Words matter. These are the best William Devane Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
The business is built on slowing or even stopping the aging process.
At one time, whenever the hell it was, they wanted a character to come in and stir up the pot. They brought me in for 8-10 episodes and said we’ll try it for that.
Donna Mills came on the show as a female antagonist, about a year before, so now they wanted to have a male antagonist. I was cast as a Senator to shake things up.
It worked well because Don Murray didn’t want to be on Knots anymore.
Ultimately the Emmys are a popularity contest.
What I would have liked to do on that show was play a secretary of state who has huge personal business interests throughout the world. That, to me, seems to be more in synch with reality.
I would fix other people’s lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.
If you watch Cheers, in 12 years they didn’t age a day.
I knew with The West Wing that that wasn’t going to be for very long, that I was just the red herring.
David was the kind of guy who was totally supportive of the actors and instructed the writing staff to trust the actor’s instincts, since after all, it’s the actors playing the character.
I’m an Irish-American, and I grew up in an Irish-American neighborhood.
I didn’t care about that because I’m not a diplomatic person to begin with. I just went along with things and did what I wanted to do because I knew they had to shoot their 12 pages a day. And when they realized that I didn’t alter the text they really didn’t mind what I did.
The West Wing seems to be feeding the myth about how presidential politics are.
And I have to credit David Jacobs with the opportunities he gave me. He was totally into sharing the creation of characters. David put together a show that told the story of people over many years’ time and that was greatly enjoyable. Though nowadays that is frowned upon.
I try to watch only real things, which basically amounts to C-Span for me. I like real people in real situations. I learn from that.
And all of Laura’s stuff, what they wrote originally wasn’t as good and Constance wound up doing that herself. That was all her stuff, reading to the child, because she had children herself and that’s what she would have done.
The same issue is happening on a show like Everybody Loves Raymond now, which is in its eighth year and struggling to come up with good stories. It’ll be interesting to see how they do. The bottom line is, it starts with the writers and ends with the writers.
Clint Eastwood is aging beautifully. But someone like Burt Reynolds and others are practically destroying their faces in the amount of work they have.
Joey, my older brother, had his own TV show in the ’50s, along with Cathy Callahan.
