Quotes About Hollywood

Some of my favorite movies are Hollywood movies. Hollywood is part of the cinematic spectrum. I nurture a healthy love-hate relationship with Hollywood.

Any ensemble - they didn't call it "the all-male Expendables," for example. But it's Hollywood's fault that people say that, because there have been so few movies that have allowed women to have these leading roles, so that's Hollywood's fault.

Making African American films are hard in Hollywood. We need to rely on a support network and bring more cohesion to different filmmakers, actors, producers etc. It's a very difficult business. There aren't a lot of Africans Americans or people of color in high positions in Hollywood that we can green-light films.

That's one thing I like about Hollywood. The writer is there revealed in his ultimate corruption. He asks no praise, because his praise comes to him in the form of a salary check. In Hollywood the average writer is not young, not honest, not brave, and a bit overdressed. But he is darn good company, which book writers as a rule are not. He is better than what he writes. Most book writers are not as good.

Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood.

I appreciate it if I make a Chinese film. And if there is an opportunity to make a Hollywood film, I will take it - especially because, as you probably know, in Hollywood, even today, there are not a lot of big roles for Asian performers. So it is a great opportunity. It is possible to make films that people everywhere enjoy. I travel quite a lot. I don't really feel like when I am in China, I am a Chinese person and when I'm here, I'm a foreigner. I don't feel that kind of difference anymore. In the past I did. Not anymore. I feel quite at home everywhere. The whole world is my home.

I don't think that Hollywood will have much to do with changing politics. Hollywood usually reflects things.

I have not walked away from Hollywood. I'm walking away from the way I personally did business in Hollywood. The budget of whatever movie I do needs to be efficient; it needs to consider what kind of resources we're using and how to be as responsible as possible.

I've sold 11 of my books to Hollywood. There are all kinds of my books on shelves in Hollywood because the scripts didn't capture the characters.

Like in [the 1950s] if you wanted to ruin someone´s career in Hollywood you claimed he was a Communist. Nowadays, you want to ruin someone´s career in Hollywood, you claim they are Republican.

In the middle of my third Hollywood picture The Magician, the earthquake hit Hollywood. Not the real earthquake. Just the talkies.

If you think Hollywood is depressing and corrupt, politics is really depressing and corrupt -- and fueled even more than Hollywood by money -- if that's possible.

You know what? I never really factor Hollywood into anything. I'm a black actor, so I can't really control what Hollywood thinks. I gotta go do my thing, and my jokes have got to be funny. Whatever I do has got to be great.

I don't want my dad to say, 'My daughter is an actress on a TV show.' I want him to say, 'My daughter cares about people.' I would love to know that I'm a role model in Hollywood.

Each time I get off a plane in Hollywood, I don't think I'm pretty enough.

Everyone in Hollywood is seeking fame and fortune; it's in the water here. Everyone from young women to old men - they all want it.

When I was younger, I was really anti-Hollywood. Now I'm more accepting of it because I'm less of a snob.

I do not make films which are prescriptive, and I do not make films that are conclusive. You do not walk out of my films with a clear feeling about what is right and wrong. They're ambivalent. You walk away with work to do. My films are a sort of investigation. They ask questions . . .. Sometimes I hear that some [Hollywood] studio is interested in me. Then they discover that this is the guy who works with no script, that there is no casting discussion, no interference, that I have the final cut, and that does it.

I don't know how Hollywood sees me.

There's more to life than being an actor in a Hollywood movie. I'm not going to adapt my life after that existence, where a lot of people do. And they get the publicist, and they get all that stuff, and it becomes them. I think it's a stupid way to live your life. A really dumb way to live your life.

People think in Hollywood there's a family, where everybody gets together talks about stuff and we all know each other, and it's just not that way at all to me.

Hollywood gave us far more Muslim terrorists in the Eighties and Nineties than it has since 9/11.

I had done a couple TV pilots, and a friend of mine wanted to leave comics and come work in Hollywood, and I said, "Well, you've got to understand that when you sell a TV pilot, imagine if you turned in the best issue of Batman ever, and DC was like, 'Well we love this, but we can't publish it because we have to publish this other thing by this other person." The odds are really long on getting anything made, so if you come from comics and you're still making a living in comics, that really helps because you're not desperate for someone's permission to write for a living.

