Academy Award Winners

"A sad occasion in that Julian could not follow me out the door. He lives in a tiny room with great modesty and discipline."

"We have an obligation to those who died ... to remember"

"My father was a Republican and he hated Roosevelt. And that's sort of been the battle of my life, I think. You have to understand I grew up a Republican conservative. I hated Castro. And I put my money where my mouth was because I went to war, but I understood pretty quickly that this was another place, another culture and we would never fit in there."

"[In comparison with the Vietnam war] It's the same story in Afghanistan, Iraq and South America. It's white people meeting people who they think they are better than. And I feel that this war is the war of my life. I've seen it over and over again and if I can do one thing with what's left of my remaining years, it's just to cry it out and say it, I hope, with enough entertainment that people will want see it."

"Since that day, the media has chanted the mantra that Oswald did it alone. But the American public... has never accepted it. They smell a rat."

"In their ten-part cable television documentary series and seven-hundred-page companion book The Untold History of the United States, filmmaker Oliver Stone and historian Peter Kuznick ask: "Why does our country have military bases in every region of the globe, totaling more than a thousand by some counts? Why does the United States spend as much money on its military as the rest of the world combined? Why does it still possess thousands of nuclear weapons, many on hair-trigger alert, even though no nation poses an imminent threat?" These are key questions. Stone and Kuznick condemn the situation but do not answer the questions. The authors see the post-World War II development of the United States into the world's sole superpower as a sharp divergence from the founders' original intent and historical development prior to the mid-twentieth century. They quote an Independence Day speech by President John Quincy Adams in which he condemned British colonialism and claimed that the United States "goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy." Stone and Kuznick fail to mention that the United States at the time was invading, subjecting, colonizing, and removing the Indigenous farmers from their land, as it had since its founding and as it would through the nineteenth century. In ignoring that fundamental basis for US development as an imperialist power, they do not see that overseas empire was the logical outcome of the course the United States chose at its founding."

"Movie critics have complained that the movie lacks coherent vision. The fault may not be Stone's. We know what Alexander] did, and it continues to astonish us, but we don't know how or why he did it... Stone suggests some noble purpose for Alexander's mad, bloody tromp across Asia. He and his historical consultant shared a need to give meaning to a meaningless conquest."

"If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxious, ambitious actors, directors, writers and producers to continue their assault on the English language by reducing the vocabularies of their characters to half a dozen words, with one colorful but overused Anglo-Saxon verb and one unbeautiful Anglo-Saxon noun covering just about every situation, then I would like to suggest that they stop and think about this: making millions is not the whole ball game, fellows. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more."

"I hold no brief for Communists, but I believe in and will defend their right to act independently within the law. I question whether members of the committee are interested in defending our form of government or whether they are attempting to suppress political opinion at odds with their own."

"Entertainment is all right, but entertainment with an idea behind it is much more important."

"You have to dream, you have to have a vision, and you have to set a goal for yourself that might even scare you a little because sometimes that seems far beyond your reach. Then I think you have to develop a kind of resistance to rejection, and to the disappointments that are sure to come your way."

"They say the bad guys are more interesting to play but there is more to it than that — playing the good guys is more challenging because it's harder to make them interesting."

"It just seems silly to me that something so right and simple has to be fought for at all."

"I don't think I could stay interested for a couple of months in a character of mean motivation."

"I think I should have been more ferocious in pursuit of the whale, more cruel to the crew, and I think I'd have a better grasp now of what Melville was talking about. Ahab focused all his energies on avenging himself against the whale, but he was trying to penetrate the mystery of why we are here at all, why there is anything. I wasn't mad enough, not crazy enough, not obsessive enough. I should have done more. … At the time, I didn't have more in me."

"I put everything I had into it — all my feelings and everything I'd learned in 46 years of living, about family life and fathers and children. And my feelings about racial justice and inequality and opportunity."

"I'm not a do-gooder. It embarrassed me to be classified as a humanitarian. I simply take part in activities that I believe in."

"If I have to tell him who I am, then I'm not."

"There's no sense that you're there forever. No parent is there forever."

"The painter leaves his mark. And I just put in two statues in Rhode Island that I'm working on. And I think that's going to make me last longer than me. I mean, who remembers "Zorba?" Nobody remembers "Zorba." Nobody remembers "Requiem for a Heavyweight.""

"If I give you romantic advice, don't take it. Look what's happening to me. I have the best taste in friends and the worst taste in husbands. I'm never getting married again. That's just stupid. There's no reason on Earth to do that."

"They used to have clauses and contracts where you can't get bad publicity or you'd get fired. But now bad publicity is good publicity. I just keep working and don't think about it much."

"You don’t know how to handle anything today, because you have to go to jail to get some press or fall down drunk."

"My mother once told me never be a second-rate version of somebody else when you can be a first-rate version of yourself."

"It really scared me to do what Mom did because I never did anything that she did. I promised her that I would never sing her songs, and I kept my promise. "You sing them better than anybody. I don't want to be a second-rate example of you. I want to be a first-rate example of myself.""

"I'm carrying on a tradition. But I'd rather be a first-rate version of myself than a second-rate version of somebody else. I'm proud of my parents, and the only way that I can prove it to them is to take what they gave me and work my head off."

