John Buffalo Mailer Quotes
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I think that you know you have experts in fields who spend their life studying one thing. When an event goes on that chances are they're going to want that specific expert who has done it to be on the show talking about it, not a writer or an artist of any sort, which I think is a mistake because you know we don't have... I mean we have them, but there is certainly not you know in strong force public philosophers anymore.
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Really there's different scales of stories. Sometimes you want to tell one that 20, 30, 40, 50 million people will want to see and hear. Sometimes you do one that you know 150 will want to see on one night. As long as you're telling the right story for the right audience and they're getting something out of it it's essentially the same feeling to me.
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I mean the price of our technology may very well end up being our humanity, so I think you got to have that balance. Personally I try to do one for one if I can. Do a movie, do a play, do a movie, do a play - while at the same time writing and being in that cycle.
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There's a lot of forces opposed to legalization marijuana, so I don't want to put the cart before the horse. It's looking like it's going the legalization route, which, you know, a lot of people thought it needs to for a long time outside of recreational and medicinal use, just for crime reasons. We're pumping our prisons full of petty weed offenses and it's partially to feed that industry, but it's not good. It's not good for society, people go in there as a minor criminal and come out as a real criminal.
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I was about 20 when my mom got sick with cancer and it was bad. It was very scary and at the time I was doing my first screenplay and I was on deadline and was alone with my father in Massachusetts. I said, "Pop, you know, I don't how I'm going to work. I don't know how I can get this done. You know, I got to hand this script in and I can't think about anything but Mom." He said, "Well, you know, now is the time when you're going to learn what it means to compartmentalize." And those words really had an impact on me.
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That was my dad's sense of, you know, laughing at himself, laughing at existence, the universe, all of it and not being too serious about what we do with because at the end of the day if you're here it's a blessing. It's you know life is hard. Life is hard for everybody at some point, but it's those who are able to laugh at it and laugh with it and roll with it that ultimately I think live the fulfilling lives that we're all trying to do. You know, and big step there is to not take yourself too seriously from the start.
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We've been duped into believing we don't have 25 minutes to have something change our life. We don't have 2. You know, we're tweeting. We're running around. We're 15 words or less.
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It seems to be the sense that once you throw guys in prison they're not going to come out. No, they're going to come out and, you know, what kind of beast have you created from that process?
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I don't know if it's possible for anyone to really have that level of a voice anymore because our media is so diluted and parsed out. You know people kind of go for the news and information that they want as opposed to picking up a paper and seeing what catches their eye. It's a very stark difference and there is a few stories that end up going wide and everybody hears about them, but they're usually salacious celebrity stuff that is not about substance or it's the latest disaster and it's kind of covered in a way that is just trying to get eyeballs on the screen.
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As each generation comes up that doesn't have the habits for paper it's just easier and cheaper to get your stuff online. You know, people go to what they're used to. Certainly our generation, you know, we'll always want to have a magazine in our hands. We like that, but millennials didn't see the value in that necessarily.
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The thing is, to try to talk about a performance that will never be seen again, that was only lived by the people there, it's kind of like telling somebody about your dream. You know if they love you they'll listen and smile, but they can't really get it, so there is a certain infinite quality to film that is nice. You do the work and you know it's always going to be there. The flip side is if you do bad work it's always going to be there.
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I think that if you look at places like Amsterdam and places where pot is very legal they do well with it. There is nothing taken away from it and crime is very low and all that.
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What it means to be a man is to take on all the emotional pain and work through what you got to work through with the people you love while at the same time getting your business done. And it's tough. I think that most children when they grow up they kind of realize that the things they didn't like about their parents or didn't understand about them they get now and that you know every year you get more responsibilities. You get more overhead. You get more things you got to take care off.
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There were so many different factions and that's I think what my father was taking issue with was the idea of, look, you can't go from male dominance to female dominance and expect anything to be better. We're all shits, ultimately, and we've got to do the best we can together.
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Cinema and theater - it's apples and oranges. You can't really beat movies. Yeah, when you're on an Oliver Stone set everybody brings their A game. Everybody brings their A game, from the top to the bottom and in between. In terms of theater you know there is no way to really duplicate that rush you get when you take an audience that is live and right there in front of you through the journey of a great play and you go through these emotions so that they can experience them without having to go through them themselves.
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My father probably taught me everything I know, aside from dialogue, which I think I get from my mom a lot more. He certainly didn't teach me everything he knew, but you know he has got this book out called "The Spooky Art," which is essentially an advanced book on writing and it's not... You know it's not ABC, but it's for people who feel that bug and know that they're writers and are willing to put in that time alone. Pretty much the vast majority of what he taught me you can find in that book.
