Quotes About Hollywood

The irony is I did an intimate film in France with no stars and that got me to Hollywood. It got me to the Oscars. If I had tried to imitate the Americans or the Hollywood movies with a commercial recipe, I'd never have gotten to Hollywood. Although, it was not my goal in any way, and I never thought there was any connection between Monsieur Lazhar and the Oscars.

I ask everyone - white Hollywood and black Hollywood - to get outside of your comfort zone and make friends. That's where they're going to learn from each other, and that's where they're going to make better movies and make Hollywood a better place.

I didn't go Hollywood on the outside with flashy cars, upstairs maids and mink covered bathroom fixtures. I went Hollywood on the inside and that's worst of all. I tried to avoid being natural. I lowered my voice. I copied the mannerisms of other stars. I struck poses. I received bad advice - from dramatic coaches, from agents, and from studio executives. I stopped being a human being. I blame myself and I blame Hollywood's star system.

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.

If the Indian people want stories written about themselves, how they want them told, they are going to have to make them, they're going to have to finance them. If you let Hollywood do it, Hollywood is going to get it wrong most of the time.

I'm always fascinated by people from the Midwest, because it is so different than Hollywood, who discover at some point that they want to be in Hollywood.

I find Hollywood gives these pat stories, and they're reassuring stories, and I don't really want to give people that. Hollywood does all that work. I'm offering, sometimes, an alternative to that. The answers aren't black-and-white. There may not even be answers in certain instances. The ground is not necessarily solid, either. So you've got to keep awake the whole time, even after the movie is over.

My basic mistake in 'The World's Greatest Lover' was that I made the leading character a neurotic kook and sent him to Hollywood. I should have made him a perfectly normal, sane, ordinary person, and sent him to Hollywood. The audience identifies with the lead character.

I loved acting as a kid because I was kind of shy, so it brought me out of myself. Acting for kids is like playing house, you know? But growing up in Hollywood, it just made it seem possible. It wasn't like some idea of going to Hollywood; it was in my backyard. I lived two blocks from Grauman's Chinese Theatre growing up. It was what people did. It's an industry town. So it wasn't some far-off fantasy, it was like "Oh yeah, when you grow up, you do this because that's what people do here."

If Hollywood is the global producer for [media] products all around the world, that's of concern. If all audiences around the world know of America is what they see from Hollywood, then we're in trouble.

Hollywood is a peculiar beast - people in Hollywood are nuts.

What you have now is a Hollywood that is pure poison. Hollywood was a central place in the history of art in the 20th century: it was human idealism preserved. And then, like any great place, it collapsed, and it collapsed into the most awful machinery in the world.

Hollywood was not a place I dreamed of getting to. I never could take seriously the obsession people have about being a celebrity or getting to Hollywood - I was born next door.

Comedies in Hollywood is usually the path of least resistance when it comes to being black in Hollywood and putting movies together. They would rather make us laugh than cry, in some respect.

Poor Hollywood! These things happen all over the world but what a great backdrop to have Hollywood in our movie. No, but I know people who divorce a lot....and have really nice houses. But I didn't model the character on anyone in particular. And if I did, I would never tell the name.

Just as many people flee Hollywood as those who flock to it. Hollywood can be an acquired taste.

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.

The good part of what comics trains you to do is it trains you - especially if you've worked in mainstream comics like Marvel and DC, or if you're just doing your own independent comics - to compartmentalize things and work on multiple things at the same time. And that's a skill that is incredibly handy in Hollywood, because within the first year that you get here, you realize there's a reason why every successful person in Hollywood has like seven or eight projects up in the air at any point.

You can't find an uglier urban environment than the centre of Hollywood, but then you go to Griffith Park, you go to the beach, you go to the mountains, and it's rural. I live up in the Hollywood Hills and I have frogs, owls, coyotes, mountain lions - but I'm ten minutes from the centre of the city.

