Hollywood

"When it comes to bending the truth to assist a story's plot versus staying completely true to the facts, we can assure you any dramatist will always select the former. Mark Twain's old saying "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story" still reigns in Hollywood."

"Hollywood is a place where you spend more than you make on things you don't need to impress people you don't like."

"It could be that today's conservative movement remains in thrall to the same narrative that has defined its attitude toward film and the arts for decades. Inspired by feelings of exclusion after Hollywood and the popular culture turned leftward in the '60s and '70s, this narrative has defined the film industry as an irredeemably liberal institution toward which conservatives can only act in opposition—never engagement. Ironically, this narrative ignores the actual history of Hollywood, in which conservatives had a strong presence from the industry's founding in the early 20th century up through the '40s, '50s and into the mid-'60s. The conservative Hollywood community at that time included such leading directors as Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and Cecil B. DeMille, and major stars like John Wayne, Clark Gable, and Charlton Heston. These talents often worked side by side with notable Hollywood liberals like directors Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and John Huston, and stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Spencer Tracy. The richness of classic Hollywood cinema is widely regarded as a testament to the ability of these two communities to work together, regardless of political differences. As the younger, more left-leaning "New Hollywood" generation swept into the industry in the late '60s and '70s, this older group of Hollywood conservatives faded away, never to be replaced. Except for a brief period in the '80s when the Reagan Presidency led to a conservative reengagement with film—with popular stars like Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger making macho, patriotic action films—conservatives appeared to abandon popular culture altogether. In the wake of this retreat, conservative failure to engage with Hollywood now appears to have been recast by today's East Coast conservative establishment into a generalized opposition toward film and popular culture itself. In the early '90s, conservative film critic Michael Medved codified this oppositional feeling toward Hollywood in his best-selling book Hollywood vs. America."

"Hollywood industrialized mythology, and then weaponized it."

"Modern Hollywood is a far cry from its intrepid female founder's [Daeida Hartell] "dream of beauty"."

"In 1900, Hollywood, California, was a small town of 500 people, many of whom had moved there from the midwest. Around 15 years earlier, Daeida Hartell, a young woman from Ohio, had traveled there with her husband, Harvey Henderson Wilcox, and convinced him to purchase 120 acres... the couple soon moved there permanently and imagined a "utopian subdivision" to accommodate cultured, wholesome Midwesterners looking for fresh air and a second act in California...She [Daeida Hartell] was creating an alcohol-free, cultured Christian community. To that end she offered free lots to Christian churches regardless of their denomination."

"Liquor, the use of firearms, speeding, pool halls and even bowling alleys were banned. The riding of bicycles and tricycles on sidewalks was prohibited—telling, given that the only sidewalks in Hollywood at the time were in front of the homes of Daeida and one other prominent developer. For all its infighting, the new town of Hollywood now entered its brief golden age. A woman who grew up during the time remembered a "country life," where children ran through lemon, orange, and tomato fields and made snowmen during the rare snow of 1905."

"The only -ism Hollywood believes in is plagiarism."

"The fallacy in Hollywood is that if you’re making a 'feminist’ story, the woman kicks ass and wins. That’s not feminist, that’s macho."

"Hollywood is the definition of sexual discrimination."

"Far from being freaks, the Hell's Angels are a logical product of the culture that now claims to be shocked at their existence. The generation represented by the editors of Time has lived so long in a world full of Celluloid outlaws hustling toothpaste and hair oil that it is no longer capable of confronting the real thing. For twenty years they have sat with their children and watched yesterday's outlaws raise hell with yesterday's world … and now they are bringing up children who think Jesse James is a television character. This is the generation that went to war for Mom, God and Apple Butter, the American Way of Life. When they came back, they crowned Eisenhower and then retired to the giddy comfort of their TV parlors, to cultivate the subtleties of American history as seen by Hollywood."

"In 1931, two eighteen-year-olds charged with second-degree robbery admitted they were inspired by gangster films to try the "easy money racket" for themselves. Before sending them to a reformatory, the presiding judge had some harsh words for the film industry: "The moving picture industry is complaining about poor business, but it only has itself to blame. Gangster and sex pictures, which seem to predominate, are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. No responsible parent cares to take children to these pictures. Maybe some day the industry will again become respectable; but until then it will not be a financial success.""

"It's said in Hollywood that you should always forgive your enemies - because you never know when you'll have to work with them."

"I think Hollywood invention has always been somewhat limitless. You may have relied on a bit of claymation, filmed lizards for dinosaurs, or depicted Chuck Heston parting the seas but what continues to change is execution: design aesthetic and photorealism continue to evolve. For me the limits have always resided with our imagination. The struggle is to conceive something unique. If you can achieve this, then the underlying concept or idea even badly executed, will always outshine the polished cliche."

"Yes, I'm blonde. When I started as an actor, because of the accent and my body and my personality, it was not what the stereotype of the Latina woman in Hollywood is, so they didn't know where to put me. The blond hair wasn't matching. The moment I put my hair dark, it was better for my work."

"You're now heading toward Hollywood, like any normal tourist. Breathe in that smog and feel lucky that only in L.A. will you glimpse a green sun or a brown moon. Forget the propaganda you've heard about clean air; demand oxygen you can see in all its glorious discoloration."

"I am not cut out to deal with certain types of individuals that run large Hollywood studios. I have checkered teeth, I smell like a Slim Jim and enjoy crushing nerdy executive hands. Not a good combination for getting your foot in the door in "Hollywood". Look what Hollywood has done to computer graphics .... turned her into a slutty sister!"

"People go to the movies instead of moving. Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them."

"Las Vegas is more like Hollywood than Hollywood, because the money is changing hands right out front."