Hollywood is a district in the central region of Los Angeles, California, in the United States. It is notable for its place as the home of the entertainment industry, including several of its historic studios. Its name has come to be a metonym for the motion picture industry of the United States. Hollywood is also a highly ethnically diverse, densely populated, economically diverse neighborhood and retail business district.
Quotes
- 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.
- Thelma Adams, as qtd. by Lewis Beale, “Blame ‘Star Wars’ if You Think Science Fiction Is Brain Dead”, The Daily Beast, (12.15.17).
- Hollywood is not necessarily biased toward a particular political view, but it is biased toward what does and doesn’t make money. Since 9/11, the market wanted these almost comic book characterizations of Muslims as the bad guy. But that market has dried up. It’s not interesting anymore. They want different narratives about Muslims and Middle Easterners, and networks are looking for ways to do that.
- Lorraine Ali, "Exploiting fear of Muslims? The far right has nothing on liberal Hollywood", Los Angeles Times, (Jan. 6, 2017).
- 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).
- 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... 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.
- Ralph Bakshi in "Ralph Bakshi", Tasha Robinson, AV Club, (12/06/00).
- 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.
- Ethel Barrymore "Queen Ethel Comes This Way Again" by Walter Monfried The Milwaukee Journal, (Mar 15, 1942).
- The voice of Hollywood has grown beyond the border of the United States. It's everywhere.
- Max Beauvoir in "A U.S.-Trained Entrepreneur Becomes Voodoo’s Pope", New York Times, (04/05/2008).
- Hollywood is like Picasso's bathroom.
- Candice Bergen in: Bill Adler Funny Ladies: The Best Humor from America's Funniest Women, Andrews McMeel Publishing, 23 February 2001, p. 91.
- If you’re looking for historical truth in Hollywood, you’re looking in the wrong spot.
- Brent Bozell, Never Trust Hollywood With History, 5 January 2020, The Daily Wire
- 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
- Most of the successful people in Hollywood are failures as human beings.
- Marlon Brando in: Pete Martin Pete Martin calls on..., Simon and Schuster, 1962, p. 324.
- 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.
- Tim Burton in: Tim BurtonBiography, IMDb
- In Hollywood if you don't have a shrink, people think you're crazy.
- Johnny Carson in: Santhosh Babu Hire a Coach and create your future, Businesstoday, 5 June 2014
- 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 in: The Most Typical Avant-Garde: History and Geography of Minor Cinemas in Los Angeles, University of California Press, 30 April 2005, p. 9.
- 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
- Any actress who appears in public without being well-groomed is digging her own grave.
- Joan Crawford in: Mari Lyn Henry, Lynne Rogers How to Be a Working Actor, 5th Edition: The Insider's Guide to Finding Jobs in Theater, Film & Television, Ten Speed Press, 7 July 2010, p. 41
- 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.
- David Cronenberg, "David Cronenberg", Bette Gordon, Bomb, (Jan 1, 1989).
- I'm impressed with the people from Chicago. Hollywood is hype, New York is talk, Chicago is work.
- Michael Douglas in: Genna Hill The 2011 Chicago North Side Real Estate Guide: Bucktown, Wicker Park, Lincoln Park, Lake View, Gold Coast, Streeterville. Andersonville, Wrigleyville, Ravenswood and More, Wexford House Books, 24 September 2010, p. 2.
- [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 in the documentary Dreams on Spec (2007)
- '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.
- Manny Farber in: Sunset Boulevard, The Nation, 23 September 1950.
- The No. 1 problem in Hollywood was, and is, and always will be pedophilia.
- Correy Feldman from his memoir Coreyography (2013); as quoted in "Corey Feldman living in fear after talking to police about sexual abuse claims", by Lisa Respers France, CNN, (November 9, 2017).
- 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.
- Mike Figgis in: Digital Film-Making, Faber & Faber, 16 August 2012, p. 5.
- 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.- James Frey in: My Friend Leonard, Hachette UK, 13 March 2006, p. 203.
- People in Hollywood are not showmen, they're maintenance men, pandering to what they think their audiences want.
- Terry Gilliam IMDB profile
- 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.
- Terry Gilliam about Hollywood. As quoted in the New York Times article Terry Gilliam's Feel-Good Endings (14 August 2005)
- Movies in Hollywood now, for the past 20 or 30 years, are made mainly by lawyers or agents.
- Jean-Luc Godard The Christian Science Monitor - August 3, 1994. David Sterritt
- In Hollywood, no one knows anything.
- William Goldman in: Jorja Prover No One Knows Their Names: Screenwriters in Hollywood, Popular Press, 1994, p. 12
- 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 in: James Parish The Hollywood Book of Death: The Bizarre, Often Sordid, Passings of More than 125 American Movie and TV Idols, McGraw-Hill Education, 29 October 2001, p. 195.