"I don't sing them because I couldn't sing them as well as she did. I'd rather be a first-rate version of myself than a second-rate version of anybody."

"I couldn't sing Mama's special songs. I couldn't do them as well. I would rather present a first-rate version of myself than a second-rate version of Mama."

"Liza Minelli said she can't sing well enough those "special songs" of her late mother, Judy Garland, so she doesn't sing them at all. The award-winning entertainer said she'd "rather present a first-rate version of myself than a second-rate version of Mama.""

"Some people think reality must be constantly depressing, but I think reality is something you rise above."

"My father could never get it through his head that acting was honorable work for a man. Even when I was making $7,500 a week, he stubbornly kept saying, "What kind of a job is that for a fellow six feet tall, weighs 195 pounds?""

"The only reason they come to see me is that I know that life is great — and they know I know it."

"You know, this "King" stuff is pure bullshit. I eat and sleep and go to the bathroom just like anyone else. There's no special light that shines inside me and makes me a star. I'm just a lucky slob from Ohio who happened to be in the right place at the right time and I had a lot of smart guys helping me—that's all."

"If only Mr. Gable had stayed a little longer. Everything else was such an anticlimax after he left."

"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."

"Howard and I played a hunch. We figured that the era of the poetic types was over and that with the newspaper headlines about Capone and the mobs and the G-men—all symbols of violence—the public would be more interested in tough guys who wooed their women with their fists and their cynicism rather than aesthetics. I don't want to take anything away from Clark, but—as he himself says—it was just his luck that he happened to be in the right place at the right time when this decision was made. It could have been any one of a dozen other actors, all of whom have long ago faded into obscurity."

"Clark Gable was the only real he-man I've ever known, of all the actors I've met."

"His ears made him look like a taxicab with both doors open."

"The real movie stars were Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift. How could I put myself in the same category as Clark Gable? Tom Cruise is a great movie star. Do I consider myself a movie star? I consider myself a guy with a good job, an interesting job."

"I had no idea what effect this would have on American men. I simply wanted to show off Gable's torso, but it created a panic in the underwear industry. Overnight, no one wanted to wear undershirts anymore. Until the T-shirt became popular some years later, haberdashers were stuck with piles of undershirts they couldn't sell."

"The best ears of our lives."

"He used to claim he was very dull in bed."

"I worked like a son of a bitch to learn a few tricks and I fight like a steer to avoid getting stuck with parts I can't play."

"I used to go over to Howard's house on Sunday mornings for breakfast and it was unusual when he didn't get at least three phone calls while we ate, asking him to keep catastrophes of the night before out of the papers. One star would be picked up drunk in the street, another would have been caught in a raid on a marijuana party, another would have wrapped his car around a tree with someone else's wife in the seat alongside him. The next day I would always look in the papers to see if anything sneaked through. Nothing ever did. That Howard, he sure is a genius."

"My formula for living is quite simple. I get up in the morning and I go to bed at night. In between times, I occupy myself as best I can."

"Who was her most talented leading man? "Cary Grant," she answers immediately. In 1964, she starred with Grant in the romcom Father Goose; Grant was 27 years her senior. "Cary was a complicated brain," she says, pointing to her head. "He was a remarkable performer. He was very instinctive, seductive, intelligent. But when he got mad he would get into a terrible state. He worried about money." Surely he had plenty of it? Yes, she says, but when you grow up poor you always think like a poor person."

"Love – that is a word you hear often when you are around Cary Grant. … It seems to me that the whole world is his friend. And he is a friend to everyone – when they need one. As Ingrid Bergman did at the time of her out-of-wedlock baby with Rossellini. Cary spoke out for her as he would speak out for anyone he admired, whether it was Ingrid, the President of the United States, or a scrubwoman. He is a potent force for good – for Hollywood, and for all of us. I am always delighted to see Cary Grant, and count myself lucky to be one of his friends."

"I had written him inquiring as to whether he would be interested in narrating children's stories for a record album, and to my great surprise my secretary told me one day that Cary Grant was on the phone. Like Ms. Nelson, I couldn't believe it, but when I picked up the phone and heard his voice, I had no doubt it was Mr. Grant himself. He apologized about not being able to do the record album, as he was too busy, but that he was really flattered that I had thought of him for such a project. [...] He may have been one of the world's great personalities, but he stayed on the phone with me for at least half an hour, although I, realizing how busy he must have been, tried to make the conversation as brief as possible, but he was such a friendly individual and nice person that he seemed to enjoy chatting, and not rushing a conversation. Cary Grant is certainly someone I wish I had had the opportunity to know and call a friend."

"God for all anyone knows could be Cary Grant."

"Clark Gable is an intensely realistic sexual presence; you don’t fool around with Gable. But with Grant there are no pressures, no demands; he’s the sky that women aspire to. When he and a woman are together, they can laugh at each other and at themselves. He's a slapstick Prince Charming. [. . .] Although Grant is a perfectionist on the set, some of his directors say that he wrecks certain scenes because he won’t do fully articulated passages of dialogue. He wants always to be searching for how he feels; he wants to waffle charmingly. This may be a pain to a scenarist or a director, but in his own terms Grant knows what he’s doing. He's the greatest sexual stooge the screen has ever known; his side steps and delighted stares turn his co-stars into comic goddesses. Nobody else has ever been able to do that."