Cinema

… I turned in what is, I think, quite a good script in which the scientific processes used by the Curies and the trains of reasoning they pursued are rendered in pictorial terms (all within the space of five minutes, which is about all the public will tolerate of this kind of thing).

— Aldous Huxley, letter to Julian Huxley from Hollywood, 1938, Letters of Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, 1969, 437.

The fact that films cannot pay their expenses unless they are seen by twenty or thirty million people, imposes the most enormous intellectual and conventional limitations.
— Aldous Huxley, letter to Victoria Ocampo, 1945, Letters of Aldous Huxley, Chatto and Windus, 1969, 536.

Take that black box away. I can’t act in front of it.
— Herbert Beerbohm Tree (1853 – 1917), objecting to the presence of a camera while performing in a silent film.

Why should people go out and pay money to see bad films when they can stay home and see bad television for nothing?
— Samuel Goldwyn (1882 – 1974)

Here’s looking at you, kid.
— Humphrey Bogart (1899 – 1957), in Casablanca.

Photography is truth. And cinema is truth twenty-four times a second.
— Jean-Luc Godard (1930 – 2022), Le Petit Soldat.

Who invented the television set? In any deep sense, it was Clerk Maxwell who foresaw the existence of radio waves, and Heinrich Hertz, who proved it, and J. J. Thomson who discovered the electron. This is not said in order to rob any practical man of the invention, but from a sad sense of justice; for neither Maxwell nor Hertz nor J. J. Thomson would take pride in television just now.
— Jacob Bronowski (1908 – 1974), Science and Human Values, Julian Messner, 1956.

Television is a medium of entertainment that permits millions of people to listen to the same joke at the same time – and yet remain lonesome.
— T. S. Eliot (1888 – 1965).

He found a formula for drawing comic rabbits:
This formula for drawing comic rabbits paid,
So in the end he could not change the tragic habits
This formula for drawing comic rabbits made.
— Robert Graves (1895 – 1985), Epitaph on an Unfortunate Artist.

Thanks to the movies, gunfire has always sounded unreal to me, even when being fired at.
— Sir Peter Ustinov (1921 – 2004), Dear Me.

My one regret in life is that I’m not someone else.
— Woody Allen.

 

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