The Pulitzer Prize-winning screenwriter and provocateur criticized diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives as “garbage” at an LA Times book festival event on Sunday.

David Mamet attends the 2024 Los Angeles Times Festival of Books at the University of Southern California on April 21, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.

Legendary Hollywood screenwriter David Mamet is no fan of the entertainment industry’s efforts to drive greater diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) in its ranks.

“DEI is garbage,” Mamet told the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Sunday during a session with Matt Brennan. Mamet, who was on hand to talk about his memoir Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood, added the industry’s DEI efforts amounted to “fascist totalitarianism,” according to an account in the Times.

The playwright and director, who has worked in Hollywood since the 1980s and is known for his trademark rapid-fire script dialogue, did not shy away from criticism during an informal conversation at USC’s Newman Recital Hall.

“There’s no room for individual initiative,” Mamet said of a film industry having experienced “growth, maturity, decay and death,” especially in the wake of the recent Hollywood writers strike.

“There’ll be less work,” he speculated. “But the scripts will be better,” Mamet added. And he rejected that his children, including Zosia Mamet, who starred in Girls, ever got work because of their association with the Glengarry Glen Ross stage play scribe.

“They earned it by merit … nobody ever gave my kids a job because of who they were related to,” Mamet insisted