Word: film
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...against Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn, he played a military-school cadet who goes picturesquely bonkers and is killed by the National Guard. "It's beautiful, man! Beautiful!" he shouts as he sprays the quad with an orgasm of machine-gun fire. In his first significant film of the '80s, as in his last, Cruise was the gung-ho soldier boy, his body destroyed in the fantasy of combat...
Meanwhile, McGuane had used the proceeds from selling the film rights to The Sporting Club to buy a ranch in Paradise Valley, Montana, where he moved with his wife, nee Betty Crockett (a direct descendant of Davy), and his son Thomas IV. The breathtaking scenery and anything-goes ambiance soon attracted a freewheeling constellation of characters that included fellow writer Richard Brautigan, actor Peter Fonda, painter Russell Chatham and director Sam Peckinpah. Before long, stories started coming out of the valley, ribald tales of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll that have become part of the local lore...
...tycoon (Rene Auberjonois) lays down the law (no social criticism, no politics, no hint of kinky sex), the moneystruck young writer (Gregg Edelman) peevishly retypes his scenes -- and, in an inspired bit of playfulness, that action causes his characters to move and speak jerkily backward, as if a film were being rewound, until they are back in position to perform the new bowdlerized version...
David Mamet's principal occupation is writing bruising plays (Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed-the-Plow) and film scripts (The Verdict, The Untouchables). Not surprisingly, the characters in these works are defined by what they do, not what they say. If their words count, it is because Mamet counts their words, using as few as possible to make his point and move his plot...
...Michael Dukakis' refusal "to stand on his hind legs and fight," Mamet drafts a strong and dignified speech that he and the reader would have liked to hear the Democratic candidate deliver. As a playwright, he argues that actors and directors should not freely interpret his scripts; as a film director (House of Games) he discovers that contrary to the cliche that making movies is a collaborative business, the enterprise is and must be strictly hierarchical. Having succeeded in the theatrical rat race against committees and long odds, it is not surprising that Mamet favors the individual over the collective...