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During the '90s, a lot of us in the indie film world were not making our money off our movies. We were screenwriters doing scripts for hire for studios.

For the most part, studio movies have huge budgets. They don't do anything under 30 to 40 million. When you have that much money at stake, you have so many people breathing down your neck.

A lot of things and a lot of money is involved in a movie. It is very upsetting when a movie doesn't fare well at the box-office.

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.

I was slightly disheartened when three of my films didn't work at the box-office. But the silver lining is that people did appreciate my work in those films. Had my performance gone unnoticed, I would've been in big trouble then.

We've gotten to a point where it costs so much money to make a movie that directors and filmmakers feel they have to make sure that everybody gets it. And that's an unfortunate development, I think, in a lot of narratives floating around in the film industry.

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.

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

Not only does Hollywood make money - it seems to make better movies during recessions. I'm sure a lot of studio executives wish we could have one every year.