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Hollywood

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Its name has come to be a metonym for the motion picture industry of the United States. - Joan Crawford.

Hollywood is a district in the central region of Los Angeles, California, in the United States. Its name has come to be a metonym for the motion picture industry of the United States, and many major film studios have been located in California since the 1920s. Hollywood is also a highly ethnically diverse, densely populated, economically diverse neighborhood and retail business district.

Quotes

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A–C

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  • Hollywood groupthink is anathema to the nature of sci fi, which is a cerebral philosophical exploration of humankind and puncturing the limits of our imagination. I think the central concept here is that Hollywood, Cap H, is as terrified of sci fi as it is of an alien invasion. And that's because the studios, as they have been increasingly corporatized, become absolutely risk averse in a way that they haven't always been.
  • [I]n Hollywood, I mean they don't know we exist. They're barely starting to figure out that there are Mexican Americans. And so I use humor as a way to cope with that and to let our community know that we're not invisible, at least not to us.
  • No. No, I didn't last long. I went out there for a thousand a week, and I worked Monday, and I got fired Wednesday. The guy that hired me was out of town Tuesday.
    • Nelson Algren, speaking on the extent of his contribution to the screenplay of the 1955 adaptation of his 1949 novel The Man with the Golden Arm. Interview by Terry Southern and Alton Anderson, "Nelson Algren, The Art of Fiction, No. 2, The Paris Review (Issue 11, Winter 1955)
  • I try, in my life, to follow my heart. I know what it feels like to do things that are soul-decaying. A large aspect of life in Hollywood, in a stereotypic way, I find unbelievably soul-decaying. And I choose, albeit frustratingly to other people in my life, not to expose myself too much to too much of that.
    • Gillian Anderson in: "Agent of Change - Gillian Anderson , who found fulfilling work in England after 'The X-Files,' returns to TV in a PBS miniseries", The Orlando Sentinel, p. E1. (January 21, 2006).
Hollywood is no place to grow up, no place to live. It's no place to have any friends, no place to enjoy life. It's a disgusting, horrible, craze-driven town. It's only how much do you make, or how fancy a car you have, that determines your status there. And everyone's lying so much that they don't even know they're lying anymore. There's no reality to Hollywood. The fees they pay directors are obnoxious, the money they spend on movies could feed entire starving African... I mean, fuck 'em. ~Ralph Bakshi
  • Sick of Hollywood, tired of fighting and selling out as an artist. I don't believe anyone should do the same thing for the rest of his life. We get a very short time on this planet. Challenging oneself is very important. It's not that I couldn't make other great animated films, but I'd done what I wanted to do, which was make animation an adult medium, if one wanted it to be. And I'd proven to myself that it could work, and it was time to move on to something else. When I sell a painting, I get very excited. I need one person to like what I do, not a million. It's a different structure here. Plus the Hollywood thing. I mean, Hollywood is no place to grow up, no place to live. It's no place to have any friends, no place to enjoy life. It's a disgusting, horrible, craze-driven town. It's only how much do you make, or how fancy a car you have, that determines your status there. And everyone's lying so much that they don't even know they're lying anymore. There's no reality to Hollywood. The fees they pay directors are obnoxious, the money they spend on movies could feed entire starving African[s]... I mean, fuck 'em. I made a few bucks and got out. I don't want to spend the rest of my life with those people. They're disgusting people, and you can quote me on that. There's a lot of great talent there, but it's no place I wanted to spend much time. I'd rather spend time with Rembrandt and Goya at home. They're better company than those schmucks who never read Lord Of The Rings.
  • The place is unreal. The people are unreal. The flowers are unreal—they don't smell. The fruit is unreal. Even the streets and buildings are unreal. I always expected to hear a carpenter shout "Strike" and the whole place come down like a stage set. That's what Hollywood is—a set, a glaring, gaudy, nightmarish set erected in the desert.
