They had taken me to an exhibit called 'Psychiatry: Industry of Death' on Hollywood Boulevard, where a Scientologist told me psychiatrists set up the Holocaust. I feared I was being brain-washed. And then I lost it - big time.

It's hard to make a living as a novelist. My first novel 'Tapping the Source' made quite a splash in Hollywood, and people started asking if I wanted to write scripts. I quickly realized I could make a lot more money that way.

I remember when I was working on Mission: Impossible 2, John Woo said, "In Hong Kong, there's not much money and a lot of time. In Hollywood, a lot of money, not much time." Personally I'd prefer not much money, a lot of time.

Some stuntmen become actors, but Hollywood is a caste-oriented society. Most of the time you just don't have the opportunity to get out of your field if you're a grip, an electrician, stuntman, set designer, director or actor.

No one except Hollywood stars and very rich Texans wore Indian jewelry. And there was a plethora of dozens if not hundreds of athletic teams that in essence were insulting us, from grade schools to college. That's all changed.

Before you begin working your way into the system, it is imperative that you are ready to be judged. You are only new once. ... You are only ready when you can orchestrate the next move after you have the industry's attention.

Hollywood has known this for quite a while: Cable is the place to go because they truly have a supportive network and they want to do things that cannot be seen on broadcast. That stimulates the writer-producer. Cable is king.

I really think that everybody would like to be an actor. Why wouldn't they? It's great work if you can get it. The one thing that prevents most people from saying, 'I'm just gonna go to Hollywood!' is that it seems unrealistic.

One of the things you have to understand with The Room, I never approached a studio to produce, because I know no one in Hollywood will produce this. I came to Hollywood and I said "I will produce this movie the way I want it."

When we first started Marquis Jet back in 2001, one of our first goals was to try to break into the Hollywood marketplace. We thought it was a good way to help build brand credibility and attract new customers by word of mouth.

To be quite honest, I've been very blessed when I've worked with Hollywood. The studios that have purchased my work to be adapted to film have really liked the work and wanted to stay as close as they could to what the book was.

There's always the standard six people you can hire that have played all these villains in Hollywood. Instinctively, when they come on screen, you know what's going to happen. You don't know the story, but you know what they do.

Bollywood is not a stepping stone to the West. I am extremely picky and in no hurry to sign a Hollywood film. I am only greedy for great roles; language and country is no barrier. And yes, I'll always be a Hindi film star first.

I think the true test of a pop song, for me, and I've talked to a lot of other writers about this, is you take your demo, you pop it in your car and you drive down Sunset Blvd. to Santa Monica, and that's the Hollywood car test.

Being a conservative in Hollywood is like walking into a shooting range with a bull's-eye attached to your body. There are more of us than you would believe, but if you want to keep working, you feel like you have to keep quiet.

es, I spend a lot of time in Reading because we live in Oxfordshire and so we're always just in and out of each other's houses. It's very much the family that it always has been. But there's no comparison with Hollywood as such.

I figured, when I make a movie, especially earlier in my career, one thing I was going to make sure was that the movie doesn't cost a lot and that it has potential to make a lot of money. That's how you get respect in Hollywood.

Well I don't know what the city of Hollywood knows about foreign policy, but do I know that a lot of people do learn and educate themselves about policy and I don't have to be a policy expert to know that this will be a disaster.

I tell this joke about Barack Obama is the best communicator of our generation: The guy reads a teleprompter better than any Hollywood actor. John McCain, his opponent - Stevie Wonder reads a teleprompter better than John McCain.

On how he spent his first Hollywood paycheck "I think my first big purchase was actually for my mom. She had one of those '90s TVs in her living room that's like a 10×10 brick, so I purchased her a flatscreen for her living room.

I thought I'd give myself 10 years as an entertainment journalist and build up so much clout that there was no way Hollywood could ignore me when I started delivering scripts. Little did I know they were very good at ignoring it.

When the script for 'The Wrestler' kept coming to me I said, This movie is so good if you put me in the film as a wrestler people are going to say, 'No credibility, Hulk Hogan isn't a good actor,' whatever Hollywood thinks of me.

Hollywood. It lacks originality. Remake sucks.' But I had to look deeper into it from my own perspective. We are not trying to compete with the original at all and that's what allowed me to pull the trigger without any hesitancy.

Hollywood has to appeal to the broadest audience, and when it comes to most social and economic issues, America is progressive. Because of that, the messages that are in Hollywood movies tend to be, for instance, pro-environment.

