Hollywood Culture Quotes

“All of that Hollywood stuff! Like these women wanting men to pick them up and carry them across thresholds and some of them weigh more than you do. I don't know how many marriage breakups are caused by these movie and television addicted women expecting some bouquets and kissing and hugging and being swept out like Cinderella for dinner and dancing then getting mad when a poor, scraggly husband comes in tired and sweaty from working like a dog all day, looking for some food. ~Malcolm X”
― Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X

“Then, Leo will be my friend. He will like my mind. Our brains can kiss. Even if our bodies can’t. Even if he has a girlfriend. It is an intellectual crush. Our brains can have sex. Would I have sex with him? Yes. Brain sex!!!”
― Nicole Schubert, Saoirse Berger's Bookish Lens In La La Land

“people think intimacy is about sex. But intimacy is about truth.”
― Taylor Jenkins Reid

“Yes, there was something special about me, and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand. But things weren’t entirely black—not yet. When you’re young and healthy you can plan on Monday to commit suicide, and by Tuesday you’re laughing again.”
― J. Randy Taraborrelli, The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

“If I'm forced to sign an NDA to never speak of someone again, I won't do it because it would be silencing my voice from saying what I've been through. I respect Taylor Swift for turning her back on silencers like Scooter Braun.”
― Laika Constantino

“Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool.”
― Ava Gardner

“I was thinking,' she said. 'About those wives of yours.'
'What about them?'
'Mrs. Llewellyn must be the fourth.'
'Fifth. You're overlooking Bernadine Friganza.'
'It seems rather a lot.'
'That's Hollywood. You sort of drift into it. There's nothing much to do after office hours, so you go out and get married.”
― P. G. Wodehouse

“Here's the reality, guys: you save up for years to go 'Out West' and you spend everything you have in six months living in a roach infested hole in K-town, paying for "casting workshops" so you can meet managers and casting directors who don't give two shits about you. You cut your hair a little bit or grow a moustache and you have to get new headshots because people in Hollywood fundamentally lack imagination and can't even begin to fathom 'who you are as an actor' unless your headshot looks exactly like you do on the day of. And headshots cost $300 to shoot (on the cheap end) and $100 for make-up artists and $100 to retouch and $100 to print. Plus, you need a car to get around because mass transit in Los Angeles is a goddam joke. You need to get into class so you can learn how to unlearn all the shit you learned in college theater. Meanwhile, you're in love with the city because it's new and warm all the time and there are beautiful women everywhere. But you start getting this creeping sensation like everyone is a facade of a human being and beneath every beautiful face is spiritual rot, careerism, graft, nepotism, bull shit, lies, fakery, a need to be seen and an overwhelming whorism. But don't worry, guys, because you can always get a job working as a bartender where you can sneak booze from the well and forget for a few minutes what it's like to be on the bottom of the totem pole. That's a lot of fun, especially when you discover that cocaine means you can drink forever and not get too wasted until later. You'll get a DUI eventually, but fuck it, right? Around this time you start to get bitter. Really bitter, which you'll mistake as an 'evolution of your art.' You start looking for edgy rolls. You get a dumb haircut and try to make yourself look ugly. Maybe you hit the gym or start doing improv. Something to give you an edge. You start seeing young kids coming into town all bright eyed and bushy tailed and you say 'good luck' when you mean 'eat shit and die.' You wake up one day after endless commercial auditions that you really need to make rent but can't seem to book because you 'come off as an asshole' or don't smile enough...”
― Dan Johnson, Brea or Tar

“Most of the Hollywood stars are pretty old and I never even heard of their names. Makes you think. These people were super famous back in the day. They were adored by millions of fans at one point. But nowadays nobody remembers who they were or what they did. Pretty sad. When even past superstars don't leave much of an impression on history, what chance do we regular folks have of being remembered after we die? None.”
― Oliver Markus Malloy, New York to Los Angeles Roadtrip

“The bizarre thing about the industry is: you were discovered because you were unique. What was special about you when you were discovered, they do their damnedest to remove, not unlike what traditional society does to children.”
― Rose McGowan, Brave

“I was thirty-one at this point. I was deep in the grips of Hollywood conditioning. The thing is, I was always playing roles that were younger, at least five years younger, which amplified my twisted perception of aging. You have done something wrong! You have lived! You start feeling crazier with each birthday that passes.”
― Rose McGowan, Brave

“It was a brutal schedule. I would be on the airplane going back Monday morning at six after shooting all Sunday night, every time barely making my flight. When I arrived in Los Angeles, I had to rush straight to the Paramount studios and be a whole other person, this wildly different character, Paige. My brain was starting to scramble on top of its already fragile state.”
― Rose McGowan, Brave

“I was being photographed by a gay male who was imagining me as what he thinks a straight man wants to fuck, and he was doing so on behalf of a director, a straight male who was interpreting me with his little boy brain on behalf of the studio, also male, who were interpreting me based on who they want to sell tickets to, which is this invisible horde of boys and men. The male gaze is real, ladies and gentlemen, and it is deep.”
― Rose McGowan, Brave

