Hollywood

"Hollywood groupthink is anathema to the nature of sci fi, which is a cerebral philosophical exploration of humankind and puncturing the limits of our imagination. I think the central concept here is that Hollywood, Cap H, is as terrified of sci fi as it is of an alien invasion. And that's because the studios, as they have been increasingly corporatized, become absolutely risk averse in a way that they haven't always been."

"[I]n Hollywood, I mean they don't know we exist. They're barely starting to figure out that there are Mexican Americans. And so I use humor as a way to cope with that and to let our community know that we're not invisible, at least not to us."

"No. No, I didn't last long. I went out there for a thousand a week, and I worked Monday, and I got fired Wednesday. The guy that hired me was out of town Tuesday."

"Hollywood is not necessarily biased toward a particular political view, but it is biased toward what does and doesn't make money. Since 9/11, the market wanted these almost comic book characterizations of Muslims as the bad guy. But that market has dried up. It's not interesting anymore. They want different narratives about Muslims and Middle Easterners, and networks are looking for ways to do that."

"I try, in my life, to follow my heart. I know what it feels like to do things that are soul-decaying. A large aspect of life in Hollywood, in a stereotypic way, I find unbelievably soul-decaying. And I choose, albeit frustratingly to other people in my life, not to expose myself too much to too much of that."

"Sick of Hollywood, tired of fighting and selling out as an artist. I don't believe anyone should do the same thing for the rest of his life. We get a very short time on this planet. Challenging oneself is very important. It's not that I couldn't make other great animated films, but I'd done what I wanted to do, which was make animation an adult medium, if one wanted it to be. And I'd proven to myself that it could work, and it was time to move on to something else. When I sell a painting, I get very excited. I need one person to like what I do, not a million. It's a different structure here. Plus the Hollywood thing. I mean, Hollywood is no place to grow up, no place to live. It's no place to have any friends, no place to enjoy life. It's a disgusting, horrible, craze-driven town. It's only how much do you make, or how fancy a car you have, that determines your status there. And everyone's lying so much that they don't even know they're lying anymore. There's no reality to Hollywood. The fees they pay directors are obnoxious, the money they spend on movies could feed entire starving African[s]... I mean, fuck 'em. I made a few bucks and got out. I don't want to spend the rest of my life with those people. They're disgusting people, and you can quote me on that. There's a lot of great talent there, but it's no place I wanted to spend much time. I'd rather spend time with Rembrandt and Goya at home. They're better company than those schmucks who never read Lord Of The Rings."

"The place is unreal. The people are unreal. The flowers are unreal—they don't smell. The fruit is unreal. Even the streets and buildings are unreal. I always expected to hear a carpenter shout "Strike" and the whole place come down like a stage set. That's what Hollywood is—a set, a glaring, gaudy, nightmarish set erected in the desert."

"The voice of Hollywood has grown beyond the border of the United States. It's everywhere."

"Hollywood is like Picasso's bathroom."

"In the USA, meanwhile, the willingness of Hollywood to confront social problems, as in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), the film of the 1939 John Steinbeck novel about dispossessed dirt-farmers, slackened. This change reflected political pressure not to criticise America, but, instead, to resist Communist 'subversion'. This pressure was orchestrated by the House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities as part of a battle over national identity and interests, a battle that owed its origins to resistance to the New Deal, but that gathered pace after World War Two as opposition to Communism made it possible to discredit progressive ideas. Those in Hollywood with Communist associations were blacklisted from 1947. Moreover, anti-Communist films were produced, for example The Red Menace (1949) and I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951). These films spread images of the USA around the world. Film was tremendously important to the practice and currency of myth, symbolisation and characterisation that were central to the imagining of people, country and world. Anti-Communism was both cause and device. It was directed against alternative views of a more egalitarian America which were presented, instead, as causes and reflections of internal division in the shape of class conflict and radicalism. Eric Johnston, President of the Motion Picture Association, a committed anti-Communist, told script writers to act accordingly, and was supported by Ronald Reagan, President of the Screen Actors Guild, who linked radicals and strikers to foreign Communists. The nature of the American consensus was redefined from the 1940s, with important political, social and intellectual effects. Left-wing ideas were castigated as was cultural relativism. Instead, there was pressure for support of a conservative view of American culture."

"If you're looking for historical truth in Hollywood, you're looking in the wrong spot."

