Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
When I drove up on the set one day, and they'd put up a sign that says 'The Bill Engvall Show,' I stood there for 20 minutes just staring at it. The director, James Widdoes, came up and said, 'What are you doing?' And I said, 'Look at this! There's my name on a stage door in Hollywood!'
Like many works of literature, Hollywood chooses for its villains people who strive for social dominance through the pursuit of wealth, prestige, and power. But the ordinary business of capitalism is much more egalitarian: It's about finding meaning and enjoyment in work and production.
I had moved across the country, taken internships, networked, worked long hours, and called in favors to get there. And I had done it. I was working in Hollywood. So imagine the melancholy I found myself in when I realized that I didn't love casting the way that I always thought I would.
Not only our political system is broken, but how we do business and have public discourse with one another. The system in Hollywood, specifically, is not depicting people of color; we're not even talking about Asian Americans or Latino Americans; we're not even getting into that question.
I have to admit I've rarely been happier in my life. I have been absolutely thrilled to be back in New York and living a block from where I grew up. Just to be back in New York and, quite honestly, away from Hollywood has been an absolute thrill for me. I feel like I'm a real actor again.
When I'm singing, I can see so many people, and I can see their response and everything. And being somewhere like the Hollywood Bowl, I'm seeing those immediate people in front of me, but other than that, it's just dots, and I'm just imagining who's out there and imagining their responses.
I regret the way that America has elected to make films for its bluntest section of society and in ways that flatter them, and we have to recognize how much that is being done for money. We have to find another way of measuring ourselves. And film is one of the few ways that might be done.
The bravery of Stanley Kramer's 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' amounted to two Hollywood legends - Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy - telling the world that a black son-in-law is something they can live with, and so should you, especially if he looks like Sidney Poitier and has degrees.
'Entourage' was a show that existed around wish-fulfillment. People watched it because they wanted to believe they could go on private jets and be hanging out in Hollywood, but as a show, comedically, it was not funny. Not a funny show. It's funny, ironically, because of how terrible it is.
I read 'Tiger Beat' and 'Bop' from the time I was 9, 10, 11 years old. I loved movies. I saw 'E.T.' seven times. I used to yell at people who called me when 'L.A. Law' was on because they should know better. So I just have been so in love with the business of Hollywood since I can remember.
You read these stories of people who were in Hollywood in the late '60s. After they found out about the murders, everybody was like, "Have you met [Charles] Manson? Have you been to that ranch?" In some way, everybody felt connected, but what was it like for people who really were connected.
Aging in Hollywood sucks. There's always so much pressure to look way younger than you are, and everyone's watching! I'd like to embrace getting older, because it's kind of inevitable. The different, wiser me, to be at peace with how I look and I'm supposed to look - it's a work in progress.
I was attracted to the concept of Hollywood and the lifestyle here. But I've grown to mistrust it because it has changed. I didn't bargain for digital access parking in some concrete structure. Real heaven for me was to drive somewhere and park right in front. Now the city is going vertical.
Cougars are all the rage! I'm so glad that Hollywood and America are embracing women when they get in their 40s instead of putting us out to pasture. That's when a woman's in her peak. That's when she's hot. She's already been through all of the junk. She's confident. Secure with who she is.
47 Ronin is a very special movie for me. Not only a Samurai thing. Not only a Hollywood fantasy. It has a very special mixture between Japanese traditional culture and Western culture for the costume, set, story. Everything. I believe it will be a very special film that no one has ever seen.
I was told I was fat in the modeling world, and a director on a shoot told me I needed to lose weight. The J-Lo booty wasn't popular then, and I wanted to be the perfect Hollywood girl - tall, blonde and skinny. I couldn't do the 'tall' because I was 5'2, and I couldn't do the skinny, either.
I don't feel so strongly against remakes, but if I don't like it, I guess I just don't do it. It is what it is. Hollywood is driven by the financial system, so if they think that it has a brand and people are going to go see it because it's a recognizable property, they're going to remake it.
