Who gets what from whom? What happens if they don’t get it? Why now? That is, according to Mamet, the essence of all drama. It’s not about nice things happening to nice people. It’s all about “get there,” in other words, what happens next? Forget what they teach you in school. There’s no such thing as character development. “All character is, is perpetual action,” says Mamet paraphrasing Aristotle.

Though it came out a year ago Mamet’s Bambi vs. Godzilla has the makings of a handbook for the eternal student of writing and film. It is a pamphlet urging the cause of the artist in Hollywood. It is subversive, irreverent and brutally honest. He dissects the system, everything from producers to the script to esthetic distance. He takes shots at everyone and everything in his own caustic way. Even the big Hollywood mechanism that he likens to the American Defense Department, which has an uncanny resemblance to big bad films: “…we are reassured by their presence rather than their content and operations.”

Mamet doesn’t end there. He asks what’s the use of big bad, vacuous block busters anyway? Is there a message? Oh yes. “Enough money spent can cure anything. You are a member of a country, a part of a system capable of wasting two hundred million dollars on an hour and a half of garbage. You must be somebody.”

But how does a serious director or writer survive in such an environment? By acknowledging the vital difference between trivial stimulation and true emotion. You can stay in front of your TV for five hours, but after you’ve seen King Lear, it’s time to go home.

God bless David Mamet.