1980s Hollywood Quotes

“David Kirkpatrick, a bald, former Jesuit student, whose smile never looked real, had the dubious distinction of being the executive with the longest run without a hit. We used to have a pool: When will Kirkpatrick get a hit? It didn't happen during my tenure. In fact, he became known as "The Teflon Executive, " because wherever he went, failure always followed. But for the longest time, it seemed that the bombs never stuck to him.”
― Dawn Steel, They Can Kill You..but They Can't Eat You

“Director of 48 Hrs. (1982), Walter Hill, says of the studio in the early-1980s, 'Paramount in those days was a very unpleasant place to work. That was their style.”
― Kim Masters, The Keys to the Kingdom: The Rise of Michael Eisner and the Fall of Everybody Else

“The first time Polly Platt met Jim Brooks to discuss Terms of Endear­ment (1983), she was distinctly unimpressed. “I was infuriated that he was that late,” she recalls. “Fifteen minutes or half an hour, who cares, but to be a whole hour late.” She waited for him at Gladstone’s, a tacky tourist joint on the Pacific Coast Highway. “I just remember I didn’t like him ... I just didn’t like his turn of phrase ... I didn’t like the way he referred to the people. I didn’t like the people he was talk­ing about working with.”
― Rachel Abramowitz, Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?: The Truth About Female Power in Hollywood

“Robert Altman is an asshole.
That’s what producer Don Simpson, a friend of mine, thought:“We made Popeye (1980) and we hated Altman. He was a true fraud … he was full of gibberish and full of himself, a pompous, pretentious asshole.”
― Joe Eszterhas, The Devil's Guide to Hollywood: The Screenwriter as God!

“United Artists had now begun a descent from the magical precedent-setting era of its rebirth in 1951 when Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin acquired the company from Mary Pickford and Charlie Chaplin, to the sad-but-true cliché of a “Hollywood” operation typified by Mike Medavoy’s deceit.”
― David V. Picker, Musts, Maybes, and Nevers: A Book About The Movies