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ERIC PLESKOW: Take Rocky, for example. It cost us 66 percent of the budget to find out whether we were right on Rocky. And I assure you, it didn’t open “smash.” It had to build, and it had to be nurtured. In the end, we will spend about four times the budget in advertising alone, in the US and Canada, just to exploit the film.
GEORGE LUCAS: When you make a film, you’re dealing with the largest group of psychotic, neurotic, difficult people you could ever imagine.
MORGAN FREEMAN: A lot of people come here with a dream, and you can see them, they’re still here. But no dream.
GEORGE LUCAS: If you want to make money, I suggest you go into the stock market. The people who come in wanting to be famous and make money are misguided, because this is a bad job. It’s terrible. Really it is. There are many easier ways to make money and become famous. You know, I barely created Yoda.
DAVID PICKER: Everybody is reaching for the golden ring, right? That golden ring has gotten more golden over the last few years. And people go to fewer movies than they used to, but they go to the ones they go to more than they used to. The middle-bracket movie has almost disappeared.
ALJEAN HARMETZ: What happened in the eighties is that all the movies—an exaggeration, not all the movies but a great number of movies—were aimed at adolescents. And the teenagers took over the movie theaters, basically, between 1978 and 1984. Nobody was even making movies for adults, nobody wanted adults, because not only could they get a great deal of money from teenagers, they would go see a movie two, three, or four times. That was the other thing about Jaws: it was a movie that kids want to go back to over and over again.
GALE ANN HURD: One of the reasons that movie budgets are so high is because they’re doing the research and development. Because up until that film proves it can be done, no one knows for sure whether it can be done, and someone has to pay for that research and development. And generally it’s the budget of the film that pays.
Return of the Jedi wasn’t financed just with the revenues from the movie. Half of it was financed from the revenues of the licensing products.
A Star Is Born [1976] sold eight, almost nine million albums at $9.98. So actually, the album grossed almost as much as the film.
And the studios didn’t have a lot of choice, because of the fifty top-grossing directors, for example, in 1990, CAA represented, like, forty-five of them. So you couldn’t say no to us.
STEVEN SPIELBERG: What terrifies me is the idea that TV screens will get larger in the home, sound systems will get better and better, and people will no longer go out. They will only share the mystery with their immediate friends and family. And that’s sad, because movies are theater.
BLAKE EDWARDS: Yeah. Peter [Sellers], to say the least, was very much into the occult, had long conversations with his deceased mother.
MIKE NICHOLS: Jack is such a force for the positive. And I understood from watching him what lifted him, because he was connected to every single person on the set, the wardrobe ladies in the third row of vehicles in the wardrobe trailers—to them, to everybody beyond, to the greens man.
MICHAEL OVITZ: Hollywood always was a global business, but when I started, foreign [box office] was 10 percent of the gross. Getting to the nineties, it was 40 percent.
SAM WASSON: The increase in blockbuster-budgeted movies and subsequent decrease in production transformed a once prolific Hollywood into a risk-adverse industry, economically and artistically terrified of saying yes to filmmakers.
