David Mamet is considering rewriting his hit Broadway play Speed-the-Plow, but switching the genders of one of the main characters from male to female, according to an unsourced story on Showbiz411.
The story says, ”The word is that Oscar winner Anne Hathaway is talking to Mamet about playing one of the male roles, re-written for her. That would be Charlie, played so brilliantly eons ago [1988] on stage by Ron Silver.”
As previously reported on Playbill.com, Hollywood has been working for more than a year to make a movie of Speed-the-Plow, David Mamet's scathing takedown of the Hollywood decision-making process. The original 1988 Broadway production starred Silver, Joe Mantegna and Madonna.
A London revival was staged in 2014 starring Lindsay Lohan.
The play tells the story of a pair of Hollywood producers who are all set to make a big-budget action film with a name star, but the plan gets derailed when a sexy secretary brings them an uncommercial script that she convinces one of them would be a great prestige project.
As the Showbiz411 story notes, however, the super-macho posturing of the two male characters, both of whom would like to bed the female character, has been central to the story.
Mamet himself is adapting the screenplay for a team of producers, Emmett/Furla/Oasis Films, Winkler Films & The Fyzz Facility.
The show was revived on Broadway in 2008 starring Raul Esparza, Elizabeth Moss and Jeremy Piven, the latter of whom was replaced in succession by Norbert Leo Butz, Jordan Lage and William H. Macy. The play's title was considered a mystery for a long time, until Mamet cleared it up (slightly) saying in an interview that he remembered seeing the phrase "Industry produces wealth, God speed the plow" on an old plate, and felt it related to the themes of the play.
Mamet's plays are known for delving into the unique argots of various American walks of life. His Glengarry Glen Ross captured the speech patterns of real estate salesmen; his November did the same (in a comic way) for politicians; his A Life in the Theatre did so for actors; his American Buffalo did so for small-time crooks, and so forth. But the movie industry has exerted a strange fascination for Mamet. He has written about various aspects of it in his film scripts for Wag the Dog and State and Main.
