Between 2009 and the beginning of last week, dramatist and author David Mamet released 16 new plays and books, some of them exceptional. During the same span, filmmaker David Mamet directed either one or zero feature-length pictures, depending on whether one counts the 2013 made-for-TV movie Phil Spector. To say merely that this imbalance saddened fans of the unofficial laureate of American hustlers is very nearly to engage in Mametian deception, so drastically does it undersell the point. Instead, we were miserable. Yes, the Pulitzer winner delivered Race (2009), one of the best new plays in decades, but where was his much-whispered-about John F. Kennedy assassination film? If the absurdist novel The Diary of a Porn Star by Priscilla Wriston-Ranger (2019) could exist, why couldn’t our man’s long-rumored Will Ferrell collaboration, Joan of Bark: The Dog That Saved France?