William J. Mann > Quotes

“Too often have we believed the old lie that says we’re bad, we’re perverted, we’re abominations. But those who spread the lie don’t know. They don’t know how we love, how we hurt, how we live.”
― William J. Mann, Where the Boys Are: A Novel

“Barbra [was a] different-looking, different-sounding, different acting lad[y] of great personal charisma who redefined what it meant to be glamorous.”
― William J. Mann, Hello, Gorgeous: Becoming Barbra Streisand

“All of which goes to prove that there is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it ill behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us.”
― William J. Mann, Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood

“He hasn't been in San Francisco for a number of years. He's looking forward to being in the city again. It's a town that knows how to have a good time, but without all the mess and craze of New York. San Francisco always does things with a touch of of class.”
― William J. Mann, The Biograph Girl

“In a world where everything is hyped and hawked, where every available space, even the risers of subway steps, is claimed for advertising, Brando’s admonitions against the monetization of the culture, voiced frequently from the 1960s on, feel extremely prescient.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“had taken it upon herself to sit through as many of the devil’s entertainments as she could tolerate, cataloging every sin.”
― William J. Mann, Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood

“Hays was thinking of Prohibition, “which had by no means produced the era of national sobriety its proponents had contemplated.”
― William J. Mann, Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood

“A great disservice was done to American actors,” Stella told her students, “when they were persuaded that they had to experience themselves on the stage instead of experiencing the play.” The answer wasn’t in an actor’s past, Stella argued, but in the writer’s script. “Oh, sweetheart,” she’d counsel a flailing actor, “we don’t need your emotion. We need the text.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“Some would try to argue that without that constantly roiling inner turmoil, he might not have become such a great actor. To such arguments, Marlon grew impatient. “What you’re saying,” he replied, “is that unless you irritate an oyster with a sand grain, he will not make the necessary compensations for the purposes of that sand grain, and will [therefore] never create the pearl.” He made a sound of contempt. “Who gives a damn about the pearl?”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“She had only one human companion, but a menagerie of dogs and cats. Her only connection to the outside world was a radio. Marlon was in awe. This was exactly the sort of retreat from the world he longed for, the sanctuary he needed to survive.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“There’s treasure to be mined from Bacall’s memoirs, to be sure, but the true mother lode is found elsewhere, in the Bogarts’ recently opened personal and business files at both Indiana University, Bloomington, and Boston University. The papers of Katharine Hepburn and John Huston have also been opened since the last major Bogart biography, and several people who dared not speak out while Bacall was alive felt free to do so now (though some of them still asked for anonymity; Bacall remains formidable even in death). I am also indebted to the exhaustive research of A. M. Sperber and Eric Lax, conducted while so many important figures in Bogart’s and Bacall’s lives were still living and published in their excellent Bogart in 1997.”
― william J Mann, Bogie & Bacall: The Surprising True Story of Hollywood’s Greatest Love Affair

“The industry could not be seen as pandering to the public’s lowest common denominator—”
― William J. Mann, Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood

“Sometimes we have to go back. Sometimes the past just doesn’t stay where you want it to.”
― William J. Mann, All American Boy: A Novel

“An artist is, of course, entitled to make money, and Brando didn’t claim otherwise. What he struggled with was the conflation of art and commerce, a phenomenon he first observed in the 1960s and watched mushroom beyond all expectation into the twenty-first century. “I don’t know if there are any artists left now,” he said. “They are so degraded and so confused by the mercantile mind.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“trauma takes a very long time to heal, if ever.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“Success, to Brando, meant “understanding yourself.” Success, as it was defined by Hollywood, held no appeal to him. This was a man who was hailed as the greatest in his field, a two-time Oscar winner, a box-office champ, the first actor to get a million dollars a picture. He made it to the top of the heap—and when he got there, he found success didn’t have “the fiber,” as he told talk show host David Susskind. He spent his life searching for things that did have the fiber, those permanently true things for which he could lay down his life. He wanted to feel as if he were—to play on his famous line from On the Waterfront—a “contender,” someone who mattered, someone who had fought the good fight. He wanted to feel as if he had made a difference, left a mark, and not just on acting. What he did not want to be was an “unthinker,” the way he described those people who never examined themselves or their place in the world.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“But what if the work itself was not the artist’s choice? What if the work gave him no such satisfaction as Williams’s writing gave him? What if he had not been born wanting the work as Williams had been born wanting to write, but had instead stumbled upon the work, been proclaimed a genius for it, and been forced to continue producing it?”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“Theater owners told horror stories of church ladies and civic reformers, many brandishing crucifixes as if to ward off vampires, barging into their offices and demanding they never again show Arbuckle’s films.”
― William J. Mann, Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood

