I don't think of the marketplace as teen-oriented or teen-dominated. I think of it as dominated by high-concept, in marketing especially.

I had a checkered early career, for sure, with a lot of very unhappy experiences where pictures got taken away, re-cut, re-titled... all the nightmares one hears about.

I didn't look at it as a transition so much, because I never intended to have a career as a journalist, writing about people who make movies.

Hollywood, of course, is the city of illusion.

I had the great fortune to actually become friends with Sam [Fuller] and ultimately collaborate with him on White Dog, which we wrote together.

You can imagine what it was like for me to actually be sitting in a room with matching typewriters, working under the tutelage of this guy I so admired, both as a filmmaker and as a man.

The bigger problem still is that it determines in many ways what movies get made in the first place. Because as sources of finance are considering a project, they ask themselves, "Does this lend itself to a simplistic marketing approach which will guarantee a big opening weekend?" As a movie-goer, I think that's tragic, because when you look back at those movies that made us fall in love with movies in the first place, most of them were not high-concept, and most of them would not have "won their weekend."