Quotes / The Golden Age of Hollywood

"Everybody's a dreamer and everybody's a star
And everybody's in showbiz, it doesn't matter who you are
And those who are successful, be always on your guard
Success walks hand in hand with failure along Hollywood Boulevard"

— The Kinks, "Celluloid Heroes"

One time while I was bemoaning the end of the golden age of pictures, Welles laughed and said, 'Well, come on, what do you expect? Even the height of The Renaissance only lasted 60 years!'

— Peter Bogdanovich

Michel Ciment: "Were you ever disillusioned with Hollywood?"
Joseph L. Mankiewicz: "You can't fall in with a band of thieves and then complain about losing your virginity. I was never illusioned with Hollywood."

— All About Mankiewicz

I come from a country and I belong to a generation for which America and movies were almost the same thing, and now to be here with you, my dear Americans, make me feel at home.

— Federico Fellini, on accepting the Oscar for Lifetime Achievement Award.

If you are irritated by the extravagant admiration of younger movie lovers for the American cinema, remember that some of the best Hollywood films have been made by the Englishman Hitchcock, the Greek Kazan, the Dane Sirk, the Hungarian [Laszlo] Benedek, the Italian Capra, the Russian [Lewis] Milestone, and the Viennese directors Preminger, [Edgar G.] Ulmer, [Fred] Zinnemann, Wilder, Sternberg and Fritz Lang.

— François Truffaut

Peter Bogdanovich: Do you feel that American films remain the most vital?

Alfred Hitchcock: "Worldwide, yes. Because when we make films for the U.S., we are automatically making them for all the world — because America is full of foreigners...I don’t know what they mean when they talk about 'Hollywood' pictures. I say, 'Where are they conceived?' Look at this room—you can’t see out the windows. We might just as well be in a hotel room in London, or anywhere you like. So here is where we get it down on paper. Now where do we go? We go on location, perhaps; and then where do we work? We’re inside on a stage, the big doors are closed, and we’re down in a coal mine: we don’t know what the weather is like outside. Again, we don’t know where we are — only within our film, within the thing we’re making. That’s why it’s such nonsense to talk about locale. 'Hollywood.' That doesn’t mean anything to me. If you ask, 'Why do you like working in Hollywood?' I would say, because I can get home at six o’clock for dinner."

— Who the Devil Made It

"Who knows, maybe you can stare too hard at something. Drain out the virtue, suck out the living juice. You shoot the great places and the pretty people. All those girls and boys. Shoot them dead."

— Jack Hannaford, The Other Side of the Wind

Greta Garbo, and Monroe
Dietrich and DiMaggio
Marlon Brando, Jimmy Dean
On the cover of a magazine
Grace Kelly; Harlow, Jean
Picture of a beauty queen
Gene Kelly, Fred Astaire
Ginger Rogers, dance on air
They had style, they had grace
Rita Hayworth gave good face
Lauren, Katherine, Lana too
Bette Davis, we love you
Ladies with an attitude
Fellas that were in the mood
Don't just stand there, let's get to it
Strike a pose, there's nothing to it

— Madonna, the Hollywood rap from "Vogue"

Selznick: Hollywood? The town had thirty great years. Amazing years. Who could have imagined when it all began that some of the biggest fortunes on the planet were going to be made by making people sit in a room full of strangers, many of them probably tubercular, switching the light off and throwing pictures on a glorified horse blanket? But we didn't just kill the goose that laid the golden egg - we stuck the golden egg up its ass and fricasseed it.

Fleming: Hollywood's going to make over three hundred movies this year.

Selznick: Tell me how in the name of God that can't be three hundred variations of the same dumb story and the same dumb bunch of characters.

— Moonlight And Magnolias