Shawn Ryan Quotes

The inventors we remember didn't invent anything. They're the people who took somebody else's invention and made it commercially viable.

Britain is famous for being great at inventing and poor at commercializing.

I tell people all of the time that they would make any show in this business - whether it's black, white, Hispanic, Jewish, Colombian, Dominican - whatever. They'll make it if it sells. It's a business. It's not personal.

I think it would be a good thing in the creative community if there was less embarrassment of this word 'commercial' because that's how you make a business.

Everything I write is designed to be milked to the last drop of revenue.

If there isn't a business logic to get to marketability, the chance of an idea's importance in the world is very low.

I think caring too much about the economics starts affecting the creative aspect of the film. That is a dangerous process for a filmmaker. He should make his film without having to worry about how much it has cost or how much it will be sold for.

Selling an idea to a publisher is not as valuable as selling your audience to a publisher.

Even genius is tied to profit.

In general, the final filter of Hollywood is for-profit. Nothing goes through unless it can make money.

A movie studio has to answer to a marketing department, and to shareholders, to ensure the broadest audience possible for its product; it tends to err on the side of caution as a result.

There are lots of parts of filmmaking that I don't like. At the end of the day, especially on features, the film turns into a commodity. You have to play this entirely new game I'm very uncomfortable with.

We never thought we'd be commercially viable, and we were proved wrong.

'Spooks' was unique. It took up such a lot of your life - I think we did 10 episodes for the first few seasons. That's six months of your life.

The song 'Bite the Thong' in particular, with Damon Albarn, really encapsulates the whole dilemma of, 'Hmm, should I stay on the underground when everybody else is selling out?' Nowadays, you can just do it - have your name-brand clothes, do songs with rock n' rollers - and it's not considered selling out.

We're always looking for ways to extend all of our intellectual property. We've seen that's what happened with 'Harry Potter' and 'The Lord of the Rings.'

When I first saw my line in stores, that's when it really hit me that there was a consumer on the other end of it all, and they were going to have to spend their own money on it. So there was that initial panic. I remember thinking, what if nobody buys it?

The problem is some of our riskier films just don't make as much money. But if you only make films that will just be commercially successful, then you can also sink yourself as a studio.

Price point is always important for mass market commodities. Look at the iPhone. It's expensive. But I think it is going to sell. It does something that people really want to do. People want to share it. It's an emotional thing that goes beyond the price point. It has emotional power. You are connected to it.

We tried to just convince big publishers like EA or other people to make games like 'Cloud'... It's just almost impossible.

Nike is Nike. Adidas is Adidas. I've played in their circuits and stuff like that, but now it's a business. You don't want just product. You're not a kid anymore. You're really trying to get bank. That's about it.

The market kills more artistic passion than anything else.

Saturday morning cartoons do that now, where they develop the toy and then draw the cartoon around it, and the result is the cartoon is a commercial for the toy and the toy is a commercial for the cartoon. The same thing's happening now in comic strips; it's just another way to get the competitive edge. You saturate all the different markets and allow each other to advertise the other, and it's the best of all possible worlds. You can see the financial incentive to work that way. I just think it's to the detriment of integrity in comic strip art.

Sometimes I might feel like [a movie] is kind of a weird idea and if I'm going to get enough money to execute it properly I've got to get somebody in it that is going to justify the expense.

If you're in a system where you must make profit in order to survive. You are compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others.