A Man of Confidence

PARK CITY, Utah —  The ghost of Monica Lewinsky hovers over David Mamet. It is the day after the scandal broke, and Mamet, who is here promoting his latest movie, “The Spanish Prisoner,” is being besieged by questions about it.

After all, in the absence of many hard facts, he is considered something of an expert on the matter, having co-written the eerily prescient “Wag the Dog,” a political satire about spin doctors inventing a war to distract public attention from a president who gets caught with his pants down.

Instead of adding his voice to the avalanche of punditry, however, the 51-year-old Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright talks about the snowy Sundance Film Festival.

“It seems to me that one really doesn’t have Hollywood openings anymore, at least for independent films,” Mamet says, “the moment of ‘Here’s our work,’ which is so dear to us in the theater. This is the equivalent.”

Given his cynical take on business in general (see “American Buffalo,” “Glengarry Glen Ross”) and Hollywood in particular (“Speed-the-Plow”), one might expect him to lash out at all the cellphone-appended agents darting from screening to screening and hogging the best restaurants in town. He does not.

“Well, there’s always ants at a picnic,” he says aphoristically. “On the other hand, you’ve got to take your cow to market. That’s just part of the deal. I think it’s a good idea, for me anyway, hothead that I am, to keep it in perspective.”

He seems to be succeeding. He’s enjoying himself. Certainly he has to be pleased with Sundance audience reaction to “The Spanish Prisoner” (which opens Friday) and to him personally. When he is announced before screenings of the film, he’s accorded the kind of response usually reserved for A-list stars, not playwrights or directors. Audience members asking him questions after the screening do so with un-Sundance-like deference.

And why not? Mamet is one of our most prolific and honored playwrights, who’s managed to go to Hollywood without going Hollywood. In addition to working on the stage, he’s written screenplays for himself to direct (“House of Games,” “Things Change,” “Homicide,” “Oleanna”) as well as for others (Bob Rafelson’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” Sidney Lumet’s “The Verdict,” Brian De Palma’s “The Untouchables”). He’s also written poetry, novels, essays and children’s books. He’s perhaps best known for his dialogue, which, like his own conversation, is terse, aphoristic, idiomatic and highly stylized. (Though some say it works better onstage than it does onscreen.) He’s particularly fascinated by salesmen and hoods and the con games they play.

“I’ve always been fascinated with the idea of confidence,” Mamet says. “When I was a kid, I was a bit of a gambler on the north side of Chicago. I used to hang with those people and write about the demimonde.”

“The Spanish Prisoner,” his fifth film as a writer-director, is in fact an elaborate con game. It stars Campbell Scott as the inventor of a top-secret formula called “the process.” Everybody wants it: his boss (Ben Gazzara), a wealthy businessman (Steve Martin), perhaps even his own secretary (Rebecca Pidgeon, who is also Mamet’s wife). The plot involves the clever way he’s relieved of the process and his efforts to retrieve it and clear his name after a murder has been committed. It might be compared to Mamet’s own “House of Games,” another con game movie, except that he considers the former a light thriller and the latter film noir.

The idea is based in part on a guy Mamet met 15 years ago while he was covering a Soldier of Fortune convention in Las Vegas for Esquire. Mamet was hanging with a group of NRA types--”for better or worse, pretty important people.”

“He was improvising,” Mamet says of the con man. “He walked into this convention and introduced himself as an air vice marshal of the Royal Air Force and presented himself in such a way that everybody in the group I was with assumed that he was a friend of the other guy. He started to sell people on this investment scheme in the Cayman Islands. He talked to everybody about this scheme that the other guy had been involved in. And he might have even sold some shares.”

Mamet bought the story hook, line and sinker but didn’t have the money to actually invest in it. He later found out from a fact-checker at Esquire that the air vice marshal of the RAF was bogus.

Although “The Spanish Prisoner” may have been inspired by real-life characters and events, including an actual con game called the Spanish Prisoner, the sensibility behind it is very Hollywood--the Hollywood of Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Donen (“Charade”).

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Mamet talks at length about Hitchcock’s “North by Northwest,” in particular the famous crop-dusting scene. It’s not the crop duster blowing Cary Grant off his feet that interests him but rather the quietly menacing prelude to it.

“I thought quite a bit about the Hitchcock formula of having danger come from a place where it can’t possibly come,” Mamet says. “And having salvation come from the place it can’t possibly come.”

“The Spanish Prisoner” also features homages to Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train” and Jacques Tourneur’s “Cat People.” But according to Campbell Scott, Mamet never mentioned these reference points to him, even though Scott was cast in what was conceived of as the classic Cary Grant role.

In fact, Mamet not only didn’t want the actors to refer to other films, he didn’t want them to “act.” The sort of affectlessness he was going for is what people mean when they say “Mametesque.” Initially it can be disorienting for both audiences and actors.

“David doesn’t want you to do anything,” Scott says. “He doesn’t want you to act in any way. And as actors, you’ve made your life doing that.”

Mamet makes few distinctions between working on the stage and the screen. He says that both involve putting the material on its feet and seeing how it plays. With movies, that’s done in the editing room or sometimes on the set. With plays, it’s done during rehearsals. In neither case does he see himself handicapped by being both the writer and the director.

“There are two stages,” he says. “First I write the best script I can and then I put on my director hat and say, ‘What am I going to do with this piece of crap?’ ”

Mamet is kidding, of course. But apparently there are directors and producers in Hollywood who would take him at his word. He says he has “14 or 17” screenplays that he was paid for and likes but are languishing in drawers, including a draft he did of “Lolita.”

“[Producer] Dick Zanuck read it and said, ‘You made the guy seem like a pedophile,’ ” Mamet says, deadpan, about the character of Humbert Humbert, the most famous pedophile in all of literature. “True story.”

He also mentions that someone asked him to adapt “Moby Dick” from the whale’s point of view--another true story.

“He’s an avid consumer of life--his mind is always working while the rest of us are just trying to find the other sock,” Scott says, who adds that Mamet was never without a notebook that he often scribbled in, which may explain how he produces so much.

It’s probably safe to say that in his long career Mamet has consumed a lot of life--scribbling it in that little notebook and then transforming it into something Mametesque. It comes as no surprise then that there are Mamet knockoffs at the festival, including a film called “Jerry and Tom,” featuring Mamet regulars Joe Mantegna and William H. Macy.

“It’s very flattering, but it’s also natural,” Mamet says. “Someone like me who’s been writing for a long time, naturally other people coming up will look and say that’s a good idea. Just like I would look at the works of Harold Pinter or Samuel Beckett and say that’s a good idea. The old phrase is ‘Talent borrows, genius robs.’ I don’t mind if somebody wants to write like me. The only thing that disturbs me is if they do it better.”