“Rose jabbed her cigarette at Enid and said, "I served my time in LaLaLand and if any of those bastards tell you to talk into the mike and they pull out the yogurt cannon - just remember - you're a lady! Pull up your knickers, steal their wallet, and get the hell out of there!”
― C. Mack Lewis, Black Market Angels

“I am truly, finally done. I love the DeVitos, and I hope I stay in contact with them, but going back has made me realize I made the right decision. The past couple of years have given me a lot of valuable experience. But sometimes I think if I had to do it all over again, I am not sure I would have. The pain of leaving the kids was so much greater than I ever imagined. I just didn't put enough thought into the good-byes.”
― Suzanne Hansen, You'll Never Nanny in This Town Again: The True Adventures of a Hollywood Nanny

“Hollywood’s motives in marketing sex may have been cynical—Hollywood’s motives always are. But in providing audiences with sophisticated fare, it was also responding to real cultural changes that had happened within American society. Hollywood was a few years behind the trend, of course, but that’s nothing new. Don’t forget, this is the same industry that for seventy years has made wonderful, passionate, stirring anti-war movies six or seven years after every war, never during one.”
― Mick LaSalle, Complicated Women: Sex and Power in Pre-Code Hollywood

“Suicide is much easier and more acceptable in Hollywood than growing old gracefully.”
― Julie Burchill

“Why do people pay for entertainment? Because they believe that’s not a real human on the screen. Nobody wants to watch someone ordinary. So the Industry takes ordinary people and decorates [them.] It makes [them] more than [they] really are.”
― Katherine Grace Bond, The Summer of No Regrets

“Let's call out all the predators in Hollywood because enough is enough”
― Laika Constantino

“Hollywood: A people with great personaality.”
― Brian Spellman, We have our difference in common 2.

“A far cry now that she is in Tajrish. This is District One. The posh end of town. Snuggled deep in between the streets of this bustling roundabout are where the rich live. She looks up, a huge billboard with a blue-eyed model sits there with a phone in his hand. Some brand she’s never heard of. She has never quite understood the infatuation Iranians have with celebrities and colored eyes. To her, it seems like any Iranian with green or blue eyes makes their way either on the big screen or on a billboard. The old traditional concept of Persian beauty, black eyes with a unibrow now replaced with Hollywood-inspired looks. The Leo DiCaprios, Brad Pitts of this world. Still a cheap knock-off of them as well.”
― Soroosh Shahrivar, Tajrish

“It had been too good to be true. Stories like theirs only come in fairytales and Hollywood's crude depiction of promise and hope. The poor girl never ends up with the prince. She remained silent without breaking eye contact.”
― Soroosh Shahrivar, Tajrish

“There is nothing more to reveal. Our lives lie bare and exposed.”
― Bhuwan Thapaliya

“The share-and-share-alike anti-establishment ethos of the Topanga Canyon Hollywood hippie entertainment class of the late sixties was what Dennis Wilson offered these ragmuffins. However, pretty quickly, these garbage-eating, acid-tripping, clap-ridden, singsong-sounding runaways proved themselves to be a bunch of freeloading ingrates. They wrecked Wilson's pad and cost him thousands of dollars in venereal-disease medicine and lost, stolen, and damaged property. Until, finally, Wilson just moved out of the house and left it to his business manager to evict the squalid squatters.”
― Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

“Michael Eisner observes that “Hollywood is a microcosm of the world. There’s a group of ethical people, serious, eager to work. Then there’s the underbelly, and the seedy part of that group, the people who supply the underbelly. There are the struggling runaways, the prostitutes—male and female—the dregs of the earth. The vultures. They take the low road. They may wear suits, be articulate…” He trails off.”
― James B. Stewart, Disney War

“This kiss is so massively different from the first two. There's no salty taste to this one, no struggling to breathe through hiccuping sobs. No eyes on us, no modesty, no hesitation. But this beautiful hunger, this urgency for closeness, this desire to lap up every sensation we can pull from each other.”
― Carlyn Greenwald, Sizzle Reel

“The Sixth Sense was ultimately nominated for six Academy Awards. Completed at a cost of $35 million, it earned just under $300 million in the United States alone, the most successful live-action film in Disney’s history.

David Vogel, Disney’s President of Production (recently dismissed by Michael Eisner after purchasing The Sixth Sense without permission) had been right when he told Eisner that he’d left Disney with one of its biggest pictures. Vogel hadn’t found another job and had pretty much stopped looking. He had decided he no longer wanted to rely on the Machiavellian instincts he found necessary to continue as a movie executive. A few studio people called to congratulate him on the film’s enormous success, but he heard nothing from any of the top Disney executives, including Eisner, Roth, and Schneider. Of course, Vogel was one of the few people who knew that Disney had sold off both the foreign and domestic profits to Spyglass, and would earn only a 12.5 percent distribution fee. He wondered what Eisner thought now.”
― James B. Stewart, Disney War

“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

“Like many junior executives, Dawn Steel served as punching bag/chum for her bosses. Once the marketing chief, Frank Mancuso, asked her to tell Steven Spielberg the release date of one of his movies; Spielberg immediately retorted, “Who are you to tell me when the release date is?”
― Rachel Abramowitz, Is That a Gun in Your Pocket?: Women's Experience of 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!