Today we launch another semi-regular feature: “From the Short Stack,” which consists of offerings from the three dozen or so film and TV-related books that I never tire of reading.
Today’s short stack selection is David Mamet’s On Directing Film. Originally published in 1991, when Mamet had only three credits as a movie director, it’s a concise, forceful but not totally closed-off work, at once philosophical and technical. Essentially, it’s kind of a notebook by a filmmaker who’s still struggling with a new medium, and who wishes to construct a set of general principles that will help him get out of his own way and make reasonably intelligent, watchable films—films that honor Mamet the screenwriter without necessarily being a slave to him.
Mamet’s introduction begins with some caveats: the book, he says, came out of a Columbia University course in film direction that he undertook after having directed two pictures, House of Games and Things Change. “Like a pilot with two hundred hours of flight time, I was the most dangerous thing around,” he admits. “I had unquestionably progressed beyond the neophyte stage but was not experienced enough to realize the extent of my ignorance.” Having thus framed the book as a manifesto-in-progress, Mamet then proceeds to work up a set of rules that will enable a person with scant experience to direct a halfway decent movie that serves the narrative and its characters, and that makes simplicity a virtue.
I’ll leave it up to House Next Door readers to say whether Mamet the filmmaker practices what Mamet the manifesto-writer preaches, or if Mamet the filmmaker ever became the equal of Mamet the playwright, or if his plays were ever such great shakes to start with. For now, I’ll concentrate on one aspect of the book that continues to obsess me: Mamet’s feelings on the Steadicam.
As readers of this thoroughly geeked-out blog probably know already, the Steadicam is a stabilized handheld camera rig created by cinematographer and inventor Garrett Brown. It effectively fuses a camera operator to the camera via an elaborate body harness system that displaces the camera’s weight across the armature and the operator’s body, allowing for smooth shots in virtually any sort of terrain, without having to install dolly tracks, a crane or anything else.
To name just a few examples, the Steadicam was employed on the Copacabana tracking shot in Goodfellas, Rocky Balboa’s jog up the Philadelphia Art Museum steps in Rocky, the opening nightclub scene in Boogie Nights, and almost all of The Shining. It’s become an industry workhorse—a miracle of modern science, no doubt. But in 1991, Mamet distrusted it—not because he was any sort of Luddite, but because he thought the Steadicam encouraged lazy filmmaking.
““What should film schools teach?” Mamet asks, then answers, “An understanding of the technique of the juxtaposition of uninflected images to create in the mind of the viewer the progression of the story.”
Then he launches into the following screed: “The Steadicam, like many another technological miracle, has done injury; it has injured American movies, because it makes it so easy to follow the protagonist around, one no longer has to think, ‘What is the shot?’ or “Where should I put the camera this morning?’ but if you love that morning’s work at dailies, you’ll hate it when you’re in the editing room. Because what you’re seeing in dailies is not for your amusement; it should not be ‘little plays.’ it should be uninflected shots that can eventually cut, one to the other, to tell the story.”
Elsewhere, in a transcript of a Columbia film school workshop session where the students try to come up with a shot list that will work through a short dramatic scene, Mamet warns his class to “…tell the story in cuts. We’re going to adopt this as our motto.”