I've been lucky because Hollywood can be harsh and try to pigeonhole you. I've done TV, films, and comedy, done it all... I think I'm spread out evenly among the film community. I've been lucky and keep working with great actors.

I have seen so few films in which the sex felt really respected by the filmmaker. Hollywood too often shies away from it or makes adolescent jokes about it... Sex is only connected to the negative because people are scared of it.

I can't talk about Hollywood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it's a horror to look back on. I can't imagine how I did it. When I got away from it I couldn't even refer to the place by name. ''Out there,'' I called it.

There has to be a reason of whether you look right or you bring the emotional or intellectual baggage of what's required for the storytelling. For me, it's not something I've aspired to say, "I'm going to be working in Hollywood."

In the evening, since I have a lot of friends in theater, we might take in a Deaf West production in North Hollywood, or, since I'm a member of the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, they have screenings that are really great.

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.

I have always let the lack of Indian actors in the industry drive me, not hold me back. I remember an agent in L.A. telling me a few years ago that an Indian actor wouldn't ever make it in Hollywood, but my ethnicity has helped me.

I thought it was a cool parallel. Being replaced by the young thing. I know that definitely happens in Hollywood. It's harder to find good roles, and suddenly there's new girls. I'm at that age I've been warned my whole life about.

If you're a young woman in Hollywood, then they want you to look a certain way and paint you in this and that. To this day, it's hard to find people like us, who want to kind of find deep truths, not just skirt above the top of it.

I remember just lying in the grass, staring at the clouds, wondering where they drifted off to after they floated over Texas. I never would have imagined that one day I would follow one of those clouds and find myself in Hollywood.

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.

My parents know I was outgoing as a child, and whenever people came over, I'd automatically do impressions of them as soon as they left; it was my mom's favorite thing. Yes, I grew up in Hollywood, but not in any rich neighborhood.

I'm doing 'Les Miserables,' the movie. I've done a lot of musicals and a lot of movies, and I know there are not a lot of people in Hollywood who have been down those two paths so I've been like, 'Come on, let's do a movie/musical.'

Hollywood has cracked emotions very well with animation, and that is where India will eventually cover because it is an emotional country, and we just want a right story to tell, which will stir the right emotions with the audience.

I was fortunate to write pretty much a year out of film school and start making movies in the Hollywood studio system. But with each progressive film it became more frustrating not being able to speak and say things I wanted to say.

Dune was really my first Hollywood job. It was such a small part, but I opened the movie. I was about 19 years old and I had to make this speech, and I didn't understand most of the words because they were, you know, words from Dune.

Last summer a second unit production crew went to France and shot scenes for several of this seasons episodes. They shot costumed actors in and around real castles and landmarks, we couldnt possibly have duplicated here in Hollywood.

I'm always being accused of being a Hollywood Republican, but I'm not! I have just as many Democratic ideas as Republican ones. If they could build three fewer bombs every month and give the money to foster care, that would be great.

There is a strange sort of reasoning in Hollywood that musicals are less worthy of Academy consideration than dramas. It's a form of snobbism, the same sort that perpetuates the idea that drama is more deserving of Awards than comedy.

You have tours that go to certain parts of the world to see a specific type of bird, and then you come back to Hollywood, and you see tour vans that go around in hopes of catching a glimpse of Halle Berry going out to get a newspaper.

Magic Johnson was in the seventh year of his Hall of Fame career when thoughts of his basketball afterlife led him to the office of uber-executive Michael Ovitz, co-founder of Creative Artists Agency, Hollywood's most powerful agency.

Last summer a second unit production crew went to France and shot scenes for several of this season's episodes. They shot costumed actors in and around real castles and landmarks, we couldn't possibly have duplicated here in Hollywood.

Hollywood, to hear some writers tell it, is the place where they take an author's steak tartare and make cheeseburger out of it. Upon seeing the film, they say, the author promptly cuts his throat, bleeding to death in a pool of money.

What are the symbols of American strength, wealth, power and modernity? Certainly not jazz and rock and roll, not chewing-gum or hamburgers, Broadway or Hollywood. It's their skyscrapers. Their Pentagon. Their science. Their technology.

Mickey Mouse popped out of my mind onto a drawing pad 20 years ago on a train ride from Manhattan to Hollywood at a time when business fortunes of my brother Roy and myself were at lowest ebb and disaster seemed right around the corner.

I made a very good living as a bad writer. I wrote a lot of comedies, 'Diff'rent Strokes,' 'Facts of Life,' while all my friends were doing the good shows, like 'Cheers,' but I loved it because I got to be a working writer in Hollywood.

Share This Page