I never watched the film until after I started working in a county that is ground zero for a huge portion of the archetypal Florida land scam sites. So I know that depending on when the film is set, they could be selling land that is utterly worthless through being so difficult or expensive to develop that that there’s no way to ever use it or resell it short of using GGGR tactics. IIRC, the sales men use tactics that are definitely immoral and sometimes illegal to get their up front commissions. Often, the tactics have nothing to do with the product. They pressure with other stuff like an insult to your manhood or your compassion to help them out.
My roommate from the time I saw GGGR liked the film because of all the times he had to sit through real life versions of the “Always Be Closing” speech when he worked at Montgomery Ward.
IIRC they mention Rio Ranchos, a famous land scam in New Mexico, which my father got taken in on. I still have the lot - my kids will be inheriting it before it becomes valuable. He didn’t get his money back because our land can be exchanged for land near town, but we have to move their and build on it. No thanks. The Rio Ranchos mention is evidence the land is pretty much worthless.
I think that a viewer that doesn’t get that what is being sold is worthless is missing a large piece of the story’s impact. The whole relationship between Pryce’s neediness and longing for human contact and Pacino’s pitching of a worthless “investment” as the cure for his problems is just brutal.
2 things that make me question the “swampland” theory:
The play was written in the early 1980s, 20 years after the states of New York and Florida outlawed selling swampland. If they were doing something illegal, I can’t imagine the first thing they would do after the burglary was . . . call the police. Kind like a pot dealer calling 911 after getting robbed of his stash.
The way the salesmen were verbally abused I can’t believe not one of them would get red-assed and tip off the FBI. Ricky Roma himself surely could get a legit sales job making as much money selling something legal.
Another thing that makes me thing it MIGHT have been a legal, if not 100% ethical, scheme was a trip I took with my father around 1981-1982. He was a PA custom home builder and realtor, and he visited a friend of his from the industry that migrated South and who was living north of Tampa in Hernando County who was wining and dining and high pressuring my father to invest in his real estate development scheme.
In between schmooze meetings my father decided to take a drive through one of these supposedly hot developments that were being built, and it was mile after mile after mile of new ranch homes up for sale but barely any were occupied. I was only 13 at the time and I remember this like it was yesterday, it looked like one of those unoccupied new Chinese cities you read about on the Internet, except it was all houses.
My father politely declined and about 2 years later his friend was bankrupt as were many many others in the real estate industry when the Florida real estate bubble blew up in the 80s.
Im thinking Mitch & Murray were trying to do the same thing: get customers to invest in legit but over-priced real estate without them seeing what was really going on down south.
Count me as the exception who didn’t think much about the land either way, other than the fact that it might be less desirable/harder to sell. And I don’t think there’s anything explicit in the text to say it’s swampland, though I suppose you could extend their sleaziness to that inference. But I don’t think it’s important at all to the character study.
Nobody was buying them. As enticing as no neighbors may sometimes be, it means no local businesses, no tax support for infrastructure improvement, distant schools, etc.
Sometimes, the subdivision is in the middle of nowhere, 10-20 miles from any other development. if you’re lucky, there’s citrus fields nearby. But most likely, it’s cattle grazing which magnifies the feeling of isolation. And there’s so many lots that the few people who do move out there are still surrounded by empty homes are even just empty lots. Really gives the place a post-apocalyptic feel.
Look up places like Lehigh Acres, Golden Gate estates, and The Rotunda, all in S. FLA, to get a feel of what it can be like.
Well, Mamet doesn’t debate the interviewer’s remark about “peddling worthless property” so, whether or not it’s literally covered with water and alligators, it seems safe to assume that they’re in the business of selling garbage real estate to unsuspecting people.
Most real-life salesmen that I’ve known spend a lot of time obsessing about the product they’re selling. If they bitch, they bitch about their employer for failing to keep the product competitive (how can I sell this shit?) or for demanding too high a price.
The GGR salesmen, by contrast, care not a whit about their product. All they obsess over and bitch about are the leads. The product is irrelevant; the mark is everything. That’s telling.
I think we can safely infer that the proferred land isn’t likely to be a great investment, just from the manner in which it’s being sold. If it were choice land, likely to be snapped up within a few years for commercial or residential development, it would be sold by and to men and women with briefcases and prospectuses sitting around a conference table, not from a boiler room.
That said, there is also no reason to believe that the salesmen are out-and-out fraudulent. I assume they are conveying valid title deeds to property that really exists. The property just isn’t likely to be worth more than the mark pays for a long, long time.
They are shady and sleazy at the least. They are selling things to people who don’t want them, don’t need them, and they are creating a need/desire. No different from ad salesmen, but if the land was in fact swampland, that pushes them over to immoral.
I find it difficult to believe that Mamet doesn’t also mean that although they may have started as (semi-) decent individuals, the job has ‘altered’ them into soulless shells of humanity. And no, GGGR is not primarily an exposé on sleazy real estate sales businesses, anymore than *Death of a Salesman *is solely a Marxist condemnation of capitalism. Like most all plays it’s first & foremost an examination of the human condition. But the two are not mutually exclusive.
YES!!! And the fucking leads. I’m not shit; normally I’m damned good at this because I understand the prospect’s needs (no thanks to you, training people) and work to not jack them around or get pushy (with my pre-sales commissions topping out at twelve bucks I’m hardly motivated to get sleazy), but lately the leads truly are shit. When the product is intended for WalMart Corporate in Arkansas, don’t have me calling A WalMart in Tampa! They have no use for it, and I’m embarrassed to be calling them, so I have to come up with sneaky ways to dispose of the shittiest leads without it reflecting badly on me. And where are the upgrades? The last upgrades I heard about came a year ago, and that’s a century in software time. Maybe there are new ones, but nobody has told me, so I avoid mentioning the version number. Unlike my cohorts, who follow the inane and misleading* script religiously.
But it’s not a boiler room. The outfit on the floor below is, and people have quit and gone there because the money’s supposed to be better. Except there’s a lot of pressure to sell and the commissions are paid by the outside salesmen out of their cut. When they feel like it. Then they quit and come back upstairs because we are the Hotel California of telemarketing.
ETA: Not misleading for sleazy reasons. Misleading because the person whom wrote it knows little about the product, who we’re calling, and how to motivate them.