Gary Calamar Quotes

George was getting alot of independence for himself in those days. He was writing more, and wanted things to go his way - where, when we first started things basically went John and Paul's way. You know, 'cuz they were the writers.

That's the fun part about being a director. You get to say, 'Oh, now that I'm in charge, I can try and cast whoever I want.' They can always say no, but that's okay.

Sometimes directors will hire you and say, 'Oh, we love your work.' And then they start to tell you how to do it. I say, 'Hey, man, back off. You hired me to do it. Let me do it.'

The key is you don't want to control the controlled stuff too much and you don't want to be too free flowing in uncontrolled situations. That can be a contentious issue with some directors. The joy of my career is I've gotten to work with great directors who get that balance.

I found collaboration to be a terrible thing in Hollywood because there are so many people involved you have to make a thousand little compromises to every project and every single scene is a committee decision. It's maddening. But with comics you've got an artist and you've got a writer.

My best business decision was to be independent as a musician and artist. My worst was compromising on certain aspects of a deal for the sake of other members of my group when I shouldn't have, because I was right in the end.

We've always decided ourselves what we wanted to put out as our singles and that sort of things.

You can't have cinema by committee if you're trying to do it well.

Everything in my career is my decision - every picture, every outfit. You get one chance at this, and I never saw myself as being a puppet.

But at the same time, never having final cut before, I really learned an interesting thing for any studio executive who is reading this: that if a director has final cut, it's actually easier and more interesting to listen to notes.

I don't believe that an animation studio should be an executive-driven studio.

We've been working with the very best in the business. The studio really just let us alone to make the films.

With acting I am being led by the script, other actors, the director, etc. But with songwriting I feel it is much more self reliant and allows me to be in the creative experience without being as dependent on others.

The best part about stand-up is that you control everything. Period. When you work in movies, or on TV shows, there are 50 other people involved.

I think every actor wants a certain amount of control. Maybe not control, as such, but just to be part of the process. But it's not necessary, I guess.

Why hire these geniuses if they're forced to stick with the script? You want to empower your actors as collaborators.

In the commercial theater, I've been pretty fortunate. The producers that I've worked with have allowed me to define the artistic integrity, the artistic limits of the work.

Writing is a solitary existence. Making a movie is controlled chaos - thousands of moving parts and people. Every decision is a compromise. If you're writing and you don't like how your character looks or talks, you just fix it. But in a movie, if there's something you don't like, that's tough.

Democracy can tie your hands in a rock 'n' roll band, you know? It can be a great thing, but if you've got a certain amount of vision and you write a lot of songs, it's sometimes better to have your own band and make your own decisions.

In general, I don't feel artists should need producers.

If you really wish to be independent and make your own judgements about everything important, it is difficult to be a good team player —because a team has different criteria for making judgements about an issue.

When I create a TV show, it's so that I can write it. I'm not an empire builder; my writing staff is usually a combination of two kinds of people - experts in the world the show is set in, and young writers who will not be unhappy if they're not writing scripts.

What you find with really good directors is that they kind of leave you alone. They've hired you because they know the kind of work you do and the sense of how you'd approach it. So usually, they'll just stand back and maybe give you a nudge once in a while in terms of something specific they might want in a particular scene.

If I wanted to have total control and be a dictator, I would do ice sculpture in my basement. If I want to make a movie, I'm going to work with 500 people, and I will have to work with their strength and their weakness.

Part of the fun of working on 'Beverly Hills, 90210,' for me, was that I got a lot of freedom from our executive producer, Chuck Rosen, to add things, change things. I got a lot of freedom to be creative.