  • In the USA, meanwhile, the willingness of Hollywood to confront social problems, as in The Grapes of Wrath (1940), the film of the 1939 John Steinbeck novel about dispossessed dirt-farmers, slackened. This change reflected political pressure not to criticise America, but, instead, to resist Communist 'subversion'. This pressure was orchestrated by the House of Representatives' Committee on Un-American Activities as part of a battle over national identity and interests, a battle that owed its origins to resistance to the New Deal, but that gathered pace after World War Two as opposition to Communism made it possible to discredit progressive ideas. Those in Hollywood with Communist associations were blacklisted from 1947. Moreover, anti-Communist films were produced, for example The Red Menace (1949) and I Was a Communist for the FBI (1951). These films spread images of the USA around the world. Film was tremendously important to the practice and currency of myth, symbolisation and characterisation that were central to the imagining of people, country and world. Anti-Communism was both cause and device. It was directed against alternative views of a more egalitarian America which were presented, instead, as causes and reflections of internal division in the shape of class conflict and radicalism. Eric Johnston, President of the Motion Picture Association, a committed anti-Communist, told script writers to act accordingly, and was supported by Ronald Reagan, President of the Screen Actors Guild, who linked radicals and strikers to foreign Communists. The nature of the American consensus was redefined from the 1940s, with important political, social and intellectual effects. Left-wing ideas were castigated as was cultural relativism. Instead, there was pressure for support of a conservative view of American culture.
[T]he motion picture community has been as responsible as any for degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character, describing his as savage, hostile and evil. It's hard enough for children to grow up in this world. When Indian children watch television, and they watch films, and when they see their race depicted as they are in films, their minds become injured in ways we can never know. ~ Marlon Brando
  • [T]he motion picture community has been as responsible as any for degrading the Indian and making a mockery of his character, describing his as savage, hostile and evil. It's hard enough for children to grow up in this world. When Indian children watch television, and they watch films, and when they see their race depicted as they are in films, their minds become injured in ways we can never know.
  • Hollywood is run by Jews. It is owned by Jews, and they should have a greater sensitivity. They should have greater sensitivity about the issue of people who are suffering because they've [been] exploited. We have seen the nigger, we've seen the greaseball, we have seen the chink, the slit-eyed dangerous Jap. We have seen the wily Filipino. We've seen everything, but we never saw the kike, because they know perfectly well that is where you draw the wagons around.
    • Marlon Brando Interview on Larry King Live (April 1996). Quoted in Cultural Diversity and the U.S. Media (1998) by Yahya R. Kamalipour and Theresa Carilli, p. 105
  • Every day, to earn my daily bread
    I go to the market where lies are bought
    Hopefully
    I take up my place among the sellers.
    • Bertolt Brecht, "Hollywood" (1942). Quoted in Poems, 1913–1956 (1976), edited by John Willett and Ralph Manheim, p. 382
  • In Hollywood, they think drawn animation doesn't work anymore, computers are the way. They forget that the reason computers are the way is that Pixar makes good movies. So everybody tries to copy Pixar. They're relying too much on the technology and not enough on the artists.
Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood -- and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else. - Raymond Chandler.
  • They pick your brains, break your heart, ruin your digestion -- and what do you get for it? Nothing but a lousy fortune.
    • Lenore Coffee, speaking with friend and colleague Frances Marion; as quoted in Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood (1997) by Cari Beauchamp
  • Think of the plot of The Fly. Two attractive people fall in love. The man suddenly contracts this incurable disease. He goes downhill in a horrible and hideous way as his mate watches and then he asks her to kill him and that's the end of the movie. Now, people would not accept that. You could not deal with that in a normal, realistic fashion. It's just too upfront and too hard and too despairing. If you gave Hollywood that plot, they wouldn't make the movie. And yet, because it was sci-fi, fantasy, horror, no one ever questioned how dark it was. That's another good thing about horror—it allows you to come to grips with the nitty gritty and at the same time gives you a little cushion, a little protection as well, because it is fantasy.