"[T]he motion picture community has been as responsible as any for degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character, describing his as savage, hostile and evil. It's hard enough for children to grow up in this world. When Indian children watch television, and they watch films, and when they see their race depicted as they are in films, their minds become injured in ways we can never know."

"Hollywood is run by Jews. It is owned by Jews, and they should have a greater sensitivity. They should have greater sensitivity about the issue of people who are suffering because they've [been] exploited. We have seen the nigger, we've seen the greaseball, we have seen the chink, the slit-eyed dangerous Jap. We have seen the wily Filipino. We've seen everything, but we never saw the kike, because they know perfectly well that is where you draw the wagons around."

"Most of the successful people in Hollywood are failures as human beings."

"Every day, to earn my daily bread I go to the market where lies are bought Hopefully I take up my place among the sellers."

"In Hollywood, they think drawn animation doesn't work anymore, computers are the way. They forget that the reason computers are the way is that Pixar makes good movies. So everybody tries to copy Pixar. They're relying too much on the technology and not enough on the artists."

"I'm looking forward to this race. I want to thank you all for giving me a chance to come out and ask for the vote. I'm traveling your important State asking for the vote. You got some big differences in this campaign. One of them is that my opponent thinks you can find the heart and soul in Hollywood. I think you find it right here in Traverse City, Michigan."

"In Hollywood if you don't have a shrink, people think you're crazy."

"Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood -- and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else."

"They pick your brains, break your heart, ruin your digestion -- and what do you get for it? Nothing but a lousy fortune."

"Any actress who appears in public without being well-groomed is digging her own grave."

"Think of the plot of The Fly. Two attractive people fall in love. The man suddenly contracts this incurable disease. He goes downhill in a horrible and hideous way as his mate watches and then he asks her to kill him and that's the end of the movie. Now, people would not accept that. You could not deal with that in a normal, realistic fashion. It's just too upfront and too hard and too despairing. If you gave Hollywood that plot, they wouldn't make the movie. And yet, because it was sci-fi, fantasy, horror, no one ever questioned how dark it was. That's another good thing about horror—it allows you to come to grips with the nitty gritty and at the same time gives you a little cushion, a little protection as well, because it is fantasy."

"I'm impressed with the people from Chicago. Hollywood is hype, New York is talk, Chicago is work."

"[Hollywood] is a very male business, and it has in vast portions of it — the whole action movie part of it might as well be the United States Army in 1943 in that the ethics of it are, you know, boot camp and action movies and guns and explosions and all the rest of it, and that – so that means that about 50% of the business is not only pretty much closed off to women, but women don’t even wanna be in it!"

"Sunset Boulevard - the story of Hollywood movies draped on a depressing sex affair - is an uncompromising study of American decadence displaying a sad, worn, methodical beauty few films have had since the late twenties."

"The No. 1 problem in Hollywood was, and is, and always will be pedophilia."

"I made my first film on 16mm. Then I began using 35mm. Then I began working in Hollywood. And I began to really understand how films were made by professionals. I have to say I wasn't very impressed."

"Emotionally resonant media about real issues have changed public's perception. Researchers have found, for example, that ostensibly realistic films like Argo (depicting the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis) or Zero Dark Thirty (chronicling the search for Osama bin Laden) altered public opinion about those events. There is also evidence that such media can result in real world behavioral change in agents of the state. In his 2008 book, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, Philippe Sands interviewed a former lawyer stationed at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who claimed that the television show 24 inspired interrogators to "go further than they otherwise might." The journalist Jane Mayer interviewed an Army interrogator in Iraq, who said that after people watched 24, they would "walk into the interrogation booths and do the same things they’ve just seen." This is perhaps one reason why the Pentagon has collaborated with Hollywood since the early 20th century to create sympathetic portrayals on television and in film through the Entertainment Office—an arrangement often called the "military-entertainment complex." For television shows like 24 and films like American Sniper, the office will not only analyze the scripts for accuracy, it will also alter scripts to improve the portrayal of the military on screen. The Entertainment Office is in enough demand to be selective in what it will advise, reportedly turning down 95% of the scripts or story treatments it receives. "We’re not going to support a program that disgraces a uniform or presents us in a compromising way," Captain Russell Coons, director of the Navy Office of Information West, told Al Jazeera in 2014. This selectivity creates a powerful incentive for writers, producers, and directors to cede narrative ground to the Pentagon in order to secure access to their expertise, equipment, and approval."

