People will continue to make movies. But I do think the economic model of the studio movie is closing in on a kind of systemic collapse.

Sometimes it seems to me that the celebration of a person is really just a prelude to ridicule.

My parents were very patient with my pretentious little adolescent snobberies. It took me awhile to accept them.

Much to my surprise, there's a sense for people in the cable industry that fiction writers might actually be good at script writing. You can write dialogue!

The novelist is frequently considered to be an impediment.

There was a moment when the Berlin Wall came down and some people felt, "Oh capitalism won. That's the ideology we can believe in now."

The '90s were a time when not just the movie business, but every aspect of American life, became a lot more corporate. There's a line in Jonathan Franzen's essay "Perchance to Dream" about how "the rich lateral dramas of local manners have been replaced by a single vertical drama, that of commercial generality." I wanted to examine that great homogenizing force that came in during the '90s, since Hollywood seemed a place where it was particularly active.