D–H

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[Hollywood] is a very male business, and it has in vast portions of it — the whole action movie part of it might as well be the United States Army in 1943 in that the ethics of it are, you know, boot camp and action movies and guns and explosions and all the rest of it, and that – so that means that about 50% of the business is not only pretty much closed off to women, but women don’t even wanna be in it! ~ Nora Ephron
  • [Hollywood] is a very male business, and it has in vast portions of it — the whole action movie part of it might as well be the United States Army in 1943 in that the ethics of it are, you know, boot camp and action movies and guns and explosions and all the rest of it, and that – so that means that about 50% of the business is not only pretty much closed off to women, but women don’t even wanna be in it!
  • Sunset Boulevard - the story of Hollywood movies draped on a depressing sex affair - is an uncompromising study of American decadence displaying a sad, worn, methodical beauty few films have had since the late twenties.
  • I made my first film on 16mm. Then I began using 35mm. Then I began working in Hollywood. And I began to really understand how films were made by professionals. I have to say I wasn't very impressed.
The Entertainment Office is in enough demand to be selective in what it will advise, reportedly turning down 95% of the scripts or story treatments it receives. "We're not going to support a program that disgraces a uniform or presents us in a compromising way," Captain Russell Coons, director of the Navy Office of Information West, told Al Jazeera in 2014. This selectivity creates a powerful incentive for writers, producers, and directors to cede narrative ground to the Pentagon in order to secure access to their expertise, equipment, and approval. ~ Joshua Foust
  • Emotionally resonant media about real issues have changed public's perception. Researchers have found, for example, that ostensibly realistic films like Argo (depicting the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis) or Zero Dark Thirty (chronicling the search for Osama bin Laden) altered public opinion about those events. There is also evidence that such media can result in real world behavioral change in agents of the state. In his 2008 book, Torture Team: Rumsfeld’s Memo and the Betrayal of American Values, Philippe Sands interviewed a former lawyer stationed at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, who claimed that the television show 24 inspired interrogators to "go further than they otherwise might." The journalist Jane Mayer interviewed an Army interrogator in Iraq, who said that after people watched 24, they would "walk into the interrogation booths and do the same things they’ve just seen."
    This is perhaps one reason why the Pentagon has collaborated with Hollywood since the early 20th century to create sympathetic portrayals on television and in film through the Entertainment Office—an arrangement often called the "military-entertainment complex." For television shows like 24 and films like American Sniper, the office will not only analyze the scripts for accuracy, it will also alter scripts to improve the portrayal of the military on screen. The Entertainment Office is in enough demand to be selective in what it will advise, reportedly turning down 95% of the scripts or story treatments it receives. "We’re not going to support a program that disgraces a uniform or presents us in a compromising way," Captain Russell Coons, director of the Navy Office of Information West, told Al Jazeera in 2014. This selectivity creates a powerful incentive for writers, producers, and directors to cede narrative ground to the Pentagon in order to secure access to their expertise, equipment, and approval.
  • The secret to kicking ass in dumbshit Hollywood... Every time you meet someone, make a fucking impression. Make them think you're the hottest shit in the world. Make them think they're gonna lose their job if they don't give you one. Look 'em in the eye, and never look away. Be confident and calm, be fucking bold.
    That sounds more like the secret to kicking ass in life.
    It is, but I was gonna wait and tell you that some other time.
  • People in Hollywood are not showmen, they're maintenance men, pandering to what they think their audiences want.
  • It's an abominable place. If there was an Old Testamental God, he would do his job and wipe the place out. The only bad thing is that some really good restaurants would go up as well.
  • I like the Coen brothers. Their films are smart and disturbing. I am very impressed by what George Clooney is doing now. He is very political. I like the fact that he did Oceans Eleven and Oceans Twelve, made all that money and then leveraged the money and his success into interesting projects. Johnny Depp has also set up a production company and is showing an interest in risky projects that will not be easy. I am sorry that it is hard for the average person, and even for an above-average person, to see a film that is not a Hollywood production. You see those films only in the festivals. There are few people there. That is worrying. People don't think. My goal in work is to make them think. The media do the opposite.
  • Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents.
    • Jean-Luc Godard quoted by David Sterritt in The Christian Science Monitor4 (August 3, 1994).
My life is fair game for anybody. I spent an unhappy, penniless childhood in Brooklyn. I had to slug my way up in a town called Hollywood where people love to trample you to death. I don't relax because I don't know how. I don't want to know how. Life is too short to relax. - Susan Hayward.
  • Hollywood, an industry that shapes not only our national but global memories, has been the most reactionary cultural perpetrator of white nostalgia, stuck in a time loop and refusing to acknowledge that America's racial demographic has radically changed since 1965. Movies are cast as if the country were still "protected" by a white supremacist law that guarantees that the only Americans seen are carefully curated European descendants.
    • Cathy Park Hong "The End of White Innocence" in Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning (2020)

