Fred Allen Quotes

The last thing I ever wanted to get involved with is Hollywood. The way it works is that people get an idea you could possibly do something, but there's a one-in-a-hundred chance that it could get made.

I have come close to producing films. But generally by the time they hit the screen, there's about 50 people with producer credits, so what's the point. I usually find scripts I like with no money attached and take them to producers that I know and try to raise finance.

Nowadays, to get a movie greenlit, you have to make an incredible effort.

I've been in the game long enough to know what elements you have to package together to get a movie into production.

I really wanted 'NH10' to be made, and being associated with it eased the entire process.

It's part of the film-making business and also part of the creative process - putting all the pieces together to make a movie, so that they all line up. Sometimes it looks like you have a lot of projects lined up, but some of them are in different stages.

Hollywood must be the only place on earth where you can be fired by a man wearing a Hawaiian shirt and a baseball cap.

Everyone in Hollywood has a screenplay.

Having gotten TV shows on the air, that's so much less work that trying to get the 'Veronica Mars' movie made.

I loved doing casting because I love actors, and I am very conscious of what actors do. But I always wanted to be a producer.

Well, we are not doing that film actually. At least I am not at the moment, but we are making an effort to get it done; I don't know whether we'll get the financing for it. The old story we had it, it fell out of place and this and that.

The most important question in American cinema, I've learned, is 'When is lunch?'

So I've had really great assistant directors for my last seven movies.

Whether it's acting, directing or writing, I want to be involved in the film industry for the rest of my life.

There were not fifteen people in the story department and twenty-five producers and stuff. And Roger had produced 1,000 movies and directed a couple of hundred, and their comments were always very, very specific.

The film business has so many twists and turns that it's a miracle any film gets made.

You never know when you read a script how it's going to turn out because so much depends on the collaboration between people. If I'd been in some of the movies I turned down, maybe they wouldn't have been a success.

Every movie is like a little company, and any little thing can make it not work.

I don't mean to sound - I don't want it to come out funny, but I don't like show business. I love - I love acting in films. I love it.

It doesn't mean I'm not interested in Hollywood. I like the way it operates; I like the people who are involved and the sense of possibility. But if I ever get back in, it's not going to be as an actress.

With 'The Last Picture Show,' Peter Bogdanovich brought the script to the company that made it. They liked it, and they gave him the money he needed to make the film. He cast it with the actors that he thought were right for the parts. Now, it's the reverse.

It is so hard to get movies made in Hollywood that you got to have six going at once, and you know, probably none of those get made.

When I went to Warner Bros., there was a woman named Bonnie Lee who was an executive who helped me to get to 'Pee-wee's Big Adventure.'

I think it's rare for anyone that a really accomplished, amazing director calls you up and says, 'I want to make a movie around you, and I want it to be this.'

The truth is, we were sick of, every time we finished a movie, having to start all over again from nothing, going to a studio, pitching an idea, setting up a new office.