- You know, let's put it this way, if all the people in Hollywood who have had plastic surgery, if they went on vacation, there wouldn't be a person left in town.
- Michael Jackson in: Michael Jackson speaks on his vitiligo and being black, Examiner.com Entertainment 6 July 2009.
- Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy the Church. America Hollywood.
- Erica Jong in: Gyles Brandreth Oxford Dictionary of Humorous Quotations, Oxford University Press, 17 October 2013, p. 151.
- Let any pretty girl announce a divorce in Hollywood and the wolves come running. Fresh meat for the beast, and they are always hungry.
- Hedy Lamarr in: No other man or woman is involved in what happened between Hrithik and Sussanne: Zarine Khan, The Times of India, 10 January 2014,
- 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.
- Max Lerner in: Max Lerner America as a Civilization, 1957, p. 826.
- In Hollywood, the women are all peaches. It makes one long for an apple occasionally.
- W. Somerset Maugham in: Gene Shalit Great Hollywood Wit: A Glorious Cavalcade of Hollywood Wisecracks, Zingers, Japes, Quips, Slings, Jests, Snappers, & Sass from the Stars, Macmillan, 22 November 2003, p. 95.
- In Hollywood, brides keep the bouquets and throw away the groom.
- Groucho Marx in: Joseph Demakis the Ultimate Book of Quotations, Lulu.com, p. 402.
- Well, nobody looks to Hollywood for social commentary, do they? They only recently discovered that there were black people in the world.
- Hollywood has mistreated women in every possible way throughout its history. Gay men don’t exist.
- Ian McKellen, "Ian McKellen: half of Hollywood is gay, yet in movies gay men don't exist", Catherine Shoard, The Guardian, (23, May 2018).
Ludwig von Mises, as quoted in The Communism of Broadway and Hollywood (6 December 2019)]]
- 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, as quoted in The Communism of Broadway and Hollywood (6 December 2019)
- 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.
- Marilyn Monroe in: Gloria Steinem Marilyn: Norma Jeane, Open Road Media, 19 March 2013, p. 19.
- 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.
- Marilyn Monroe in: Gloria Steinem "Marilyn: Norma Jeane", p. 12.
- 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.
- James Morcan in: The secret history of mind control, Morcan Books and Films.
- 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.- Govindini Murty, “Hey, Conservatives: It's Safe to Go to the Movies Again”, The Atlantic, (Oct. 12, 2011).
- Modern Hollywood is a far cry from its intrepid female founder's [Daeida Hartell] "dream of beauty".
- Rachel Nuwer in: Hollywood Was Once an Alcohol-Free Community, Smithsonian.com , 21 February 2014.
- In 1900, Hollywood, California, was a small town of 500 people, many of whom had moved there from the midwest. Around 15 years earlier, Daeida Hartell, a young woman from Ohio, had traveled there with her husband, Harvey Henderson Wilcox, and convinced him to purchase 120 acres... the 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...She [Daeida Hartell] was creating an alcohol-free, cultured Christian community. To that end she offered free lots to Christian churches regardless of their denomination.
- Rachel Nuwer in: "Hollywood Was Once an Alcohol-Free Community".
- 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.
- Rachel Nuwer in: "Hollywood Was Once an Alcohol-Free Community".
- The fallacy in Hollywood is that if you’re making a 'feminist’ story, the woman kicks ass and wins. That’s not feminist, that’s macho.
- Natalie Portman, "Natalie Portman interview for Thor: 'A woman kicking ass isn't feminist. That's macho'", Elaine Lipworth, The Telegraph, (29 Oct 2013).
- Hollywood is the definition of sexual discrimination.
- Ally Sheedy in: Wheeler W. Dixon The Second Century of Cinema: The Past and Future of the Moving Image, SUNY Press, 28 February 2000, p. 13.
- 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 in: Hunter S. Thompson Hell's Angels: A Strange and Terrible Saga, Random House Publishing Group, 1 August 2012, p. 259.
- It's said in Hollywood that you should always forgive your enemies - because you never know when you'll have to work with them.
- Lana Turner in: The Quotable A**hole: More than 1,200 Bitter Barbs, Cutting Comments, and Caustic Comebacks for Aspiring and Armchair A**holes Alike, Adams Media, 15 September 2011, p. 120.
- 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.
- Sofia Vergara in: Sofia Vergara Breaks Out, The Daily Beast, 29 July 2011
- 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 in: Crackpot: The Osessions of b, Simon and Schuster, 1 November 2007, p. 28.
- 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.
- Tennessee Williams in: Moving Words: Re-Writing Dance, Routledge, 28 June 2005, p. 330.
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