Peter O'Toole credited as playing...
Eli Cross
- Eli Cross: [after a cameraman says cut because there's only 22 seconds of film left] In 22 seconds, I could break your fucking spine. In 22 seconds, I could pinch your head off like a fucking insect and spin it all over the fucking pavement. In 22 seconds, I could put 22 bullets inside your ridiculous gut. What I seem unable to do in 22 seconds is to keep you from fucking up my film!
- Eli Cross: Do you not know that King Kong the first was just three foot six inches tall? He only came up to Faye Wray's belly button! If God could do the tricks that we can do he'd be a happy man!
- Eli Cross: Oh Burt, stop this worrying. You must have heard surely of movie magic. You should be a stunt man, who is an actor, who is a character in a movie, who is an enemy soldier. Who'll look for you amongst all those? People like to believe in things, and policemen are just people. Or so I'm told. Frankly, our problem is so simple it's almost beneath us. Now listen to me: that door is the looking glass, and inside it is Wonderland. Have faith Alice! Close your eyes and enjoy.
- Eli Cross: I know a man who made an anti-war movie... a good one. When it was shown in his home town, army enlistment went up six hundred percent. I'm trying to convince the world with my movie that there is a reasonable and better way of getting home for Thanksgiving.
- Eli Cross: If you cooperate, you'll receive a first-class ticket to Amsterdam where you can stick your finger in a dike.
- Eli Cross: Nina the actress so fair / Who fancied a man with blond hair. / But Raymond discovers / As he lifts up the covers / That his double - young "Lucky"- is there
- Cameron: [after completing stunt] That was the hardest thousand dollars I ever earned.
- Eli Cross: [Later... Starts to turn away, then turns back] Thousand dollars? What thousand dollars?
- Cameron: [curt] The stunt.
- Eli Cross: The stunt pays six-fifty.
- Cameron: [angrily] No. Chuck said the stunt paid a thousand dollars.
- Eli Cross: [dismissing him] Chuck could have promised you the Nobel Prize. The stunt pays six-fifty.
- Cameron: [shouting] The stunt pays a thousand dollars. Chuck told me. You insulted me again.
- Sam: [his madhouse scene having been replaced with a brothel scene] Eli, do you know that when I read the insane asylum scene to my family, do you know that my oldest son shook my hand for the first time in his whole life? So why is it, Eli, why is it that your vulgar little scene turns out to be so much more moving? So much more impassioned?
- Eli Cross: Ah, I don't know, Sam. Possibly because we realize that our friend, the enemy, may just be a poor horny slob, like yourself, falling into the nearest whorehouse.