Quotes

So it can be seen that the trouble with the motion-picture art was (and is) that it is too much an industry; and the trouble with the motion picture industry is that it is too much an art. It is out of this basic contradiction that most of the ills of the form arise.

A movie star is a creation of the substance of which, like a painting or a statue or a symphony, does not age. People grow older but stars remain.

Great beauties are infrequently great actresses, simply because they do not need to be.

{on Katharine Hepburn] As the years go by she does not lose her old admirers, she goes on gaining new ones.

Amateurs hope. Professionals work.

[Of his friend Paddy Chayefsky] I think it's fair to say - and nothing against him - Paddy was a little crazy. I don't think there is any important writer who is completely sane. If he was, he wouldn't be a writer - or a painter, or a poet, or a sculptor. I don't mean clinically insane. But his reactions aren't normal, and his perceptions certainly aren't normal. And Paddy, more than most, was a little bit cuckoo.

[on the state of filmmaking in 1974] I never knew cheap thrills could be so expensive.

The Hollywood laborers, the carpenters and painters, were always perfect. Then came the technicians, the electricians and special effects men. They were marvelous. However, the higher you climbed in the system, the lower the level of competence, until you reached the head of the studio, who turned out to be an idiot.

When I arrived in Hollywood at the invitation of Samuel Goldwyn, I was not only unimpressed, but unimpressible.

I have always refused to work on adaptations of other people's works. I love film better, I adore film, and I'm immensely jealous of film. I feel that it should have a literature of its own. Taking a big fat novel like David O. Selznick did with Gone with the Wind (1939) may sell a lot of seats, but it doesn't produce the masterpieces like Citizen Kane (1941) and "A Nous la Liberte".

It is inevitable that the writer be subservient to the director. In the early days of Hollywood, films were made by a small team that included only a director and a man with a camera. As filmmaking became more complex and sophisticated, people were hired to write scripts, but never were they considered other than hired talent. It was not unusual to hear directors refer to a screenwriter as 'my writer.' This tradition exists to this day. Iknowof no writer who as a writer has gotten into the driver's seat during the shooting of a film although many fine writers have subsequently gone into directing.

Greed, I suppose, took me to Hollywood. I was floating around Broadway as an assistant to George Abbott, the celebrated playwright, director, producer, and sometimes actor - a marvelous man! I think that the base of what I know as comedy and the construction of comedy, I owe to my apprenticeship to George Abbott.

Charles Laughton was a difficult man, but - what the hell - if someone's good they're not like anybody else; they see things their way, and it's hard for them to see it anybody else's way. Actors who simply bring their bodies and do as they're told are not difficult, but they're not very good.