Hollywood

"What this indicated, surprisingly to me, was that the hotbed of creativity that was the supposed hallmark of Hollywood was not all it was cracked up to be. It was much harder than I thought for the studios to take big risks and to innovate. They seemed to trade more on certainty and copycatting than risk. This meant that if Pixar were to raise its flag as an entertainment company, it would have to avoid the Hollywood habits that stifled innovation. If Pixar traded its familial and informal culture for one based on control and celebrity, it could lose the freshness and spirit on which it depended. Maybe my grumbling about Pixar’s lonely outpost in Point Richmond, California, was misplaced. Perhaps it was a good thing, making it easier for Pixar to forge its own way."

"When we first met Skip, I asked him, “What makes stars rise to the top in Hollywood?” “People think there’s a lot of luck involved,” he said. “But I don’t think so. You’d be amazed how savvy the top stars are, not just in their art, but in business. It’s no accident that they got where they did. They are very, very sharp.”"

"When the film finally opened, we got the most outstanding reviews, but not great box office results. We were nominated for twelve Academy Awards, but David Puttnam, the head of Columbia, had his own competing film, *Chariots of Fire,* and he went all out publicly denigrating *Reds* as an out-of-control spendthrift production that took jobs away from Hollywood. That clever and craven campaign did us in."

"I’m fairly certain Charlie really thought that hiring me was a good comeuppance for Yablans’s arrogance and insubordination, but that after a while somehow Yablans and I would find common ground. Charlie and everyone else in the business thought Yablans was a genius distributor, and after he suffered a little humiliation, this would go the way most Hollywood relationships cynically went: the money would talk and no one would walk."

"Before I arrived, Davis had been having a good time at Fox. He liked lording his status over everyone on the lot, and liked Hollywood and all the extracurricular stuff that went with it. The Davises were very socially ambitious, and they had an interesting technique to attract celebrities: they would send them elaborate flower arrangements or gifts, invite them to some event, and then send a thank-you gift afterward. I said to some of my friends who received this graft, “Rather than accept these gifts, why don’t you just get paid directly in cash for coming? Why don’t you say, ‘Ten thousand dollars a pop for drinks, one hundred thousand to come for dinner’? Because, you know, this is not about being social. This is about being bought, so you might as well get paid in cash without the froufrou.”"

"The one person I never got my way with was the über-powerful chairman of MCA, the wildly feared then “king” of Hollywood, Lew Wasserman. I’d known him since I was eleven years old as the father of my schoolmate Lynne. He’d intimidated me then and forever since. The only time I ever tried to negotiate with him, he wouldn’t give an inch, not even a fraction of an inch."

"The cigarette industry was also boosted by the film industry. Ordinary people could not afford the yachts, fur coats and luxury goods displayed by Hollywood stars in films, but they could smoke the cigarettes their screen idols were enjoying so freely."

"For a long time, American couturiers and manufacturers had been trying to shake off the yoke of Paris. The world of cinema in Hollywood had its own designers who created a fashion more or less detached from ours. In New York, the gigantic clothing industry had established a plan to prevent the return of the “tyranny of Paris.” Millions of dollars had been spent to make Seventh Avenue the exclusive engine of fashion on the American continent. Haute Couture salons were being set up and recruiting Parisian models at great expense. This transfer of creation to the United States would have been a disaster not only for French Haute Couture but for the multitude of industries, craft activities, and services that follow in its wake."