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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.

Things have changed a great deal since the days of Mr. Mayer. The studios no longer control, as they did in those days, artists or directors or producers, as the case may be.

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.

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.

All the Warner actors were real actors. They started in theater and led very straightforward lives - you never saw entourages around. The MGM girls were the glamour girls, and they always had the makeup and hair people with them and all that.

We were like a stock company at Warners. We didn't know any of the stars from the other studios.

Every Vacation movie didn't just make the studio money. They each made the studio a lot of money.

The studio didn't ask them to learn their trade, they just worked them, and when that personality or that gimmick or whatever they had ran dry at the box office, they were dropped and out.

Locations are all tough, all miserable. I never left the sound stage for 18 years at Warners. We never went outside the studio, not even for big scenes.

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.