Sam Wasson > Quotes

“The baby boom produced a fresh batch of American youngsters -- teenagers they were called -- and they were suddenly coming of age. But until Roman Holiday, it was hard for them to see themselves in the movies. What Audrey offered -- namely to the girls -- was a glimpse of someone who lived by her own code of interests, not her mother's, and who did so with a wholesome independence of spirit.”
― Sam Wasson, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman

“Those without color—say, dressed in all black—can go about almost unnoticed. Where the rainbow is conspicuous, their darkness acts as a kind of camouflage, masculine by contrast, and allows them to watch without being watched. It’s the choice of someone who needs not to attract. Someone self-sufficient. Someone more distant, less knowable, and ultimately, mysterious. Powerful.”
― Sam Wasson, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman

“So much of writing,” he said, “is trying to avoid facing it.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“There were human beings and there was Audrey Hepburn.”
― Sam Wasson, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman

“We don't want to make a movie about a hooker," he assured her, "we want to make a movie about a dreamer of dreams.”
― Sam Wasson, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman

“Like every fiction, Holly Golightly was a composite of multiple nonfictions.”
― Sam Wasson, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman

“Everything you have read, heard, or wished to be true about Audrey Hepburn, doesn’t come close to how wonderful she was. There’s not a human being on earth that was kinder, more gentle, more caring, more giving, brighter, and more modest than Audrey. She was just an extraordinary, extraordinary person. Everyone should know that.”
― Sam Wasson, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman

“I hate show business and I love it,”
― Sam Wasson, Fosse

“I have something I’m working on,” Towne revealed. “A love story.” “Go on.” “It’s called Chinatown.” “Keep going.” “That’s all I have.” Towne elaborated as best he could. He told Evans about the water, about the detective who falls in love with the daughter of an eminent criminal, “and I have Nicholson. He wants to do it.” “Sounds perfect for Irish”—Evans’s nickname for Nicholson—“It’s set in Chinatown?” “No. Chinatown is a state of mind.” “A love state of mind?” “The detective’s fucked-up state of mind.” Evans was lost. “I see.” “But the love story is Chinatown too.” “But it’s not set in Chinatown?” “No. Chinatown’s a feeling.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“Improvisors connect for the same basic reason you and your friends connect. Say you meet someone. You like something about them and they like something about you. Your mutual interest begets mutual play. Play begets cooperation and mutual understanding, which, trampolined by fun, becomes love. Love is the highest form of play.”
― Sam Wasson, Improv Nation: How We Made a Great American Art

“Breakfast at Tiffany's was one of the earliest pictures to ask us to be sympathetic toward a slightly immoral young woman. Movies were beginning to say that if you were imperfect, you didn’t have to be punished.”
― Sam Wasson, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman

“The sound stunned Evans. The ache, the longing, dying but sweetly pleading, like a happy memory drowning in truth. It was what he had been searching for, not just for Chinatown, his love story in need of love, but for those long Woodland nights he waited out alone in bed, flipping through old photograph albums, the pictures of Ali, whom he had let go, pictures of Ali and his son Josh, the family he had traded, one night at a time, for The Godfather. He knew he had fucked up. Goldsmith’s music was scant consolation, only magic, but where love and real life failed his foolish cravings, the music ennobled them in brass and piano and harp. Their glissandos were running water, growing in him the feeling, easy to forget, of why he was right, despite all the shit, to love Hollywood in the first place. The feeling was that word he lost so much trying to find and hold on to—now he had it—a word, in the time of Nixon, almost embarrassing to speak—“romance.” For Evans it was more than moonlight and ocean winds and Gatsby’s green flare across the bay; it was not fantasy but palpable evidence of a dream becoming true, the rare and shivery threshold of immeasurable pleasure, the promise imagination grants the mundane, and the mountain stream through which beauty and goodness, against all probability and reason, flow down into the world as art. It was, out of the darkness, a faith. Like Polanski’s crane, a lift, redemption, grace. True or false, it didn’t matter; as long as it was felt once, it could be felt again. Hearing that music for the first time, thinking of his father, he cried.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“The hegemonic sanctity of all American institutions—with the notable exceptions of Hollywood and the music industry—went down with the president, finishing off, historian Andreas Killen writes, “the greatest prolonged boom in the history of capitalism.” That year, a year Killen called “a genuine low point in U.S. history,” something that had been ending for years was suddenly over. There was the 1973 oil embargo and subsequent depression; the ’73 failure of the Vietnam War, the longest war to date in U.S. history, with more than thirteen hundred MIAs; the January ’73 report in Time that airplane hijackings had reached epidemic proportions, and the disturbing number of passengers aboard those flights who, incredibly, found themselves siding with their captors. So disenchanted were they, Tom Wolfe wrote, with “the endless exfoliations of American power,” that he observed: “It is astonishing how often hostages come away from their ordeal describing the Hostage Taker as ‘nice,’ ‘considerate,’ even ‘likeable.’” (The term “Stockholm syndrome” was coined in 1973, the year the bad guys won. The year we realized the game was rigged and it was better to be hostage-taker than a hostage.)”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“The Fortune,”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“He wasn’t like Brando, who sometimes would just open his mouth, and out would come genius, expertise on anything, a perfect soliloquy . . .”
― Sam Wasson, The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story

