Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1542296
P H OT O : P H OT O F E S T CARDS: Lindsay Crouse (right) and Joe Mantegna in "House of Games." 70 C I N E M O N T A G E T A I L P O P By Evan Wiener A s a youngster on Long Island in the 1980s, I had one hard-and-fast rit- ual: Every Saturday night at 7, I'd be in front of the TV to watch the dueling film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert — rain or shine, hell or high water, thumbs up or thumbs down. School, see, was its own deal with its own rules. But on the weekend, the multi- plex was mine. I'd do a lone hop from one screen to another, trying to see as many flicks as I could. "Doubles" — back-to-back movies — were the norm. "Triples" had their own special place. It wasn't about see- ing any one kind of film. It was about films, total. Escapism, completism, you name it. And the two movie guys from Chicago figured in as patron saints of the pursuit. In 1987, Gene and Roger went nuts for a small David Mamet thriller called "House of Games." Ebert named it his favorite film of the year. I didn't actually catch it in the theater — it never made it out to my suburb — but when it came to video, I pounced. To q u o t e M a m e t ( f ro m "S t a t e a n d Main"): So that happened. The "House of Games" big twist hit me like a left hook — and that was just at the end of the f irst act. Its world, a stripped-down modern-noir dreamscape, cast a kind of mysterious spell. And the language? It was Mamet operating at his peak. I mean, c'mon. Not long after, I hung the film's poster over my dresser. I also bought the published screenplay and read it. And kept reading it. Almost inevitably, I found myself reciting the text. You didn't just want to say those words. You wanted to sling them. But the lure of the dialogue, I found, went deeper. Because when you were done running the lines, you found yourself look- ing to unpack them. To mine the impulses underneath. And when you start to do that, FUN AND 'GAMES' HOW A DAVID MAMET THRILLER CAST ITS SPELL when you start to divine the connections — and disconnections — between words and deeds, you're becoming a student of story, whether you know it or not. From "House of Games," I explored Ma- met's canon. Eventually (still a teenager), I decided that I had to stage his play, "Amer- ican Buffalo." Like "House of Games," it's a pared-down suspense piece dealing with off-the-grid crime and its discontents. In it, three hoods in a junk shop plot to steal a coin collection. I'd never been in a junk shop, nor had I committed a robbery. But I wanted to dig into that narrative, to participate in its telling. When I couldn't find anyone for the role of Teach — the part played in various versions by Robert Duvall, Dustin Hoffman, Al Pacino, and, most recently on Broadway, Sam Rockwell — I took the only natural course. I cast myself. For a venue, I had the youth community center at my local library. For a costume, I found an old leather jacket at the back of my father 's closet and swapped my Reeboks for loafers. During rehearsals, my castmates and I learned that Pacino was in our neighborhood filming a movie, so we hung outside his trailer for an afternoon, psyching ourselves up for the encounter but reminding each other to stay cool. We never caught a glimpse of him, but, true to the play, we were able to internalize together what it means to put a plan in motion and have it founder. Days before our premiere, the produc- tion's adult supervisor scanned the script and insisted on eliminating the profanity. He suggested "frickin'" as a go-to replace- ment. I countered, in so many words, that this was horses***. We were at an impasse. I reminded the supervisor that Mamet wasn't some vulgarian. He was a pure sto- ryteller, using language as just one of many tools to explore how individuals answered their calls to action. In fact, I came to realize in one of the countless times I revisited the film, "House of Games" almost literalized this notion: Lindsay Crouse's character leaves her couch, enters the house of games, a n d c e n t e r s h e r s e l f i n a n a r r a t i v e o f her own. The supervisor relented but warned t h e a u d i e n c e b e f o re h a n d t h a t t h i n g s were about to get salty. And so the show went on. And because of our Saturday performance, I skipped Siskel and Ebert. ■ Evan Wiener is a story analyst at Netflix.