There is a perversion, much practised in Hollywood movies, that might be called sado-paternalism, whereby a surrogate father treats a gifted but difficult pupil with derision and constant punishment. The aim is to bring out the best in the victim and to make him into a he-man or...a he-woman.
Hollywood, Twitter, our friends - they all contribute to a community of snark. The more we engage in the way that everyone else engages, the more followers, likes, and RTs we get. But we can't rail against the cyberbullies without acknowledging what we also contribute to a culture of cruelty.
Hollywood has successfully produced many films framed by anti-racist or pro-integrationist story lines. I'm going to guess that since 'Gone With The Wind,' Hollywood realized films about racism and segregation pull at the heartstrings of everyone and hopefully serve to purge a sense of guilt.
Anxiety is a kind of fuel that activates the fight-or-flight part of the brain in me. It makes sure that a velociraptor isn't around the corner and that you do as much as you possibly can to survive. Because Hollywood has a lot in common with 'Jurassic Park' and its primeval-dinosaur universe.
I'm a big fan of Clint Eastwood, but the Westerns I draw from most directly come from an earlier period in Hollywood. I actually look back at movies like 'Rio Bravo' and others I've liked over the years, and I capture pictures from the movies and use them as a reference for the scenes I create.
I did grow up in Los Angeles. I actually didn't start acting until I was sixteen, so I was very removed from the Hollywood scene. I had always been in my school plays, but my mom and dad wanted to keep me out of the business until I was old enough to know who I was and not let anyone change me.
I like to take risks and do weird things and stuff that's not normal compared to other Hollywood movies. Not stuff that's totally avant garde and daring, but doing stuff that's in other languages and not using stars and using real people - things that they generally don't do in mainstream films.
Hollywood is a boys' club, and that's something I thought was a stereotype - and it's not. That really shocked me. Still shocks me. Everyone's helping their buddies out and pressing their buddies and playing tennis with their buddies and making movies with their buddies, and that grosses me out.
I wanted to be an actor from a young age, but actually becoming one and seen the ugly side of the world does feel different and sometimes unwelcome. There are shallow, vapid, untalented people zombieing the streets of Hollywood, adding decadence and immorality to an already extravagant business.
Anger, pain and a tinge of joy are the recursive emotions I have been waking up to ever since I read reports on how Harvey Weinstein sexually harassed women in Hollywood for years. Some of these women are actors I have been longing to co-star with even if they reside in another part of the globe.
Hollywood, we get it. The Christian faith just doesn't work for you 'in the long run.' However, for a large percentage of this country (the same country that makes your movies millions of dollars), it does. So please, for all of our sakes, keep your 'beliefs to yourself' and just 'stop the hate.'
As we look at Hollywood and the controversy around the Oscars, it goes back to the voting block and the lack of people who come from that culture. For example, the NWA movie is a fantastic, fantastic movie. You need people who can look at a piece of art like that and understand the artistry in it.
It was no accident that I made 'Hoop Dreams' because it concerned a sport that I loved and hoped would be my dream, however far-fetched that turned out to be. Because of the success of that film, Hollywood pigeonholed me as a sports biopic guy, which led to 'Prefontaine' and two cable sports films.
They are just really stupid people in Hollywood. You write them a script, and they say they love it, they absolutely love it. Then they say, 'But doesn't it need a small dog, and an Eskimo, and shouldn't it be set in New Guinea?' And you say, 'But it is a sophisticated romantic comedy set in Paris.'
You want to unify America with a sense of culture and decency and all of this that reasserts and reaffirms the concepts of American exceptionalism.But the left and who they are, you watch Hollywood, you watch the Oscars, you watch any left-wing, it's not even Democrat. It is ultra left-wing radical.
Acting on the stage is a luxury for me. I lose money. I make movies for financial reasons and this allows me the luxury of acting on Broadway. Hollywood, unfortunately, exploits actors for their own reasons, which are usually financial. So we might as well exploit Hollywood as much as it exploits us.
Indian actors, because of the format of our stories, need to be good actors, and be able to perform emotional sequences, do a bit of comedy, dance and singing, action, because all of this forms just one film. In many ways I'd say there are greater demands on Indian actors than there are on Hollywood.
