The move from playwright to cinema screenwriter and director is a rare accomplishment. No
American writer has achieved this transition with the level of success enjoyed over the past
two decades by David Mamet. Over this same period Mamet has also authored a body of aggressive
critical writing that demonstrates enduring aesthetic and ideological preoccupations regularly
expressed as a set of confident best practices. However the relationship between theory and
practice becomes particularly (and productively) rowdy at the sites of Mamet's transitional
media crossing. Imagination in Transition establishes a flexible set of core characteristics of
Mamet's dramatic and theatrical dramaturgy and then compares these with the textual and
cinematographic strategies employed by Mamet in his initial transitional feature films. This
study then offers both an innovative approach to Mamet's work and an illuminating framework
for cross-media analysis.
