Word: scripting
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Crocodile" Dundee II reverses the formula by sending the natural man back to nature, an idea that has the virtue of originality but can be executed only with much tedious maneuvering. For some reason Hogan and his son Brett, who co-wrote the script, have decided that their heavies should be a ring of Colombian drug dealers. They have to be manipulated to New York City in order to menace Sue Charlton (Linda Kozlowski), Mick's perpetually adoring girlfriend. Then an unlikely band of citizens has to be recruited to help him rescue her. Then the criminals must be lured...
...COCOANUTS. Is that really Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Zeppo? No, but Washington's Arena Stage has fizzily reconstructed their 1925 Broadway hit with George S. Kaufman's script, Irving Berlin's score and some apt impersonations...
Mamet has said that his screenwriting, beginning with The Postman Always Rings Twice (1981) and including his Oscar-nominated script for The Verdict (1982), "forced on me the issue of plot." He acknowledged to friends that Glengarry was the first of his plays to have anything resembling a workable second act. But Speed-the-Plow has two huge holes in its narrative. First, the effort to persuade Mantegna's character to believe in the book takes place almost entirely offstage. Second, right up to the end it is impossible to tell whether the book is brilliance or bilge...
...Mamet fans, Speed-the-Plow will recall many of the pleasures of Glengarry. Both center on salesmen who have no skill except persuasion, no talent but for heightened, theatrical speech and naked yet manipulative emotional outbursts. Although Mamet is highly literary -- he reads widely, and the script for Speed-the-Plow has an epigraph from Thackeray's Pendennis -- few of his witticisms translate well into print, because he does not write rounded, formal speeches. The movie men in Speed-the-Plow, much like the thugs in American Buffalo (1975), the actors in A Life in the Theater...
Samuel Sifton, as Jack, almost manages to rescue this script from its inherent inanity. He executes a brilliant performance as the paranoid schizophrenic, yet appealing, Jack. Sifton's high level of energy as the frenetically-crazed Jack never drops. Even during Jack's saner moments, Sifton shows how Jack is fundamentally disturbed...