If it took some effort to see old movies, we might try to find out which were the good ones, and if people saw only the good ones maybe they would still respect old movies. As it is, people sit and watch movies that audiences walked out on thirty years ago.
I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.
This movie is a toupee made up to look like honest baldness.
An artist must either give up art or develop.
If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?
For a while in the twenties and thirties, art was talked about as a substitute for religion; now B movies are a substitute for religion.
Movies that are consciously life-affirming are to be consciously avoided...
If there’s anything to learn from the history of movies, it’s that corruption leads to further corruption, not to innocence.
Allowing for exceptions, there is still one basic difference between the traditional arts and the mass-media arts: in the traditional arts, the artist grows; in a mass medium, the artist decays profitably.
Art doesn’t come in measured quantities: it’s got to be too much or it’s not enough.
McLuhanism and the media have broken the back of the book business; they’ve freed people from the shame of not reading. They’ve rationalized becoming stupid and watching television.
Movies, far more than the traditional arts, are tied to big money. Without a few independent critics, there’s nothing between the public and the advertisers.
Being creative is having something to sell, or knowing how to sell something, or having sold something. It has taken over what we used to mean by being “wised up” knowing the tricks, the shortcuts.
If you’re afraid of movies that excite your senses, you’re afraid of movies.
In a foreign country people don’t expect you to be just like them, but in Los Angeles, which is infiltrating the world, they don’t consider that you might be different because they don’t recognize any values except their own. And soon there may not be any others.
Picasso has a volatile, explosive presence. He seems to take art back to an earlier function, before the centuries of museums and masterpieces; he is the artist as clown, as conjurer, as master funmaker.
The slender, swift Bruce Lee was the Fred Astaire of martial arts, and many of the fights that could be merely brutal come across as lightning-fast choreography.
Moviemaking is so male-dominated now that they think they’re being pro-feminine when they have women punching each other out.
Movies are a combination of art and mass medium, but television is so single in its purpose-selling-that it operates without that painful, poignant mixture of aspiration and effort and compromise.
I felt as if I had attended the funeral of someone I didn’t know.