Motion Pictures Quotes

“Avoid the tyranny of the reasonable voice...it will guarantee a complacency of never trying anything adventurous...”
― J. Michael Straczynski

“If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxious, ambitious actors, directors, writers and producers to continue their assault on the English language by reducing the vocabularies of their characters to half a dozen words, with one colorful but overused Anglo-Saxon verb and one unbeautiful Anglo-Saxon noun covering just about every situation, then I would like to suggest that they stop and think about this: making millions is not the whole ball game, fellows. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more.”
― Gregory Peck

“Hollywood's Studio Era was part of a Golden Age because it didn't need profanity (unlike reality-television today)”
― Manny Pacheco

“A picture may be worth a thousand words, but those well-arranged words are worth a multi-million-dollar motion picture.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich

“Spike Lee was the voice depicting the ills of social issues. Joseph Strickland will depict the spiritual issues (or ills) from within. ("The Making of Dual Mania: Filmmaking Chicago Style," 2018)”
― Joseph Strickland, The Making of Dual Mania: Filmmaking Chicago Style

“I wonder whether certain dreadful events, of the sort this picture is full of, are not so incalculably rich in the possibilities of moral and aesthetic blackmail that they can never be represented maturely or even un-deceitfully, and so had better not be represented at all...Indeed, few films ever made have so vigorously seized the spectator by the throat and so implacably insisted, with one unprincipled bang over the head after another, that he turn himself into the wildest animal possible, and mistrust and hate with all his might any lingering question which troubles him about his obligations to do so.”
― James Agee, Agee on Film, Vol. 1: Essays and Reviews

“[On Darryl L. Zanuck, motion-picture producer] From Poland to polo in one generation.”
― Arthur Caesar

“I write from the heart and do not edit and edit ... my works (music or writing). Although most writers do, and as I read their works its impossible for me to believe that they either talk or even think like that.”
― Alexzander Beck, Adventures in the Year of the Giant

“But they do," he said. "That is the distressing part. They do. The quality--the intellectual or artistic quality--of the films is almost irrelevant. The crucial thing is only the degree to which they can identify, the degree to which they can project and see themselves as they would like to be. If they can do those things they can believe the picture, and if they can believe in it, then it is a good picture.”
― Henry Sutton, The Exhibitionist