So, I haven’t seen Glengarry Glen Ross is many years, but a recent podcast made me think about it again. When I originally saw it, I thought that Alec Baldwin’s alpha male character was a reminder of what Shelley had lost, how far he had fallen. Hearing his speech again made me think that it’s the opposite- that his alpha male “I drive an 80,000 BMW” stuff is as phony as Shelly’s “hold my calls, I’m talking to an important client” bit. Cars can be rented, and why would they bother sending a top earner out to talk to those guys?
Any thoughts?
I never thought of Alex Balwin’s character like that. I always just thought his attitude raises the pressure and increases Shelly’s desperation. But, yeah, his bravado is likely a performance, but it’s hard to say how much.
FWIW:
BLAKE (still to everyone): I can go out there tonight with the materials you got, make myself $15,000! Tonight! In two hours!
Fact check: Inaccurate. Earlier, Blake said he made $970,000 the year prior. Here, Blake asserts that he makes $7,500 an hour. That equals out to over $15 million a year. Even if we scale this back and give Blake credit for making one sale a day to earn a commission of $15,000 a day, that still equals up to nearly $4 million a year.
He’s there because Mitch and Murray asked him to; they asked him for a favor.
Srsly: he’s obviously there as a motivational speaker. The guys aren’t getting the job done and they need some incentives.
That “fact check” seems to ignore the fact that you have a limited number of leads and there’s a limited number of lots to sell. Baldwin’s character is able to quickly sell lots to leads when available but there’s a finite number of each. He might still be bullshitting or exaggerating but not because he’s not making $15mil a year.
Aye: just because he says that he can make $15,000 in two hours tonight, with these leads that doesn’t necessarily mean he can somehow make $15,000 every two hours.
He most certainly does not assert that he makes $7,500/hour. That “fact check” fails from the get-go.
I like “Glengarry Glen Ross”, but several things about the setup seems artificial to me. Like the existence of this nebulous list of surefire leads, that guides so much of the conversation. I don’t know much about selling real estate, but wouldn’t such a list of interested, financially sound prospects be assembled and developed by sales people, who would also be tasked with finalizing the sale?
What I’m getting at, using too much logic on the setup of GGR may not be advisable.
He’s not saying that he makes $15k every day he goes to work. He’s saying that he could take the dozens of leads that the non-Roma office staff is making no headway with, cherrypick which ones are worth pursuing, and close them, as opposed to flailing about. So he could, in one night, find the $15,000 in the weeks of work they’ve been doing, rather than make nothing out of it as they have. But the batches of leads that allow for that don’t come along every day.
A lot of the rest of it does seem like we’re supposed to have questions, mainly along the lines of “if this guy is such a great salesman why is he working for a company that’s seemingly on the verge of collapse and doing things that are borderline illegal? Couldn’t he make just as much money working somewhere else without worrying about going to prison all the time?”
I don’t know how it works in real estate, but in most business-to-business organizations there’s a marketing department that generates the leads, which are then turned over to sales. Salespeople don’t go out and find their own leads.
I don’t think the new leads were supposed to be foolproof, just better than the worked-over junk they had. It was desperation and wishful thinking that made them seem so important. I recall that someone calls one of the old leads, and the guy that answers says something to the effect of, “my wife filled out a card about a summer home once, and you guys have been hounding us ever since, please go away”. The new leads would avoid that.
The good leads are the people who are serious about buying and who have the finances to make a down payment. Probably about 10% of them can be converted to sales, as opposed to < 1% for the rest.
The article clearly is misinterpreting things. He claims he can make $15k with the leads (he could be just picking a number to motivate the salesmen). But IRL, there would be periods when he’s not actually selling. No leads, time to do paperwork, lost sales (he can’t hit 100%, no matter how good it is), etc.
It also makes the false assumption that the movie is about selling real estate.
I’m not convinced there were new leads. The entire movie is about losers and assholes and how they are trapped in a self consuming spiral of the same bullshit they’ve spent their careers perpetuating while bilking their clients. It’s a Ponzi scheme and Alec’s character is at the top of that particular pyramid.
Or he’s a schlub like the others and selling them a line of bull.
Indeed – I saw it as multiple variations on a theme established by the immortal line in Death of a Salesman: “I am not a dime a dozen. I’m Willy Loman!”
Blake is essentially telling the crew that they’re all a dime a dozen, and they spend the rest of the play trying (and mostly failing) to prove him wrong.
This. GGR always seemed to me to be a fable, mythic, therefore artificial almost by definition. The “leads” are the MacGuffin, the Grail, the Pie in the Sky. Their elusiveness and intangibility kicks up the tension. That’s my take.
I have watched this movie twice (The year it came out and three years ago) I was 25 then and 50 the second time. The cast list is stellar and I really like all of them, However,… I despised Alec Baldwin’s character as “The Art of the Deal” given voice then and really loathed it the second time. Kudos to him for some great acting because all I wanted to do was throat punch him and convince the rest of the characters (especially Jack Lemmon) to grab the shovels and help me bury him. This and Vincent Gallo’s Brown Bunny still stand for me as the worst films I’ve ever watched.
True, but the main theme is what’s now called toxic masculinity ( long before the term became mainstream). Everyone’s caught up about what it means to be a man.
Sounds like it really stuck with you though, even if it left a bad taste in your mouth. (The Brown Bunny as well.)
Oh no you didn’t.
For young men coming of age in that era, often the product of broken marriages/absent baby-boomer fathers, R. Lee Ermey’s and Alec Baldwin’s monologues stood in for the one time some male figure was speaking the truth about what the world really stood for. Definitely toxic, but not inaccurate. Of course I wish Marcus Aurelius had been there for them instead, but he only puts in an appearance in The Fall of the Roman Empire and Gladiator as a symbol of ineffectuality.