“That night, during rehearsals for Power, cheers from a demonstration outside distracted the actors. Bud followed some of his fellow students out onto the sidewalk. There were placards and posters supporting labor, chants of “one for all, all for one,” and calls for the removal of Francisco Franco in Spain. Bud seemed delighted, the second-year student thought. All at once, lifting his fist in a show of power, Bud shouted, “Proletariat of the world, unite!”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“But nearly everything else has missed Brando’s story in both the details and the bigger picture—a particularly regrettable situation for a man whom most agree was the supreme American actor. For example, there’s the myth, endlessly repeated, that Brando was a Method actor, when in fact he loathed the very concept and found those who used the term pretentious.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“But what was he “selling out” exactly, and to whom? Almost from the start of Brando’s career, some people seemed to believe they were owed something from him and that he was being stingy in paying it back. Because they’d held such high opinions of him, they were angry when he didn’t meet, or share, their expectations. People such as Shipman bemoaned Brando’s not taking seriously what, in their view, was more important than anything else: acting. But his priorities were different: Teti’aroa, his children’s education, Martin Luther King Jr.’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the standoff at Wounded Knee.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“Yet Arbuckle’s fate didn’t rest with the entire public. It was decided in white, middle-class drawing rooms where the Federation of Women’s Clubs took their votes, and in church halls where ministers whipped their flocks into outrages over Hollywood.”
― William J. Mann, Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood

“TIMES HAVE CHANGED. It’s a very different world now than it was a decade or more ago. We can see Brando in another way—as not just the great actor but also a whistleblower on the culture, a Cassandra warning us of what was to come.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“He has served as a gadfly stinging America’s conscience,” the paper editorialized, “reminding the country of its evil past and urging it to face up to the responsibility to redeem itself. Americans don’t like to be criticized for their racial misdeeds. They falsify their history to bolster their sense of Nordic superiority. The Indians have been deprived of land and culture. Their rates of unemployment, suicide and alcoholism are above the national averages. The family incomes on the reservations are below the accepted poverty levels by nearly half. They need all the publicity they can get. Brando used the right forum, the right audience, the right moment to draw attention to a cause that has been too long neglected.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“imagination and not emotional memory” was the key to successful acting.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“But here’s something else that often gets overlooked or, even worse, derided: unlike so many others with his history, Brando proactively attempted to understand and overcome his trauma. Sometimes, in his darkest moments, he succumbed to victimhood. But for the most part, he resisted it, seeking help and transformation through psychotherapy, meditation, and other consciousness-raising practices. Journalists and biographers sometimes ridiculed his efforts, portraying him and his various therapists as eccentric or flaky. But how many never attempt to understand their problems at all?”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“Democracy was wrong, Kahn declared, when “it countenances government commissions giving to endless innuendo and irresponsible gossip the place and the scope that belong to trustworthy testimony.”
― William J. Mann, Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood

“America was embarking on a decade-long crisis of faith, principles, and identity. Long-cherished notions of what was right and what was wrong were being challenged. Ideas about family, race, patriotism, even God—all were up for reconsideration. Not surprisingly, Marlon was in the midst of it. Just as he had personified the cultural moment of the 1950s, when views of masculinity, gender, power, and sexuality were in flux, now he was at the forefront of a movement asking Americans to reconsider their moral priorities. The country was split. Although polls showed a slim majority opposing capital punishment, the minority opinion was loud and emphatic, and it let Marlon know how it felt.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando

“They had come to toast Hays, their new “czar,” as the papers were calling him.”
― William J. Mann, Tinseltown: Murder, Morphine, and Madness at the Dawn of Hollywood

“You’re making an enormous error,” Marlon told Coppola. “This guy Kurtz, don’t misuse him.” The film, a commentary on the Vietnam War, was inspired by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Kurtz, Marlon argued, needed to be that terrible, evil beating heart: a justifier of genocide.”
― William J. Mann, The Contender: The Story of Marlon Brando