Jeanine Basinger Quotes

Hollywood is a very old and very structured situation. There's still a lot of old boys at the top who have the money.

Things have changed a great deal since the days of Mr. Mayer. The studios no longer control, as they did in those days, artists or directors or producers, as the case may be.

Agents have enormous power that studios relinquished to them. The studios, when I first came to Hollywood, that's where the power was.

Studios are used to have an investment in you, an actual, literal investment in an actor. You paid them some money, you had a contract with them and you were almost like a commodity.

Overall, we had about 50 meetings where the brothers would say that I couldn't do any solo records, I couldn't write for other people, I couldn't do this and I couldn't do that. These guys were trying to nail my feet to the ground.

The relationship between talent and management is uneasy, at best.

Only the public can make a star. It's the studios who try to make a system out of it.

As you know, in America there's no rights for the artist, so whatever films I've made kind of belong to the studio, so if they want to remake it they can.

And usually the studios they don't want you to have credit for your movies because they want to take credit for the movies because if you get credit for your movies they've got to pay you more.

I was under contract to Paramount. They wanted to make me into somebody which I was not. So I got so scared and rebelled, so they threw me out of the studio.

We were all ruled by the studio system. I signed a contract for seven years.

Having a studio tell you when to jump and how high eight months of the year for six years is not a relationship I want to get into again.

Actors have given up their clout. Now decision making is in the hands of lighting men, designers, bankers, special-effects people. We need to cut that out and just go with the most able trained actors in the business.

In the contract days, the big studios groomed us to play particular roles and we would stay with the image they gave us and insisted on.

Composers and lyricists are not responsible for storyline and casting. One can imagine actors shouldering this responsibility, since they charge for half the film. But producers never ask actors to share the losses. Instead, they train their guns on composers and lyricists.

The studio didn't ask them to learn their trade, they just worked them, and when that personality or that gimmick or whatever they had ran dry at the box office, they were dropped and out.

In America there's no rights for the artist, so whatever films I've made kind of belong to the studio.

Before 1972, no actors got residuals. They just got paid. No residuals.

I've definitely met nightmare Hollywood types who think they're getting twenty million dollars a picture when they're not. But they act like it. And they just insult everybody.

I've worked with producers who have told me to lose weight, and I'm not overweight, but they want you to look strange, anorexic, horrible. It's odd. It's like they are exerting a power over women, that they want them to look really frail.

The studio have always claimed that the ship is the star of the show, especially when they're renegotiating contracts.

Actors dread working with studios because they dictate what you do in a way that independent movies can't.

Everyone who makes a film is at the major distributors' mercy.

When any young director gets hired by a studio to do a $125 million film based on a preexisting piece of intellectual property, they're climbing into the meat grinder. And what you're coming out with on the other side is a generic, heavily studio-controlled pile of garbage that ends up on the side of Burger King wrappers.

There's no doubt that the patriarchy that we live in also controls the movie industry. The heads of the studios are men, and it's reflected in the scripts they buy and the work that gets made.