Like one of those fake-smart, middlebrow TV shows, the speciousness of The Social Network is disguised by topicality. It's really a movie excusing Hollywood ruthlessness.

After two years in Washington, I often long for the realism and sincerity of Hollywood.

Alan Ladd was a marvelous person in his simplicity. In so many ways we were kindred spirits. We both were professionally conceived through Hollywood's search for box office and the types to insure the box office. And we were both little people. Alan wasn't as short as most people believe. It was true that in certain films Alan would climb a small platform or the girl worked in a slit trench. We had no such problems together.

It bothers me when the Hollywood elite are all so against people having guns and want rigorous gun restrictions.

If two percent of all the films made in Hollywood are really artistically worthy - and I think it's a lot more than two percent - that's a pretty big percentage of things that will outlive their own generation.

I never watched Friends, maybe because it was written by people straight out of college....The only way to avoid age discrimination in Hollywood is to die young.

There's nothing nicer than coming back to your village, where people like my mum's friends take the mick out of me. I prefer that to the craziness of Hollywood.

In all of our society, but especially in Hollywood, there is an obsession with perfection that can lead to self-loathing and neurosis and all that kind of stuff.

It was pop culture, entertainment, Hollywood, award shows - these are the things that really captivated me as a kid. I would watch the Oscars and every award show with my parents. I would make lists of who was going to win.

I always felt that I was born in the wrong era. I wanted to be friends with John Garfield, for instance. He was one of the only actors that refused to testify in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee back when the Hollywood Ten blacklist was happening in the McCarthy period. I wish I could've been friends with Charlie Parker and played with him. That's my period. I feel real close to the '40s - and actually I was born in '37, so I was a kid singing on the radio in the '40s. But I always dreamed of going to big cities.

In Hollywood you kind of fail upwards

If it isn’t for the writing, we’ve got nothing. Writers are the most important people in Hollywood. And we must never let them know it.

I believe that God felt sorry for actors so he created Hollywood to give them a place in the sun and a swimming pool. The price they had to pay was to surrender their talent.

Many of us had this idea of doing independent film, of making personal, relevant films, as opposed to Hollywood fluff. I directed a few.

The traditional model for a company like Coca-Cola is to hire one big advertising agency and essentially outsource all of its creativity in that area. But Coca-Cola does not do it that way. It knows how to manage creative people and creative teams and it has been quite adept at building a network that includes the Creative Artists Agency in Hollywood, which is a talent agency.

I think Hollywood is so driven by money, the people who are making the decisions are not necessarily reflective of the melting pot, so what stories are you going to want to tell? You're going to want to tell stories about yourself.

I've worked in almost every other place in Canada except Toronto, funny enough, where my husband's from. The first time I was here it was winter, and I got engaged. The second time I was here it was summer, and I was married. My family lives here, my stepson lives here, so it's a wonderful place. Everyone's very nice and hospitable, unlike Hollywood.

I'm going to marry him. And if he thinks he can get divorced and married every two or three years in the approved Hollywood fashion, well, he never made a bigger mistake in his life. He's going to marry and stick to me.

I just feel lucky to have grown up where I did because I think it gave me a nice base. Hollywood can really mess with your sense of self and I feel like coming from the South keeps me pretty grounded.

Hollywood views regular people as children, and they think they're the smart ones who need to tell the idiots out there how to be.

Hollywood is full of very liberal people, but it still has an infrastructure that needs to be broken.

Ever since they found out that Lassie was a boy, the public has believed the worst about Hollywood

With action in Hollywood, a choreographer will be hired to design an amazing fight, with all these cool little narrative bits, such as a fighter having to perform a certain move because he's been injured and can only move that way, but it can all get lost in translation because the director then does what he wants with it and then passes it on to the editor, who does his interpretation of the fight. It becomes almost like Chinese whispers, so sometimes the end fight you see on film is so different to how it was conceived and looked on the day.

There are conservatives in Hollywood who make good movies. They just don't make conservative movies because that's not what gets funded.

The wise screen writer is he who wears his second-best suit, artistically speaking, and doesn't take things too much to heart. He should have a touch of cynicism, but only a touch. The complete cynic is as useless to Hollywood as he is to himself. He should do the best he can without straining at it. He should be scrupulously honest about his work, but he should not expect scrupulous honesty in return. He won't get it. And when he has had enough, he should say goodbye with a smile, because for all he knows he may want to go back.