes of gentility and honor. I've found that extraordinarily attractive, and that's why I was drawn to this material. But this story wasn't meant to be a history. One of the reasons it's set in 1912 is it's "Once upon a time . . . ' "

But a time with eerie parallels to our own, with a Balkan crisis and political scandals

" . . . and also it's a time of great prosperity that is about to change. So if World War I breaks out again, then I'm going to start worrying."
-- P.K.

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