The Girls in the Picture Quotes

“No, this was the career I wanted; a writer could be employed for as long as she could hold a pencil; for as long as her mind still held out. But an actress—even an actress like Mary—had a fleeting shelf life.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Girls in the Picture

“We remembered these identical experiences differently—but that didn’t make them any less truthful.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Girls in the Picture

“The girls we'd believed to have been lost in the haze of regret and recrimination that comes with surviving in the unscrupulous business; this unjust world. But it turned out they'd been here all along, these two; caught forever in a shared moment, preserved together in a silver frame.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Girls in the Picture

“Her desperation was so palpable it should have had its own dressing room on set.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Girls in the Picture

“All right, all right. Next location!”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Girls in the Picture

“The film—Romance of the Redwoods—will be fine, but, Fran, it’s been awful on the set. I have to be a good little girl—oh, I’m so tired of being told that!”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Girls in the Picture

“But Mary suffering for an hour and a half—that wasn’t what her audiences wanted.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Girls in the Picture

“It’s called The Poor Little Rich Girl, a darling novel about a dear little girl, very rich but very ignored by her busy parents. I read it and I immediately thought of you, Mary—I kept seeing your face on every page. You’ll get to be an actual girl this time, not just a girlish woman—a real child who gets to skip and play, all the things you never got to do when you were young.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Girls in the Picture

“Fran, you’re the only one who can write my next movie. It’s a wonderful story—I want to remake that Norma Talmadge film, Secrets. Remember? You wrote it for Norma back then—back in ’twenty-four, wasn’t it? I think it’s perfect for me now, don’t you? This is very important—my career, you know, it’s—it’s rocky. And then, Douglas—won’t you do this for me?”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Girls in the Picture

“And they were never only movies to me—they were my life. And so I haven’t any other, I never have. But you—you had a life!”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Girls in the Picture

“It was of the two of us at United Artists, Mary and I, along with Cecil B. DeMille and Sam Goldwyn”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Girls in the Picture

“Tonight, all I want to do is dream of that movie. Is that bad? That I’d rather dream of a movie than of a man? Even my own husband?”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Girls in the Picture

“Shared memories; triumphs and tragedies; the heroine doing right in the end despite temptation—all the plots of all the movies I’ve written tangled together into one gigantic ball of yarn I couldn’t begin to unravel.”
― Melanie Benjamin, The Girls in the Picture