David Mamet has been trying to get a movie version of his 1988 Tony-winner Speed-The-Plow made for more than a decade at this point—even as, we can’t help but notice, quite a few more current satires of the film industry have gone successfully whizzing by. Now he’s finally gotten the project (apparently) together, as Deadline reports that the writer and director has wrangled Anthony Mackie, Ben Mendelsohn, Sharon Stone, and Emily Alyn Lind to star in a new film version of the play, with Mamet himself as director.
We’ll be honest: It’s going to be pretty odd to see how Mamet tries to update his original script—centered on two film executives (Mackie and Mendelsohn) trying to find a blockbuster hit while also engaging in a bet about whether one of them can successfully sleep with his secretary (Alyn Lind)—to reflect the nearly 40 years of cultural mutations that have gone down since. (To date this thing appropriately in your minds, just know that one of the big box office draws of the show’s original Broadway run was the casting of Madonna in the secretary role.)
Although Mamet took a 17-year-long break from directing for the screen after the failure of his 2008 film Redbelt, he returned last year with the lackluster Henry Johnson. As for his cast, Mackie, Mendelsohn, and Stone—the latter playing a “crazed movie star” not featured in the original play—are obviously well known quantities at this point, while Alyn Lind has begun making a name for herself in recent years in projects like We Were Liars and the Gossip Girl reboot.
The real question, though, is just going to be whether Speed-The-Plow has anything particularly new to say about making movies in the 2020s. Mamet wasn’t exactly charting virgin territory when he portrayed the film industry as a cynical and transactional cesspool back in the late Reagan years, so finding an angle that hasn’t already been covered by its many, many successors is likely to prove a daunting task.