I–M

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  • [May 17, 1939] Next day, we took a taxi into Hollywood. I was amazed at the size of the city, and at its lack of shape. There seemed no reason why it should ever stop. Miles and miles of little houses, wooden or stucco, under a technicolor sky. Miles of little gardens, crowded with blossoms and flowering bushes; the architecture is dominated by the vegetation. A city without privacy, where neighbors share each other's lawns and look into each other's bedrooms. The whole place like a world's fair, quite new and already partly in ruins. The only permanent buildings are the schools and churches. On the hill, giant letters spell "Hollywoodland", but this is only another advertisement. It is silly to say that Hollywood, or any other city, is "unreal". But what the arriving traveler first sees are merely advertisements for a city which doesn’t exist.
    • Christopher Isherwood Diaries Volume 1: 1939–1960, London: [Methuen, 1996] Vintage, 2011, p. 20
    • The sign, first erected in 1923 and originally intended to promote real estate, was restored and modified in 1949 to simply "Hollywood".
  • To create what it does, Hollywood has to draw young people, often of unstable temperament, from all over the world. It plunges them into exacting work--surrounds them with a sensuous life-- and cuts them off from the normal sources of living.
Hollywood and Broadway, the world-famous centers of the entertainment industry, are hotbeds of communism. Authors and performers are to be found among the most bigoted supporters of Sovietism. ~ Ludwig von Mises
  • Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents.
  • Someone said to me, "If fifty percent of the experts in Hollywood said you had no talent and should give up, what would you do?" My answer was then and still is, "If a hundred percent told me that, all one hundred percent would be wrong."
  • When it comes to bending the truth to assist a story's plot versus staying completely true to the facts, we can assure you any dramatist will always select the former. Mark Twain's old saying "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story" still reigns in Hollywood.
  • Hollywood is a place where you spend more than you make on things you don't need to impress people you don't like.
    • Ken Murray, as quoted in "Rambling Reporter," The Hollywood Reporter (May 3, 1939), p. 2
It could be that today's conservative movement remains in thrall to the same narrative that has defined its attitude toward film and the arts for decades. Inspired by feelings of exclusion after Hollywood and the popular culture turned leftward in the '60s and '70s, this narrative has defined the film industry as an irredeemably liberal institution toward which conservatives can only act in opposition—never engagement.
Ironically, this narrative ignores the actual history of Hollywood, in which conservatives had a strong presence from the industry's founding in the early 20th century up through the '40s, '50s and into the mid-'60s. ~ Govindini Murty
  • It could be that today's conservative movement remains in thrall to the same narrative that has defined its attitude toward film and the arts for decades. Inspired by feelings of exclusion after Hollywood and the popular culture turned leftward in the '60s and '70s, this narrative has defined the film industry as an irredeemably liberal institution toward which conservatives can only act in opposition—never engagement.
    Ironically, this narrative ignores the actual history of Hollywood, in which conservatives had a strong presence from the industry's founding in the early 20th century up through the '40s, '50s and into the mid-'60s. The conservative Hollywood community at that time included such leading directors as Howard Hawks, Frank Capra, and Cecil B. DeMille, and major stars like John Wayne, Clark Gable, and Charlton Heston. These talents often worked side by side with notable Hollywood liberals like directors Billy Wilder, William Wyler, and John Huston, and stars like Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, and Spencer Tracy. The richness of classic Hollywood cinema is widely regarded as a testament to the ability of these two communities to work together, regardless of political differences.
    As the younger, more left-leaning "New Hollywood" generation swept into the industry in the late '60s and '70s, this older group of Hollywood conservatives faded away, never to be replaced. Except for a brief period in the '80s when the Reagan Presidency led to a conservative reengagement with film—with popular stars like Clint Eastwood, Sylvester Stallone, and Arnold Schwarzenegger making macho, patriotic action films—conservatives appeared to abandon popular culture altogether.
    In the wake of this retreat, conservative failure to engage with Hollywood now appears to have been recast by today's East Coast conservative establishment into a generalized opposition toward film and popular culture itself. In the early '90s, conservative film critic Michael Medved codified this oppositional feeling toward Hollywood in his best-selling book Hollywood vs. America.
  • Hollywood industrialized mythology, and then weaponized it.
    • Mike Myers, in the first chapter of his memoir Canada (2016)

