David Mamet had spent enough time in Hollywood writing films. He knew the score when it came to getting a movie made. State and Main is his tale about a film company that descends on a small town to shot some kind of pretentious period drama.
After getting kicked out of their New Hampshire location a film company shooting a picture called "The Old Mill," descends on a small Vermont town as an alternate location. The trouble is that the town doesn't have an old mill. It's up to the director and producer to browbeat the screenwriter into changing his screenplay by taking out all references to an old mill. Meanwhile the actors are beginning to interact with the townspeople and not with the best results.
Most of the actors in Mamet's film in a film are a collection of Hollywood monsters. The leading man has a thing for seducing underage girls. The leading lady has decided she will not do a nude scene unless she gets an additional $800,000 dollars. The director is a manipulative bastard just trying to get the film made so he can make the final payment on his ranch in Montana and the producer is an abusive asshole to anyone who gets in his way. About the only pure person in the film company is unsurprisingly the writer. Not much of a stretch there since Mamet is more a writer than a director.
This is a sly and funny film with the usual Mamet touches with dialog and a couple of clever plot twists. I kind of suspect that overall Mamet seems to enjoy or at the very least be bemused by these horrible film people. At the end of State and Main the production company begins to film their story and from the look of the scenes they are shooting the world will not be losing a cinematic masterpiece.
The running time is 105 minutes.
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