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

There is a voice inside of my head that is trying to convince me that I'm not good enough and that I don't deserve to be here in Hollywood. So courage is required. The courage to decide that I have a voice and need to do what I love. To believe that this opportunity is not wasted on me. To own the fact that I am worthy.

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.

I've always said that the word 'genius,' especially in Hollywood, is way overused.

A lot of nudity in my early movies was out of necessity. When I came out to Hollywood, I didn't know anybody, I didn't have any connections. I did what a lot of people have to do in the real world, and just work up from the bottom.

You know, Hollywood sometimes tends to patronize the interior of the United States. As Horton Foote used to say, the great Texas playwright, that a lot of people from New York don't know what goes on beyond the South Jersey Shore.

Perhaps I'll get used to this bizarre place called Hollywood, but I doubt it.

I've chosen not to live in Hollywood, and instead I live in Brooklyn, New York. It's how I like to live. I'd rather hang out with my kids and family when I'm not working. Going to premieres is not my idea of a fun night out.

Ironically, even the fashion in New York or Paris or Milan or whatever, or music in Berlin, or art in, I don't know, Madrid - all these scenes come and go. Everything leads back to Hollywood.

When I look in the mirror, I see someone who's happy with how he looks, because I was never one of the handsome Hollywood people. And I've had success as I've gotten older, because I'm able to play characters. I no longer get the girl, but I get the part.

I grew up with a lot of Hollywood films. Cozy farm houses, cowboys, nice flats in New York. Especially as a kid, those things have a huge impression on you.

I don't think about Hollywood at all.

I think my music is great for film, but I don't have the opportunity, or goesche to go and pitch myself to Hollywood.

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 was told once that I didn't play the Hollywood game, and that's why I wasn't a big star. What they meant when was that I don't go to parties, and when I go to an audition and I don't like the script, they know it

In Hollywood, moviemaking used to be about escaping reality to go to the movies.

This Hollywood ain't no good, I would rather be like Robin Hood.

I hated Hollywood. It’s a town without pity. Only success counts. I know of no other place in the world where so many people suffer from nervous breakdowns, where there are so many alcoholics, neurotics and so much unhappiness.

Growing up in the U.S., I was certainly deeply aware of the power of American media, specifically Hollywood and television, in terms of broadcasting a particular vision of what the American experience was like. As someone coming from a war that was a preoccupation of Americans in the 1980s, it did strike me that since we were a part of that war, we should have a chance to talk about ourselves.

There's always a backlash in everything that you do, but it's not going to stop or change anything. And it's not only an issue in Hollywood.

This same habitual blindness to spiritual, substantive dimensions of every significant challenge continues to handicap Hollywood.

Writers who go to Hollywood still follow the classic pattern: either you get disgusted by 'them' and you leave or you want the money and you become them.

Any of these Vietnam vets that have been there and know the deal, they don't feel that any Hollywood endeavor about the Vietnam era has ever gotten it right yet.

There just are not a lot of overweight people in Hollywood.

When I first got into this biz called show, I decided I was going to change my name, make it more Hollywood. And you know how you do that? You take your middle name and the first street that you ever lived on. So when I first started, I actually went by Sue Rural Route 2.

To be robbed and betrayed by a fiendish underground conspiracy, or by the earthly agents of Satan, is at least a romantic sort of plight - it suggests at least a grand Hollywood-ready confrontation between good and evil - but to be coldly ripped off over and over again by a bunch of bloodless, second-rate schmoes, schmoes you chose, you elected, is not something anyone will take much pleasure in bragging about.

I want to thank some very special people without whom I would not be here today. George Bush, Sarah Palin and the Pope. When I came to Hollywood in 1983, I had one dream. To sleep with Jodie Foster. That didn't work out, but this is nice, too.

When I hit Hollywood, it was full-blown. I was a party boy. It amazes me that I made it ... to be able to have led this amazing career when I was out every night. Every once in a while I'll see old reruns of myself and I see I'm giving it my comedy best, but with dead eyes - no sparkle. I was in the middle of all that abuse. But now I'm a recovering alcoholic with many years of sobriety.