I grew up in television studios watching Mum and Dad do ‘This Morning’ and other stuff, and I’m just like lots of people, I’m following in their parents’ footsteps.
I have a real interest in pushing some of the limits of things that studios don’t want to make.
I’m making a movie about Wonder Woman, who I love, who to me is one of the great superheroes, so I just treated her like a universal character, and that’s what I think is the next step when I think you can do that more and more and when studios have the confidence to do that more and more.
I love living in Burbank. It has major movie studios, huge media empires, but the city still feels like a mom-and-pop town. It’s not pretentious at all. It doesn’t feel like a big Hollywood town, and it has every right to be, but it’s very friendly and easygoing.
The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before, and the pleasure you get from writing – rare but profound – remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.
For someone in my position, there’s opportunities to be anything you want to be, even if you shouldn’t be eligible, and I think that’s left a bad taste in a lots of financers’ and studios’ mouths. Just cause someone’s popular at one thing, letting them do the other isn’t always the right thing.
I bumped into Mike Epps in a barber shop. I was in the Warner Brothers studios trying to find my way for an audition and director Jordan Peele was just standing talking in a corner, so I had to introduce myself.
A conveyor belt of Think Tank pundits and allied operatives poured into the TV studios, and together they built a fortress around Mrs. Thatcher’s memory that was rooted in theories about economics. They did this because economics is the only language that wonks understand.
You’re fighting a losing battle if you expect the people who own the studios to make moral choices.
I spent most of the year in the studio for electronic music at a radio station in Cologne or in other studios where I produced new works with all kinds of electronic apparatus.
I don’t see a lot, but I think what the movie studios know and what they always know but they kind of ignore, which is that a there’s an audience for movies like ‘Get Out,’ and ‘Hidden Figures,’ and to some extent ‘Moonlight,’ which made a lot less money than ‘Hidden Figures’ did.
When the major studios flourished many years ago, an actor was groomed, developed, and worked frequently at his craft. The studios really took care of their actors.
The beating heart of your story… that’s not what shows up in a trailer. The other stuff is what shows up in a trailer, because that’s what gets people in to the seats, and that’s how studios make their money.
Growing up, I would watch a movie on video and would go to the back of the VHS and locate the address for Universal Pictures or MGM or whatever. I’d write to the studios asking them if I could be in a movie. They never wrote me back.
I don’t particularly like recording studios, they tend to be lifeless and without any natural light, so I wanted to record wherever we lived. We just don’t want to be bound to a studio to who we’d have to pay untold sums to.
I go to studios and dance all the time. And that’s something that will always be instilled in me. That was always my first passion from the time I was 3 years old – dance.
During my time at high school and university in Kreuzlingen and St. Gallen, I traveled around Europe looking at art, visiting artists, studios, galleries and museums.
But what’s interesting is now – and not only in horror, but across the board – the studios basically only make B pictures with A budgets. That’s the biggest difference.
I would love nothing more than me and my family getting green cards, going to L.A. for a year, sitting down with the big Hollywood studios and coming up with the most advanced and awesome Internet distribution platform for movies. It would make Hollywood more money than cinemas, DVDs, and everything else combined.
Relatives cannot help you in the studios. You stand or fall by your own efforts.
I loved all those classic figures from the ’30s and ’40s… Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, Humphrey Bogart, Rita Hayworth. They had such glamour and style. I loved the movies of those times too – so much attention paid to details, lights, clothing, the way the studios would develop talent.
Last year, when ‘Black Swan,’ ‘True Grit’ and ‘King’s Speech’ all grossed over $100 million, it gave studios and independent financiers the confidence to make daring movies and not do the same old you-know-what.
Studios are passe for me. I’d rather play in a garage, in a truck, or a rehearsal hall, a club, or a basement.
I remember wearing overcoats, hiding in the bushes outside of Abbey Road Studios, waiting for the traffic to clear. As it did, we would drop our overcoats and run out on to the cross walk and strike our poses.
Working on ‘Open All Hours’ had some unexpected perks, not least the attractions of the canteen at the BBC’s rehearsal studios in West London.
I think, on a larger note, that filmmakers and studios should start to tuck it in a little bit, because films wouldn’t have the pressure they have if the word wasn’t out about how expensive they were.
As New York careens toward the modernity of the twentieth century when Gibson girls were transforming themselves into working women, Clara Driscoll enters the male field of stained glass artistry and builds a lively, multi-national, multi-class women’s department within Tiffany Studios.
My engineer on the ‘Life is Too $hort’ album was Al Eaton. Al Eaton had a studio called One Little Indian Studios, and he was a pretty good guitar player. He would suggest certain songs. Al was the force behind ‘Life is Too $hort’ and definitely the force behind songs like ‘The Ghetto.’
Yet, that’s what studios do. If one thing works, they’ll keep doing it till it runs its course and people aren’t interested anymore.
I like studios. I just don’t like bureaucracies.
I’ve watched the demise of the Hollywood orchestra, the house orchestras of the big studios.
I have a tendency to hire people who tend to be unattractive to the studios. Maybe this is a bad idea.
The major studios are by and large banks, and they give you what is by and large a loan to make a movie. Like banks, they want their money back plus.
It’s rare for the studios to find a filmmaker who wants to make a family film. To find someone that has an idea, embraces it, has kids and wants to make something exciting – well, they don’t see that too often.
I remember showing Prince around Warners’ recording studios. He was the nicest kid.
We wanted to take on social and political and LGBTQ stories which no one at the upper level of the entertainment industry ever really wants to do. So you have to fight, and you have to persuade, and you have to manipulate the studios and the networks. And you have to go back – over and over again – until they say yes.
There are so many venues in which stars are exposed today, that we just know much more and the studios don’t have the control over stars like they used to, in the 30s, 40s, and 50s.
My father believed in moving on with time; he always said that the show must go on, come what may. That is exactly what we did when it came to RK Studios.
I think a lot of studios today are run by women, and we are entering a time when a lot of women have evolved in Second City and Upright Citizens Brigade and wanted to become writers and comedians.
When I was looking for financing while making ‘Hellraiser,’ I wish there was a studio like Project Greenlight Digital Studios behind me.
Producers and studios know what sells. It’s nice to be one of the guys that can help sell a movie by taking his shirt off.
Actually, my true name is Rosa Dolores Alverio. And then I became Rosita Moreno when a stepfather stepped in. And when I got to MGM studios, which was my first film contract, they just thought that Rosita wasn’t a good name, and they changed it to Rita. And yes, it was their idea.
The woeful tales of ‘Super Mario Bros.’ and ‘Street Fighter’ have taught studios that merely slapping a name to a movie is not enough to bring in the fans of the franchise. Also, the way games now unfold their stories more parallels that of a movie, with characters and plot points actually meaning as much as a high score.
There’s no point in me meeting with a bunch of producers or studios, because I’ll write my own scripts in my own time.
I think being a partner with the studios and networks and, more importantly, being a great source for consumers to watch that programming is always going to be a part of our programming mix.
I’ve had various experiences where I’ve been called by Hollywood studios to look at a script or comment on various scientific ideas that they’re trying to inject into a story.
I was recently realizing that I’ve probably spent 80 percent of my life in studios! It’s very difficult to do that and still have a private life; it’s very difficult to do anything else.
Hood films now are made by studios and have nothing to do with the reality they supposedly represent.
The Hollywood structure was monopolistic, run by four or five big studios.
The company, Tiffany Studios, ended up in bankruptcy in 1930 – early ’30s.