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It's always an interesting question of what was it like as Norman Mailer's son because I could easily turn it back and say what's it like not to. I didn't always realize my dad was Norman Mailer. I always knew he was Dad, and then I forget the exact age when it dawned on me that, you know, he is actually someone who affects the public consciousness of the time. It was amazing. I mean he was a rock star and brilliant and kind and funny and generous and scary when he needed to be and, you know, hard as a father.
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What's against legalization in a practical sense? A couple of college kids figured out how to take a hemp plant and turn it into newspaper and it was actually a better quality of paper. It was cheaper and if you plant hemp in a field it revitalizes the soil. You can grow food in a dirt lot if you do enough harvest of hemp. I don't pretend to know the specifics of the economics of it to say how much we'll be getting, but there is money to be made there that is not being made because it's illegal.
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I think that Anderson Cooper does a great job of staying with stories and pushing them. New Orleans he really... He was there and he pushed it past the point where his producers were saying, "Listen, you've got to stop because people are tuning out now. You know, we're on to another disaster." You know, what do you worry about, Haiti, Chile, Turkey? What? You know where do you put your attention and your focus? So for one person to really be able to cover all that ground would be tough.
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I grew up in an artistic family where everyone was doing something in one field of the arts or another. I was I think 12 years old when I did my first acting at the Actor's Studio and James Dean once said that the only reason to become and actor is because you have to. I think that you know from a young age if that is a certain rush that you're going to need to satisfy you and to make you feel fulfilled - and if you don't then you shouldn't do it. It's just too brutal of a business most of the time.
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A company that was I think the one I learned the most from in Wall Street 2, just in terms of my own character in and the kind of firm he worked in, was John Thomas Financial. There it's like warriors in an arena getting ready for battle. Thomas Belesis just fires these guys up like there is no tomorrow, and I absolutely got addicted to that optimism and adrenaline and that "We're going to do it, we're going to do it, buddy" kind of attitude that he had.
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It was something that hopefully sparked a few people to do similar things down the road and will keep a certain flavor of magazine publishing alive. I have to say at the end of the day I am glad not to be spending all day, every day in the High Times office, you know, covering this particular angle of life.
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Writing and acting are almost diametrically opposed in terms of being an actor it's in your interest to be in shape and to be healthy and to have a strong voice and to be flexible. As a writer you're sitting in this position for hours on end. You get up and you can't put your shoulder down. It's not a healthy existence so to speak and it's probably not healthy for the person that lives with you either, but you do the best you can.
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Having a mother who has had cancer and fought through it and at times used cannabis to you know fight off nausea and whatnot. I mean it's not really her thing, but there were times when she needed it and the idea that you can't have it because it's an illegal drug, but OxyContin is legal. That's you know that's just insane to a level that I think most people understand.
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I think that one of the things that my dad was grappling with towards the end was how that shift had happened now and he would go on a book tour and do his shows and it would be you know fulfilling and good, but he wouldn't have the same impact that he used to and it wasn't because people were less interested. It's just because people are distracted by the million different sources of entertainment and information in front of them at any given time.
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I had a lot of preconceived notions going in the Wall Street. It wasn't an industry that I really respected much. My feeling was kind of like look, you're not making anything. You're taking money from one place, putting it in another and taking your cut and that's just not really kind of soul-satisfying at the end of the day, but what I learned is, on a larger scale is how much the Wall Street industry funnels and fuels so many others. There is a lot of good that these guys do, and to lump all traders into a category is as insane as lumping any group of people into one category.
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It's a certain kind of human compact that obviously you lose as soon as there is a screen and a camera there, so I think we'll always have theater. I think theater will always be a powerful force because we need that human touch, particularly as we spend more and more time with machines, cell phones, computers we start to lose our humanity.
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My hope is that the film Wall Street 2 will actually serve as a way for us to bridge that gap between Wall Street and Main Street. Certainly that's dealt with in the film of how it does affect everybody, so, you know, I always find that when you can create a movie or a play or a book that gives somebody a safe theoretical place to discuss what is really going on in the day it tends to forward discussion, so that would be my hope coming out of the film.
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Whatever the reasons, 2008 it felt as though the combination of distribution models starting to tighten and the publishing and film and music industries having to revolutionize themselves to catch up, and understand how this is going to work in the new millennium has made it a lot easier to pursue multi-platform careers. It's much easier to hire one person who can do three or four different things than one specialist in that field.
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There's also just socially, personally. There is something naughty about pot. There is something that is rebellious and outlawish and a kind of, you know, a finger in the eye of the government saying, hey, you can't tell me what to do. That would be gone if legalize it.
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