“Fuck you. That’s my name. You know why, mister? ’Cause you drove a Hyundai to get here tonight, I drove an eighty thousand dollar BMW. That's my name.”
David Mamet originally wrote Glengarry Glen Ross as a play, first performed in1983 at the National Theatre in London where it won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize. It took several years to convince a Studio to make the film. With a budget of just $12.5 million it was filmed in 39 days. The play was set in Chicago, the movie was set in New York. Jack Lemmon and Al Pacino were cast first, and did a series of readings with director James Foley to cast the other roles. The character of Blake was not in the original play. Mamet wrote that role specifically for Alec Baldwin, adapting it for the screen. Lemmon said the cast was the greatest acting ensemble he had ever been part of. During filming, members of the cast who weren’t required to be on the set would show up anyway to watch the other actors per form. They affectionately referred to the film as “Death of a Fuckin’ Salesman”. What fascinated Lemmon about the story was what he referred to as, “the misuse of the American dream and the erosion of ethics and the tenets of behavior”. Lemmon called Mamet “the greatest American playwright right now”, and after finishing the film he collaborated with him again the following year in his play, ‘A Life in the Theater’. In the film, characters George Aaronow and Dave Moss at one point talk about stealing the Glengarry leads and selling them to a competitor named Jerry Graff. Graff is actually an actor who has been in four movies, all written and directed by Mamet. The word “shit” is spoken 50 times and the word “fuck” and its derivatives are used 138 times.
