Quote

In another time, another world, each studio made 200 movies a year and had 20 executives. Today, a studio makes less than 20 movies a year and has 500 executives. They own too many parking decks and too many billboard companies. They're awash in overhead, and it's pinning them down, and they know it.

Studios were just run differently. There really was a head of a studio. There were people who loved their studios. Who worked for their studios and were loaned out to other people and everybody sort of got a piece. Well now there's a handful now.

Times change; Hollywood is not the same as it was when I first entered the business. It felt to me like it was starting to narrow down and centralize itself around what would... make money.

In the U.S., it would be so much better if the studios made many more smaller films for niche markets rather than a few tent pole films that swamp cinemas and Hoover up all the funding.

Hollywood is the kind of place that takes what you do well in one thing and manufactures it so the joy can be taken out of it.

Nowadays the big Hollywood studios only make about three movies a year, and they cost about $200 million each. There's no room for error in that, and not a lot of room, I would think, for free expression.

Well, Hollywood isn't made up of individual studio heads anymore. It's made of corporations. And corporations are looking for the bottom line. They don't want to take chances. They want the money back for stockholders.

The fact is that Hollywood, from as early as the sixties to the present time, has ghettoized cinema into the big industry, a marketing industry. In doing this, the audiences have lost touch with the aspects of film which were to be informative and educational and even spiritual.

Hollywood, for me, is the studios. It's a way to produce. It's a different way to make movies, and I never took part in that.

When you worked in a studio it was the studio system that you kind of missed because it was a big, big family. I mean MGM had 5,000 people working a day there. You miss it.