"In Hollywood if you don't have a shrink, people think you're crazy." -- game and talk show host Johnny Carson.
"It's somehow symbolic of Hollywood that Tara was just a facade, with no rooms inside." -- David O. Selznick (producer of Gone with the Wind, 1939.)
"Is Hollywood the cruelest city in the world? Well, it can be. New York can be that, too. You can be a Broadway star here one night, and something happens, and out--nobody knows you on the street. They forget you ever lived. It happens in Hollywood, too." -- Buster Keaton (silent film genius, later reduced to bit parts in teen/beach party movies.)
"People in Hollywood are not showmen, they're maintenance men, pandering to what they think their audiences want." -- writer-director of, among others, Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975), Brazil (1985) and The Fisher King (1991), Terry Gilliam.
"In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing." -- actor and folksy humorist Will Rogers.
"You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer's heart." -- comedic actor and game show panelist Fred Allen.
"The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links." -- Oscar-winning writer as well as producer Ben Hecht.
"Hollywood is a place where they place you under contract instead of under observation." -- famous radio & newspaper columnist Walter Winchell.
"In Europe an actor is an artist. In Hollywood, if he isn't working, he's a bum." -- Oscar-winning actor Anthony Quinn.
"Ah, stardom! They put your name on a star in the sidewalk on Hollywood Boulevard and you walk down and find a pile of dog manure on it. That tells the whole story, baby." -- Oscar-winning actor (and hard drinker) Lee Marvin.
"I find Hollywood really toxic." -- Oscar-winning actress Rachel Wiesz
"I have been asked if I ever get the DTs; I don't know; it's hard to tell where Hollywood ends and the DTs begin." -- perennial tippler and comedic actor W. C. Fields.
"No one's ever happy with their position [in Hollywood]. You hear that from people you'd never dream would complain." -- TV actress Yasmine Bleeth.
"I'm not bitter about Hollywood's treatment of me, but of its treatment of Griffith, von Sternberg, Buster Keaton, and a hundred others." -- filmmaker Orson Welles, an Oscar-winner for writing Citizen Kane (1941), one of the most highly-acclaimed movies ever made.
"I always thought the real violence in Hollywood isn't what's on the screen. It's what you have to do to raise the money." -- playwright, screenwriter (of The Untouchables, 1987, and Glengarry Glen Ross, 1992) and director David Mamet.
"My attitude about Hollywood is that I wouldn't walk across the street to pull one of those executives out of the snow if he was bleeding to death. Not unless I was paid for it. None of them ever did me any favors." -- actor James Woods.
"Hollywood didn't kill Marilyn Monroe, it's the Marilyn Monroes who are killing Hollywood." -- multiple Oscar-winning writer-director Billy Wilder.
"Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool." -- Norwegian actress and very temporary California transplant Liv Ullmann.
"I believe that God felt sorry for actors so he created Hollywood to give them a place in the sun and a swimming pool. The price they had to pay was to surrender their talent." -- stage actor turned movie character performer Sir Cedric Hardwicke.
"There are only three ages for women in Hollywood - Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy." -- Oscar-winning comedic actress Goldie Hawn.
"You can't find any true closeness in Hollywood, because everybody does the fake closeness so well." -- actress, writer and product of a show business marriage Carrie Fisher.
"I came out here with one suit and everybody said I looked like a bum. Twenty years later Marlon Brando came out with only a sweatshirt and the town drooled over him. That shows how much Hollywood has progressed." -- iconic, Oscar-winning actor Humphrey Bogart.
"You know, when I first went into the movies Lionel Barrymore played my grandfather. Later he played my father and finally he played my husband. If he had lived I'm sure I would have played his mother. That's the way it is in Hollywood. The men get younger and the women get older." -- silent film legend turned character actress Lillian Gish.
"If only those who dream about Hollywood knew how difficult it all is." -- Swedish actress (and Honorary Oscar recipient) who held movie audiences in her grasp before abruptly retiring at age thirty-six Greta Garbo.
"Working in Hollywood does give one a certain expertise in the field of prostitution." -- two-time Oscar-winning actress and activist Jane Fonda.
"It's said in Hollywood that you should always forgive your enemies - because you never know when you'll have to work with them." - screen siren Lana Turner, who found these words to be true when she starred in Harold Robbins' The Survivors (1969-1970), a series created by the man who'd earlier turned her own personal drama into a best-selling roman a clef novel.
"Strip away the phony tinsel of Hollywood and you'll find the real tinsel underneath." -- piano-playing actor and sharp wit Oscar Levant.
"Hollywood gives a young girl the aura of one giant, self-contained orgy farm, its inhabitants dedicated to crawling into every pair of pants they can find." -- 1940s sensation and possessor of the trendsetting "peek-a-boo" hairstyle Veronica Lake.
"I can't talk about Hollywood. It was a horror to me when I was there and it's a horror to look back on. I can't imagine how I did it. When I got away from it I couldn't even refer to the place by name. 'Out there,' I called it." -- writer, poet and acerbic wit Dorothy Parker.
"The average Hollywood film star's ambition is to be admired by an American, courted by an Italian, married to an Englishman and have a French boyfriend." -- four-time Oscar-winning actress Katharine Hepburn.
"In Hollywood, an equitable divorce settlement means each party getting fifty percent of publicity." -- widow of Humphrey Bogart, ex-wife of Jason Robards Jr and longtime actress Lauren Bacall.
"In Hollywood a girl's virtue is much less important than her hairdo. You're judged by how you look, not by what you are. Hollywood's a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for kiss, and fifty cents for your soul. I know, because I turned down the first offer often enough and held out for the fifty cents." -- world famous, legendary sex symbol and bubbly comedic actress Marilyn Monroe.
"They've great respect for the dead in Hollywood, but none for the living." -- rascally movie adventure hero and major league hedonist Errol Flynn.
"In Beverly Hills...they don't throw their garbage away. They make it into television shows." - four-time Oscar-winning writer, actor and director Woody Allen.
"Hollywood is a place where a man can get stabbed in the back while climbing a ladder." -- acclaimed novelist and occasional movie script doctor William Faulkner.
"I look at going to Hollywood as going behind enemy lines. You parachute in, set up the explosion, then fly out before it goes off." -- pretty boy actor turned Oscar-winning film director Robert Redford.
"It's a scientific fact. For every year a person lives in Hollywood, they lose two points of their IQ." -- sharp-tongued novelist and writer Truman Capote.
"Ever since they found out that Lassie was a boy, the public has believed the worst about Hollywood." -- comic actor and game show host Groucho Marx.
"Half the people in Hollywood are dying to be discovered and the other half are afraid they will be." -- stage actor turned silent and sound film star (and Oscar-winner) Lionel Barrymore.
“I love Los Angeles. I love Hollywood. They're beautiful. Everybody's plastic, but I love plastic. I want to be plastic.” -- outre artist and filmmaker Andy Warhol.
“Most of the successful people in Hollywood are failures as human beings.” -- two-time Oscar-winning actor Marlon Brando.
3 comments:
Alll that glitters isn't gold...
In addition to their clever, and often true, comments regarding their distaste of Hollywood, these folks have something else in common; they all took the money.
My favorite line is Goldie's:
"There are only three ages for women in Hollywood - Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy."
And, I love the fact you included Rachel Wiesz. So rare to see one of my contemporary favorites on here. The gal has got it all! And that includes the hottie husband, too!
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