N–W

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[T]he couple soon moved there permanently and imagined a "utopian subdivision" to accommodate cultured, wholesome Midwesterners looking for fresh air and a second act in California... - Rachel Nuwer
  • Liquor, the use of firearms, speeding, pool halls and even bowling alleys were banned. The riding of bicycles and tricycles on sidewalks was prohibited—telling, given that the only sidewalks in Hollywood at the time were in front of the homes of Daeida and one other prominent developer. For all its infighting, the new town of Hollywood now entered its brief golden age. A woman who grew up during the time remembered a "country life," where children ran through lemon, orange, and tomato fields and made snowmen during the rare snow of 1905.
  • The only -ism Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.
    • Dorothy Parker, as quoted in Irving Hoffman "Tales of Hoffman", The Hollywood Reporter (January 14, 1942), p. 3. This appears to be simply a variation—which Parker herself may well have never actually uttered—on the following exchange, as reported almost two years earlier by Walter Winchell:[3]
      Colleague: I don't believe in any of the isms.
      Dorothy Parker: Except plagiarism.
Far from being freaks, the |Hell's Angels are a logical product of the culture that now claims to be shocked at their existence. The generation represented by the editors of Time has lived so long in a world full of Celluloid outlaws hustling toothpaste and hair oil that it is no longer capable of confronting the real thing. For twenty years they have sat with their children and watched yesterday's outlaws raise hell with yesterday's world … and now they are bringing up children who think Jesse James is a television character. This is the generation that went to war for Mom, God and Apple Butter, the American Way of Life. When they came back, they crowned Eisenhower and then retired to the giddy comfort of their TV parlors, to cultivate the subtleties of American history as seen by Hollywood. ~ Hunter S. Thompson
  • Far from being freaks, the Hell's Angels are a logical product of the culture that now claims to be shocked at their existence. The generation represented by the editors of Time has lived so long in a world full of Celluloid outlaws hustling toothpaste and hair oil that it is no longer capable of confronting the real thing. For twenty years they have sat with their children and watched yesterday's outlaws raise hell with yesterday's world … and now they are bringing up children who think Jesse James is a television character. This is the generation that went to war for Mom, God and Apple Butter, the American Way of Life. When they came back, they crowned Eisenhower and then retired to the giddy comfort of their TV parlors, to cultivate the subtleties of American history as seen by Hollywood.
  • In 1931, two eighteen-year-olds charged with second-degree robbery admitted they were inspired by gangster films to try the "easy money racket" for themselves. Before sending them to a reformatory, the presiding judge had some harsh words for the film industry:
    "The moving picture industry is complaining about poor business, but it only has itself to blame. Gangster and sex pictures, which seem to predominate, are killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. No responsible parent cares to take children to these pictures. Maybe some day the industry will again become respectable; but until then it will not be a financial success."
  • I think Hollywood invention has always been somewhat limitless. You may have relied on a bit of claymation, filmed lizards for dinosaurs, or depicted Chuck Heston parting the seas but what continues to change is execution: design aesthetic and photorealism continue to evolve. For me the limits have always resided with our imagination. The struggle is to conceive something unique. If you can achieve this, then the underlying concept or idea even badly executed, will always outshine the polished cliche.
  • Yes, I'm blonde. When I started as an actor, because of the accent and my body and my personality, it was not what the stereotype of the Latina woman in Hollywood is, so they didn't know where to put me. The blond hair wasn't matching. The moment I put my hair dark, it was better for my work.
You're now heading toward Hollywood, like any normal tourist. Breathe in that smog and feel lucky that only in L.A. will you glimpse a green sun or a brown moon. Forget the propaganda you've heard about clean air; demand oxygen you can see in all its glorious discoloration ~ John Waters
  • You're now heading toward Hollywood, like any normal tourist. Breathe in that smog and feel lucky that only in L.A. will you glimpse a green sun or a brown moon. Forget the propaganda you've heard about clean air; demand oxygen you can see in all its glorious discoloration.
  • I am not cut out to deal with certain types of individuals that run large Hollywood studios. I have checkered teeth, I smell like a Slim Jim and enjoy crushing nerdy executive hands. Not a good combination for getting your foot in the door in "Hollywood". Look what Hollywood has done to computer graphics .... turned her into a slutty sister!
  • People go to the movies instead of moving. Hollywood characters are supposed to have all the adventures for everybody in America, while everybody in America sits in a dark room and watches them have them.
  • Las Vegas is more like Hollywood than Hollywood, because the money is changing hands right out front.
    • Ellen Willis Elvis in Las Vegas August 1969 in Beginning to See the Light: Pieces of a Decade (1981)

References

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  1. ↑ Tim Burton Biography. IMDb.
  2. ↑ Babu, Santhosh (2014-06-05). Hire a coach and create your future. Businesstoday.
  3. ↑ "On Broadway". The Binghamton Press: p. 27. March 8, 1940. 
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