Drew Pinsky Quotes

As soon as I found out how compartmentalized the industry was, I realized, Well, no wonder the cartoons are so bad.

Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is.

Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition, rather than asking an artist to set his limits.

I left Mexico for artistic survival. If I had stayed, I would have been forced by the government, who control the movie business, to direct TV shows or commercials or infomercials for the government.

For a long time, censors have been cutting my works. This makes me so sad, because many times they will tell me, 'Television won't like, so we have to cut, cut, cut!'

Television is much more difficult because at every moment the network can force you to change things based on their belief about what would make it popular. You're in a constant debate with a gun at your head, and the gun is cancellation. So it's hard to win the arguments.

A nice, easy place for freedom of speech to be eroded is comics, because comics are a natural target whenever an election comes up.

In my journey as a cartoonist, I seem to have accidentally stumbled into all sorts of traps, damnations and blacklists.

You know, we were worried that in the UK, there's no anarchy on kids TV. When we grew up kids TV was very anarchic and it was about stuff that your parents would probably object to, if they got to object. And it's gotten very safe.

I have very strong views on TV. There's no diversity, there's no choice. Things are decided by committee.

I don't know that a political climate - as long as it's still a free country - makes much difference in the film world.

The ethics of editorial judgement, however, began to go though a sea change during the late 1970s and '80s when the Carter and Reagan Administrations de-regulated the television industry.

When censorship is intelligent, it will stop a film before it is made. If not, it is too late.

People in TV get too worried about making things accessible but I don't think all of the viewing population want everything to be sanitised and dumbed down.

I turned to historical films because they pass censors more easily.

There's so much control, so many executive producers, so many people looking over their shoulder, so many people trying to second-guess the boss. The space for writers and directors and actors to be creative is zilch.

Creative freedom on television is very limited and I get bored very easily.

Cinema has evolved, and it is high time we stop policing it so rigorously.

I have to own the fact that I'm a black man - that's why I did 'Black Panther' and 'Widows' because if I play the industry game, I lose.

Once I fix what kids watch, I'll be moving on to everything else.

We are disturbed about the effect of the Jewish influence on our press, radio, and motion pictures. It may become very serious. (Fulton) Lewis told us of one instance where the Jewish advertising firms threatened to remove all their advertising from the Mutual System if a certain feature was permitted to go on the air. The threat was powerful enough to have the feature removed.

It would be nice to think that a censor could allow a genuine work of artistic seriousness and ban a titillating piece of sadism, but it would take a miracle to make such a distinction stick.

We have more freedom of the press than any other country in a similar position. Even way back in the frightened '50s, Communists, for example, could publish their magazine. The KKK published their own books. But face it, the mass media is controlled by money.

If the media spotlight affects my work or represses what I want to say in the future, then it is bad.

The ratings thing is the real issue. It really hurts movies. For example, in Redbelt, I smoked. The whole plot of my character was based on the fact that I was a smoker. And then they discovered that just by having someone smoking in the movie, it immediately makes the rating an R. So they had to cut out every shot where I had a cigarette in my hand and it totally affected the performance. That was very frustrating to David Mamet as well. I can remember him saying, "It's a nightmare."