“Let me tell you about writing for films. You finish your book. Now, you know where the California state line is? Well, you drive right up to that line, take your manuscript and pitch it across. No, on second thought, don’t pitch it across. First let them toss the money over. Then you throw it […]
“I am not the sort of person who knows people. I am the sort of person whom people know.” – Lorna Moon, novelist and screenwriter. Scottish-born Lorna Moon (real name Helen Nora Wilson Low) lived a brief but interesting life as a maverick script writer in the 1920s. She was also a skeleton in Cecil B. […]
“To live sanely in Los Angeles (or, I suppose, in any other large American city) you have to cultivate the art of staying awake. You must learn to resist (firmly but not tensely) the unceasing hypnotic suggestions of the radio, the billboards, the movies and the newspapers; those demon voices which are forever whispering in […]
“I want it understood that I have no natural aptitude as a writer. In fact, I don’t consider myself a very good writer. I do consider myself a good plotter. And I consider myself one hell of a good salesman as far as manufacturing merchandise that will sell is concerned.” — Erle Stanley Gardner, pulp […]
“I prefer working at home because the studio is such a beehive of activity. And how can they expect a poor scenario writer to plunge into deep and silent study when Rome is burning on the lot across the street; Julian Eltinge, outside your door, is discussing the latest New York fashions with Mary Pickford; […]
“You might say that I know life only as it’s found in books, but if you did I should interpose that I have always chosen only those books which show life as it is. So I haven’t seen a distorted picture of life. My own existence has been restricted, in a way – yet I […]
“In Paris, I wrote poetry, French poetry, very bad indeed. But friends assured me my center of song rested below my brain, so I went to Chicago to become a grand opera singer. Vocal work there made me suspicious of my friends. Then I went into caucus with myself, and the result was a visit […]
“We can never break entirely away from the spoken drama, for while the fundamental difference between the two classes of dramatic construction lays in their manner of presentation, the photoplay can never be strictly pantomime, because the subtitle must substitute for the spoken word.” – C. Gardner Sullivan, writer and producer. Source: Alfred A. Cohn […]
“Writing is the art of applying the ass to the seat.” — Dorothy Parker “The only ‘-ism’ Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.” — Dorothy Parker
“A preoccupation with words for their own sake is fatal to good film making. It’s not what films are for. It’s not my cup of tea, but it could have been if I’d started it twenty years earlier. But twenty years earlier of course I could never have got there, and that is true of […]