"The secret to kicking ass in dumbshit Hollywood... Every time you meet someone, make a fucking impression. Make them think you're the hottest shit in the world. Make them think they're gonna lose their job if they don't give you one. Look 'em in the eye, and never look away. Be confident and calm, be fucking bold. That sounds more like the secret to kicking ass in life. It is, but I was gonna wait and tell you that some other time."

"People in Hollywood are not showmen, they're maintenance men, pandering to what they think their audiences want."

"It's an abominable place. If there was an Old Testamental God, he would do his job and wipe the place out. The only bad thing is that some really good restaurants would go up as well."

"I like the Coen brothers. Their films are smart and disturbing. I am very impressed by what George Clooney is doing now. He is very political. I like the fact that he did Oceans Eleven and Oceans Twelve, made all that money and then leveraged the money and his success into interesting projects. Johnny Depp has also set up a production company and is showing an interest in risky projects that will not be easy. I am sorry that it is hard for the average person, and even for an above-average person, to see a film that is not a Hollywood production. You see those films only in the festivals. There are few people there. That is worrying. People don't think. My goal in work is to make them think. The media do the opposite."

"Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents."

"In Hollywood, no one knows anything."

"I'm tired of being told how bad America is by leftwing millionaires like Michael Moore, George Soros and Hollywood entertainers who live in luxury because of the opportunities America offers. In thirty years, if they get their way, the United States will have the religious freedom and women’s rights of Saudi Arabia, the economy of Zimbabwe, the freedom of the press of China, the crime and violence of Mexico, the tolerance for Gay people of Iran, and the freedom of speech of Venezuela. Won’t multiculturalism be beautiful?"

"Consider California. Its wealth was initially built on gold mines. But today it is built on silicon and celluloid - Silicon Valley and the celluloid hills of Hollywood."

"My life is fair game for anybody. I spent an unhappy, penniless childhood in Brooklyn. I had to slug my way up in a town called Hollywood where people love to trample you to death. I don't relax because I don't know how. I don't want to know how. Life is too short to relax."

"Hollywood, an industry that shapes not only our national but global memories, has been the most reactionary cultural perpetrator of white nostalgia, stuck in a time loop and refusing to acknowledge that America's racial demographic has radically changed since 1965. Movies are cast as if the country were still "protected" by a white supremacist law that guarantees that the only Americans seen are carefully curated European descendants."

"[May 17, 1939] Next day, we took a taxi into Hollywood. I was amazed at the size of the city, and at its lack of shape. There seemed no reason why it should ever stop. Miles and miles of little houses, wooden or stucco, under a technicolor sky. Miles of little gardens, crowded with blossoms and flowering bushes; the architecture is dominated by the vegetation. A city without privacy, where neighbors share each other's lawns and look into each other's bedrooms. The whole place like a world's fair, quite new and already partly in ruins. The only permanent buildings are the schools and churches. On the hill, giant letters spell "Hollywoodland", but this is only another advertisement. It is silly to say that Hollywood, or any other city, is "unreal". But what the arriving traveler first sees are merely advertisements for a city which doesn’t exist."

"You know, let's put it this way, if all the people in Hollywood who have had plastic surgery, if they went on vacation, there wouldn't be a person left in town."

"Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood."

"Let any pretty girl announce a divorce in Hollywood and the wolves come running. Fresh meat for the beast, and they are always hungry."

"To create what it does, Hollywood has to draw young people, often of unstable temperament, from all over the world. It plunges them into exacting work--surrounds them with a sensuous life-- and cuts them off from the normal sources of living."

"In Hollywood, brides keep the bouquets and throw away the groom."

"In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally."

"Well, nobody looks to Hollywood for social commentary, do they? They only recently discovered that there were black people in the world."

"Hollywood has mistreated women in every possible way throughout its history. Gay men don't exist."

"Hollywood and Broadway, the world-famous centers of the entertainment industry, are hotbeds of communism. Authors and performers are to be found among the most bigoted supporters of Sovietism."

"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents."

"Someone said to me, "If fifty percent of the experts in Hollywood said you had no talent and should give up, what would you do?" My answer was then and still is, "If a hundred percent told me that, all one hundred percent would be wrong.""