Quotes

The screenwriter in Hollywood is not an isolated man working in his own time, employing his own criteria and studying his own aims. He is an employee working for a company. He works office hours in an office and usually to an overall schedule. A novelist is judged when his work appears. A screenwriter is judged en route to the final draft and can be fired before he's even gotten that far.

[in 1968] The problem that now faces John Huston, more acutely than ever before, is the problem of subject matter. If he is honest enough to choose subject-matter that really suits him, and not the stuff that goes with his popular image, then we can expect films from him as good as Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967). And two or three more of those will put him among the best film-makers anywhere.

[on Richard Brooks in 1965] Brooks is conservative, not in the sense of being right-wing politically (he is nothing if not a liberal), but in the sense that his beliefs are reasoned, not inspired. His attitudes are evolutionary and not Utopian.