“Greystoke.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“We still have dreams, but we know now that most of them will come to nothing. And we also most fortunately know that it really doesn’t matter. —Raymond Chandler, letter to Charles Morton, October 9, 1950”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“On the phone in the living room, Henry Kissinger, a frequent overnight guest, engages in apparently serious conversation: “Mm. Yes. Yes, undoubtedly.…” Gilruth swoops in to light pine-scented candles and slip a coaster under Kissinger’s drink. Kissinger nods his thanks. Gilruth nods back. They’ve done this before. The music, a comely mingling of rock and jazz standards: “You must remember this.…” The threads of golden sconce light pinging off the roses … The china, gilded with a naked girl riding a centaur, waiting contentedly on a dining room table. Printed linen walls.… Gilruth—handsomely grizzled, William Holden with a tan—whistles while he works. “A sigh is just a sigh.…” “Yes,” Kissinger says. “Yes, goodbye.” Click. “The fun-da-mental things … apply.…” Kissinger stands. “As time”—he croaks on his way to the guest room to change—“goes … by.…”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“She tried to imagine marriage, as she had as a girl at St. Clerans, her family’s estate in Ireland, covering her eyes with a veil and dream-walking the grounds as a fairy-girl bride, but she quickly came to: There was always present the vortex of a darker past, what had been done to her and Jack as children, what they had done to each other as adults, and would probably, even against their will, do to each other again. In Barcelona they met again. They talked of Regina Le Clery, his friend who had just died in a plane crash at Orly Airport, and again of her mother, killed in a car crash in 1969, who managed her father’s many transgressions ably, like a deposed queen burying a broken heart; and they talked of ghosts, memories that lace the eye; and he fell asleep fingering the pearls, once her mother’s, she wore that night to bed; and following him to France, she discovered he had slept with another woman.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“Have another drink honey, it was right there all along.”
― Sam Wasson, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman

“The wealthy will get wealthier and the young will die.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“Chinatown is a condition. The condition is the terrible awareness of one’s helplessness, what Towne had always called “the futility of good intentions.” If its resonance surpasses the literal, it is due not only to Towne’s overall concept, the thematic rigor and omnipresence of power and abuse in the script, but to Polanski’s cinematic rendering of Chinatown itself. He insisted it must be in the film as a literal location, but he filmed it metaphorically, amid the vacant black limbo of nightmare. It’s hard to see and it’s too quiet. It doesn’t seem real.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“A movie without music is a little bit like an aeroplane without fuel. However beautifully the job is done, we are still on the ground and in a world of reality. Your music has lifted us all up and sent us soaring. Everything we cannot say with words or show with action you have expressed for us. You have done this with so much imagination, fun, and beauty. - Audrey Hepburn, to Henry Mancini”
― Sam Wasson, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman

“It was never a question of honesty. Eleanor knew she had to be honest. She would remind him, as she had before, that panic was his custom. He would insist that this time it’s different; she would say he always said that. He would insist, no, this time it really is.”
― Sam Wasson, The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story

“Nostalgia blurs the edges of empires, and yet it did happen, didn’t it? The movies are the proof. They were made. People made them.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“Don’t just say something, stand there.’ And I found out in choreography frequently that less movement, more economical movement, or no movement at all makes a stronger statement than fierce activity.”
― Sam Wasson, Fosse

“Everybody loved Audrey, she was so sweet and unassuming and nice to everybody. Some stars go to their dressing rooms between takes, but she didn’t.”
― Sam Wasson, Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman

“the corporate investor became an almost essential part of Broadway--which isn't necessarily a bad thing. But when the money tries to protect it's investment...by getting involved with the creative content of the shows, unhealthy mutations occur. ...Our times encourage another sort of people--people with new money who are essentially interested in more money, not the arts.”
― Sam Wasson, Fosse

“At Woodland, in walked David Geffen, Anjelica Huston, maybe Dustin Hoffman, tennis shoes under his arm. “Did I miss the game?” Alain Delon … Mengers and Evans at the pool, drinking a bottle of white wine cellar–plucked for the occasion: “Now really, Sue … Do you get white wine at Columbia?” Giggling: “You and I have never agreed on any kind of material. And so far you’ve been right.” Now down to casting. “I think of De Niro.…”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

“Towne got the message. “Where do you work?” he asked the vice cop. “Right now we’re working in Chinatown.” “What do you do there?” “Nothing.” “What do you mean, nothing?” “Well, that’s pretty much what we’re told to do in Chinatown, is nothing. Because with the different tongs, the language and everything else, we can’t tell whether we’re helping somebody commit a crime or prevent one. So, we just … we do nothing.”
― Sam Wasson, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood