Jeanine Basinger > Quotes

“Deanna Durbin's movies are about innocence and sweetness. They're from a different time and a different place. Outside the movie house, there was Depression, poverty, war, death, and loss. Audiences then were willing to pretend, to enter into a game of escape. No one really thought that the world was like a Deanna Durbin movie, they just wanted to pretend it was for about an hour and a half.”
― Jeanine Basinger, The Star Machine

“Why would everyone - in both the movie business and the audience - want to avoid the label "marriage"? Marriage was presumably everybody's business. People were either born into one, born outside of one, living in one, living outside of one, trying to woo someone into one, divorced from one, trying to get divorced from one, reading about one, dreaming about one, or just observing one from afar. For most people, it would be the central event - the biggest decision - of their lives. Marriage was the poor man's trip to Paris and the shopgirl's final goal. At the very least, it was a common touchstone. Unlike a fantasy film or a sci-fi adventure, a marriage story didn't have to be explained or defined. Unlike a western or a gangster plot, it didn't have to find a connection to bring a jolt of emotional recognition to an audience. Marriage was out there, free to be used and presented to people who knew what the deal was.”
― Jeanine Basinger, I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies

“VINCENTE MINNELLI: I made that character Jack Buchanan played in The Band Wagon and based him a little bit on me. I’m a very confusing person.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“Julie Andrews was in many ways an unpredictable actress for Americans to embrace. She has about her a let’s-get-this-done quality that doesn’t exude warmth. She can be chilly. Her singing style is efficient. She does get the job done and does not slobber a song’s lyrics, nor does she beat the emotions of the words to death. Her greatest asset is the clarity of her diction. No matter what she sings, every word is perfectly enunciated, and that draws an audience to her. She really cares that they know what she’s “saying” in her song. There is a careful perfection to her work, a precision to both her songs and her dances that says “I am a professional.” Andrews could make it look effortless. She skimmed through whatever she was given to do, but without making it trivial; she made it easy, but real. Her main asset, of course, is a fabulous voice, but it’s combined with acting ability, intelligence, and an understanding of what is needed from her that never fails. She seems honest, and that is a characteristic that Americans always value.”
― Jeanine Basinger, The Movie Musical!

“This is the true story of Hollywood. The most cruel, most despicable town in the world. Ruthless. Completely heartless.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“KING VIDOR: When sound first came in, that’s when popcorn and all the drinks started and necking in the theater started, because you could turn away and do all sort of things and you could still hear. You wouldn’t miss anything, you know. The sound would take care of it. In silent pictures, you had to pay attention the whole time. You had to sit there and try to figure it out.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“Marriage, after all, was the known, not the unknown: the dull dinner party, not the madcap masquerade. It was a set of issues and events that audiences knew all too well offscreen. Unlike the wide-open frontier of the western, offering freedom and adventure, or the lyrical musical, with its fantasy of release through singing and dancing, or the woman's film, with its placing of a marginalized social figure (the woman) at the center of the universe, or the gangster movie, with its violent excitement and obvious sexual freedom, the marriage film had to reflect what moviegoers already had experienced: marriage, in all its boredom and daily responsibilities.”
― Jeanine Basinger, I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies

“GEORGE LUCAS: This is not a good thing to do if you actually want to earn a living. DAVID PUTTNAM: Real estate’s a much better business if you’re really interested in money.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“That’s another interesting note, and I must make note of it. In those days, the late sixties, there was a lot of innocence surrounding dope. Not like it has developed into. And as a result of that, there was a lot of dope in our editing room. SAM FULLER: These kids liked to smoke.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“GEORGE LUCAS: What I really wanted to do was go down to the ArtCenter in Los Angeles and become an illustrator. But my father said, “Well, you could do that, but you’re going to pay for it yourself”—and it was a very expensive school. He knew I wasn’t going to go out and work my way through school. Basically, I’m a lazy person.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“I am always astonished at how so much writing about old movies assumes that the audience believed everything in them. Of course we didn’t. We entered into the joyful conspiracy of moviegoing.”
― Jeanine Basinger, A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960

