Brian Abrams > Quotes

“Alan Rickman had to drop into a blue screen stretched over a bag. It might have been 30 feet, which is plenty scary. You’d break your back, especially if you were untrained, but this is the thing about it: What you see on his face when he lets go is real fear. It’s one of the greatest shots ever.”
― Brian Abrams, Die Hard: An Oral History

“There was a rope by Dave’s desk. The chimp would come around and up to the desk, and he’s trying to talk to someone. The guest was Dr. Ruth, and she uttered this single sentence, which was everything you needed to know about talk show guests and maybe everything you needed to know about celebrities or maybe everything you needed to know about human vanity. She said, “Don’t look at the monkey, Dave. Look at me.” I want that on a T-shirt.”
― Brian Abrams, And Now...An Oral History of "Late Night with David Letterman," 1982-1993

“Don’t look at the monkey, Dave. Look at me.”
― Brian Abrams, And Now...An Oral History of "Late Night with David Letterman," 1982-1993

“I thought, “Oh my God this is fantastic,” and I remember calling him and going, “Oh my God, Bruce, you did it. You made a movie.” And he went, “Well, you made a movie.” I went, “No, I made, like, a film. This thing is enormous. This is, like, a forever thing. It’s one of the most thrilling movies I’ve ever seen.” I was so proud of him.”
― Brian Abrams, Die Hard: An Oral History

“The entire incident might have been avoided had Willis more carefully selected the tracks in his blaring music playlist. “Sometimes it’s Diana Ross, which is good,” a neighbor later told the Los Angeles Times, “and sometimes it’s his album, which is bad.”
― Brian Abrams, Die Hard: An Oral History

“Everybody in Hollywood wants to be the second person to do something the first time.”
― Brian Abrams, Die Hard: An Oral History

“RANDY COHEN I thought the deeper joke was that all TV is wasted innovation and a grotesque squandering of the human spirit. I think certainly all of popular culture is that.”
― Brian Abrams, And Now...An Oral History of "Late Night with David Letterman," 1982-1993

“think NBC miscalculated on what Dave’s talents were. If he had gone along with them, he would have made a great daytime game show host and we wouldn’t have heard of him after that.”
― Brian Abrams, And Now...An Oral History of "Late Night with David Letterman," 1982-1993

“There’s no fun in this. No one feels good about it. There’s no way you can convince someone to get a babysitter for the kids, go to this movie and come out of it saying, ‘Wow this is a lot of fun. I got to tell everybody else to come and see this.’” If it’s about terrorism, that’s impossible. It simply can’t happen. I asked, “Is there a way we could make this a robbery?” Everybody likes robbers. They’re good bad guys. They’re fun bad guys. There’s a basic change in the dynamic. Terrorism has always been something that makes us all feel sad.”
― Brian Abrams, Die Hard: An Oral History

“ROBERT DAVI They tried to get me in Die Hard 2 with [director] Renny Harlin. Joel would say, “C’mon, put ’im in there.” Then they’d go, “But how do we bring him back? He’s clearly dead.” Joel said, “It’s a movie!” I didn’t push it.”
― Brian Abrams, Die Hard: An Oral History

“Die Hard is basically a Shakespearean comedy. I never said “Shakespearean comedy” because that would have scared the fucking pants off of studio guys, but that was what I had in mind. A Midsummer’s Night Dream literally is a festival night when some weird thing happens and all the princes become asses and all the asses become princes. In the morning, the true lovers are united, and everybody returns to their regular lives and feels better for having this event where the world got turned upside down. I wanted to use that as the guiding tone. BEAU”
― Brian Abrams, Die Hard: An Oral History

“I didn’t get along with John McTiernan. He started rejecting people because of their eyebrows. So I went to Joel and said, “I can’t work like this. I’m not gonna have him rejecting people because of their eyebrows.” It was such a bizarre thing.”
― Brian Abrams, Die Hard: An Oral History

“I thought the deeper joke was that all TV is wasted innovation and a grotesque squandering of the human spirit.”
― Brian Abrams, And Now...An Oral History of "Late Night with David Letterman," 1982-1993

“It changed from a seventies movie to an eighties movie. In the seventies, action movies were all full of moral ambiguity.”
― Brian Abrams, Die Hard: An Oral History

“Everybody in Hollywood wants to be the second person to do something the first time. FRANK”
― Brian Abrams, Die Hard: An Oral History

“For the first three years of the show, Larry “Bud” Melman had a day job at a methadone clinic as a receptionist. Finally, we just hired him full time.”
― Brian Abrams, And Now...An Oral History of "Late Night with David Letterman," 1982-1993

“Fred Silverman gave Dave a contract to sit around and wait [to fill in] for Johnny Carson — beautiful.”
― Brian Abrams, And Now...An Oral History of "Late Night with David Letterman," 1982-1993

“He was an underdog. That’s why the movie worked. It’s hard to feel sorry for Stallone or Schwarzenegger, which is why they have to work so hard to have 95 guys attack them at once or try to find seven-foot wrestlers to fight them.”
― Brian Abrams, Die Hard: An Oral History

“At first the buzzword was “adventure.” Then it was “a disaster movie” because the building blows up. Then it was a cop show. It was just a strange movie. They couldn’t figure out how to sell it.”
― Brian Abrams, Die Hard: An Oral History

“When I got there, David was buried. He was lost in the ensemble cast. He was just another player. My job was to prune the staff, prune the on-camera people so that David would shine. He was the star, and when I got there, he wasn’t. He was feeding and servicing a cast of characters. It was more like SCTV than it was The David Letterman Show.”
― Brian Abrams, And Now...An Oral History of "Late Night with David Letterman," 1982-1993