In terms of the film itself, there was nothing much very new about 'Star Wars.' 'Star Wars' was a trailblazer for the kind of monumentalist pastiche which has become standard in a homogeneous Hollywood blockbuster culture that, perhaps more than any other film, 'Star Wars' played a role in inventing.
'Twenty Thousand Hertz' investigates the role of audio professionals in our daily lives, from the engineering that ensures a car door closes with that reassuring finality to the Foley artists of Hollywood who synthesise the sounds of marine life using old kitchen equipment gathered at the pound shop.
Madonna is her own Hollywood studio - a popelike mogul and divine superstar in one. She has a laserlike instinct for publicity, aided by her visual genius for still photography (which none of her legion of imitators has). Unfortunately, her public life has dissolved into a series of staged photo ops.
I'd rather be thought as an international actress rather than a French one. Because I don't know what's coming up for me, my ambition is not to be typecast. So I'm working on my English accent, as well as my American one. I don't want to be like 'Okay, I'm French, and I want to succeed in Hollywood!'
Dr. King said, 'We are all tied together in a garment of mutual destiny.' Which says to me no matter how well I may be doing in Hollywood, if a young brother or sister in Louisiana, the South Bronx, the South Side of Chicago, South Central Los Angeles - is not doing well, then I'm not doing very well.
The sad fact is that actual artistic oppression - book banning in its many modern forms - is a matter of course in the entertainment industry, especially when the underlying product is declared politically incorrect or runs contrary to the interests of Hollywood's political altar, the Democratic Party.
I don't want to become more famous than what I am. I'm not interested in being in movies that are going to be shown all around the world and get a massive audience, so I'm interested in doing foreign movies as long as it stays an exceptional case and is exotic, but I don't want to go there [Hollywood].
Elvis used to have parties at his house - and I've told this story a million times - but they weren't really parties, because there was no chips or dip. Just Elvis and his boys watching TV, and him making funny comments, and everybody laughing at them. Is that a party? Not really. But that's Hollywood.
The upper middle class here still has options for entertainment. We have Internet, Hollywood and books. But for the majority and the masses, there is only TV. A lot of them sit at home and watch TV as they can't afford other forms of entertainment. So, we try to do shows which have inspirational value.
My grandmother worked at one of those Bel-Air mansions, and we would go - not too often, but every now and then - to pick her up. Hollywood was probably 12 miles from my house, but it might as well have been a million miles away. The only time I saw that world was on TV. Until I started making records.
There are so many things I'd like to change in the industry. Everything from the reliance of style over substance to their reluctance to hire me for big budget blockbusters, but the thing I would love most would be if they understood people don't have to be Hollywood beautiful to be sexy or interesting.
My father's Alfred Newman - born in 1900, child prodigy at the piano, ended up in pit orchestras in the teens. I think he's one of the youngest conductors to conduct Broadway and worked with George Gershwin and Jerome Kern and Cole Porter - went out with Irvin Berlin in 1930 to Hollywood and never left.
I feel like I'm in a weird state, and I wake up in Hollywood, and I've got a couple of studio movies underneath my belt, and I take these meetings with people. Sometimes it's this great, weird sense of oddness that comes at you, because I've never really stopped thinking the way that I started thinking.
What I consider a good part for a woman and what some other Hollywood people think are good women's parts are very different. I don't want to play the supportive girlfriend who has nine scenes and just loves that man, maybe cheats on him in one scene but will always be there, and I mean - give me a break.
But everyone comes to Hollywood hoping to get a role people are going to remember them for, and I get girls saying I was their first crush, or Asian guys saying Rufio was the first time they saw an Asian kid on-screen that wasn't nerdy or stereotypical, so I was lucky the character that resonated was cool.
I'm not turning my back on music anytime soon, but it's just a blessing to have options open. A lot of artists just have rap, and that's it. But once rap stops, it's hard to get into that Hollywood circle; it really is. It's a whole 'nother beast that people think they're ready for, but they're really not.