“Groucho asked me once to play for him one of the first Irving Berlin songs. And he said to me, “You know, I sang this song for Irving Berlin. When I finished, Irving said to me, ‘Groucho, if you ever have a strong urge to do this song again, call me, and I will give you ten dollars not to do it.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“If Valentino grew a beard, every man in America would grow a beard.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“Things could get real and really terrifying because we would have an actor running through the streets being pursued by somebody, and any minute, you know, those people in that area would take a swat at you, thinking you really were a crook. They didn’t know we were making a picture, see, because we had our cameras hidden in trucks. They saw a guy running and people chasing him—it’s a wonder somebody didn’t take a potshot at him. But we were lucky, and they didn’t.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“The star shaped the vehicle. It had to be tailored around their talents and personalities. Betty Grable was Fox. Judy Garland was MGM. And behind them were art directors and cinematographers with specific styles, too. It all added up, but it had to be shaped around the star. The public went to see the star, really.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“CHARLTON HESTON: A screenwriter has to recognize that film is a collaborative undertaking. You can’t write a film script totally in the typewriter. This is a highly controversial point, and the next time you have a writer in front of you, quote me and hear how mad it makes him.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“Our first talkies were très talky.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“KATHARINE HEPBURN: Ethel Merman is not going to play Florence Nightingale. Everybody has their limitations.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“The fan magazines were the greatest star builders that ever existed for the motion pictures. And then the newspapers in the old days.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“You know, comedy is difficult. It’s the most difficult of all the genres in film or in any other medium—stage, books, or anything else. The silent era trained people in the real comedy school: visual comedy, which is quite a bit different from verbal comedy or oral comedy. In other words, people and things had to look funny to be funny.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“PAUL MAZURSKY: You know, I was in Blackboard Jungle with Sidney in 1954. And the cast all stayed at the motel in Culver City, and Sidney had to stay at a hotel on Adams, because he couldn’t stay at our hotel. He’ll tell you it’s changed, but it’s still terrible. It’s changed a little bit, but it’s still terrible. It won’t change by magic. You know, it’s like digging a hole. You toss the dirt out. Just when you think you’ve tossed it all, more comes sliding back in. You’ve got to dig faster and faster.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“Joanne Woodward’s Mrs. Bridge is one of the best performances ever given on film of a middle-aged woman.”
― Jeanine Basinger, I Do and I Don't: A History of Marriage in the Movies

“BARBRA STREISAND: Well, I mean, there’s Robert Redford climbing on top of you, you know? You don’t have to act, you know?”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“JOHN CROMWELL: The formation of the Directors Guild was not a simple matter. It brought out the deep-seated convictions of a few who felt that it was undignified. They felt that creative people like directors had no place in organizations for protection. Led by Cecil B. DeMille, the diehards tried in vain to stop the movement.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“PETER GUBER: The actors playing teenagers were fifty-three years old. I was young and sitting around the table at Columbia Pictures. There were forty White men. The average age was sixty-five years old. I was twenty-five.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“Film history has shown us that in the silent era, women wrote, directed, produced, acted, starred, did stunts, whatever. But slowly, women disappeared out of the top ranks, both in front of the camera and behind it.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“HOWARD W. KOCH: You’re not going to take Barbra Streisand out of a picture, so you spend most of your life being a diplomat. Or she calls you at night and you talk to her all night on the phone. She says, “Shouldn’t we do this? Don’t you like my hair this way?” And you keep cajoling and working, and you have seventy-five days of madness, and your wife says, “Listen, it’s either Barbra Streisand or me.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“Dean Martin, and Sammy Davis Jr. The cool kids of the 1960s invited the old man who had been cool before they knew cool was cool to join them in a musical romp that nobody took particularly seriously. Crosby enjoys himself. He has nothing at stake, since he’s not the star who has to carry the film. He’s very casual, and appears to be ad-libbing all his lines in the old Road tradition with a touch of W. C. Fields’s colorful vocabulary thrown in: “You gentlemen find my raiment repulsive?” he asks Sinatra and Martin when they object to his character’s lack of chic flash in clothing. Crosby plays a clever con man who disguises himself as square, and his outfits reflect a conservative vibe in the eyes of the cats who are looking him over. The inquiry leads into a number, “Style,” in which Sinatra and Martin put Crosby behind closet doors for a series of humorous outfit changes, to try to spruce him up. Crosby comes out in a plaid suit with knickers and then in yellow pants and an orange-striped shirt. Martin and Sinatra keep on singing—and hoping—while Crosby models a fez. He finally emerges with a straw hat, a cane, and a boutonniere in his tuxedo lapel, looking like a dude. In his own low-key way, taking his spot in the center, right between the other two, Crosby joins in the song and begins to take musical charge. Sinatra is clearly digging Crosby, the older man he always wanted to emulate.*17 Both Sinatra and Martin are perfectly willing to let Crosby be the focus. He’s earned it. He’s the original that the other two wanted to become. He was there when Sinatra and Martin were still kids. He’s Bing Crosby! The three men begin to do a kind of old man’s strut, singing and dancing perfectly together (“…his hat got a little more shiny…”). The audience is looking at the three dominant male singers of the era from 1940 to 1977. They’re having fun, showing everyone exactly not only what makes a pro, not only what makes a star, but what makes a legend. Three great talents, singing and dancing about style, which they’ve all clearly got plenty of: Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, and Dean Martin in Robin and the 7 Hoods”
― Jeanine Basinger, The Movie Musical!

“The first time I met Howard Hughes was on a picture I did retakes for, a Billie Dove picture for Frank Lloyd in the early thirties. That was the first time I ever met this strange individual.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History

“MIKE NICHOLS: There are many funny stories about making The Day of the Dolphin. And I won’t tell any of them.”
― Jeanine Basinger, Hollywood: The Oral History