Greg MacGillivray Quotes

Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change.

If you use Hollywood as the test tissue for mankind, what could the prognosis be?

The idea of taking what people call the 'entertainment culture' as a focus of study, including historical perspective, is not a bad idea.

Film, therefore, is part of society, not distant from it, easy to experience for people regardless of class.

I may have destroyed world culture, but MTV wouldn't exist today if it wasn't for me.

It's very, very hard to affect culture. And you can get surprised thinking you're farther down the path of change than you really are because, frankly, most of us like the way things are.

Hollywood likes to boast that it can elevate the national conscience.

Before 'Schindler's List,' I wouldn't have believed movies had a lot of power for social change.

Demographically speaking, young white people are not in the majority in this country; they're in the minority. My question is, if they're not the majority anymore, then what happens? How do things change? Or do they change at all?

I want to shake things up like 'Bloom County' did.

The whole world loves American movies, blue jeans, jazz and rock and roll. It is probably a better way to get to know our country than by what politicians or airline commercials represent.

When 'Sex and the City' aired its first season, people didn't know about HBO as a place for original series. People weren't saying, 'Oh I've got to watch 'Sex and the City'!' They found it later. In some ways, it helped change what people thought of HBO.

I've often used the extremes in my work to comment on the mainstream. I think that sometimes a subject that I'm working on, like popular culture, is so present all around us that they're hard to see. It's like: How do you see the air you breathe? How do you see how it affects you?

Popular culture isn't a freeze-frame; it is images zapping by in rapid-fire succession, which is why collage is such an effective way of representing contemporary life. The blur between images creates a kind of motion in the mind.

This great, though disastrous, culture can only change as we begin to stand off and see... the inveterate materialism which has become the model for cultures around the world.

As a newcomer to America who learned to 'speak American' by watching movies, I firmly believe that to change the politics of immigration and citizenship, we must change culture - the way we portray undocumented people like me and our role in society.

All true artists in the world from all countries and all genres are influenced by Michael Jackson. There were music videos before Michael Jackson, and there were music videos after Michael Jackson. He brought such a huge change in the marketing and positioning of the music video.

There are still plenty of movie people peddling black stereotypes. I guess Tyler Perry's probably the most massively successful.

Films really can change a conversation and change someone's thinking and perception, especially with people of color at the center. It rarely happens. I think it's important for both the community but also the world to see people of color in all genres, especially love stories.

Once you 'got' Pop, you could never see a sign again the same way again. And once you thought Pop, you could never see America the same way again.

You have to be respectful of pop culture, because people interpret it in the way they want.

Television is the first truly democratic culture—the first culture available to everybody and entirely governed by what the people want. The most terrifying thing is what people do want.

All around us are the consequences of the most significant technological, and hence cultural, revolution in generations

Popular culture is inescapable in the U.S.

Western societies will have to focus on the dangers of too rapid cultural change. That might involve some limits on the rate of immigration and on the kinds of immigrants who are permitted to enter.