Committee Decisions Quotes

Our whole system was to settle disputes within the [congressional] committees. It's a waste of time to bring out a bill if you can't pass it. I just don't like to have a record vote for the sake of having a vote.

I do believe very much in movie as a one-man-show. I think that where I've watched movie go wrong, it's usually because the dread committee has been interfering with it.

Government likes committees... a lot. Committees kill all the really good ideas and generally all the really bad ideas. They produce middle-ground mush.

When you decide you want to become a television writer, you naively assume it's going to be like the writers on the old 'Dick Van Dyke Show.' You'll write something and they'll just put it on TV. But what you quickly discover is that American network television is television by committee.

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

You couldn't always trust the history books. They told a diluted truth, a truth by committee.

Success brings with it pressure to conform. I always thought that success would lead to freedom, but the opposite is true: more people get involved, and committees make decisions, and it becomes a fight to stay free.

I found myself in network always trying to play catch up because once things get going there's no time to fix this and that. And also the writing, it was more inclined to be by committee in network which drowns out the purity and the voice of the show.

I won't do advertising if they bring a layout and say, 'This is what we want to do,' because anybody can do that; it's not interesting. They've got digital and the computer; it's not taking pictures, it's not magic - it's a picture done by committee.

By the time we got to MGM, and Lions Gate the movie was done there was nothing else to say. It was done. Just as at Universal, it was art by committee.

So much of what you see now in Hollywood is written and directed by committee, and you can see it.

Today, everything has to be made by committee, and has to have special effects, but there's always room for good films.

All these teachers and [screenwriting] books mean you see movies that have been worked over by more committees wielding more rules, that all originality and authorship is lost. That's why you're seeing superstars like Brad Pitt in THE FIGHT CLUB and Tom Cruise in MAGNOLIA. They're desperately searching for people writing and directing off-formula movies.

If you work on network TV, they want to pick your casts, dictate your story and how your show works. It just becomes creativity by committee, which is never good.

The wisdom of crowds works when the crowd is choosing the price of an ox, when there's a single numeric average. But if it's a design or something that matters, the decision is made by committee, and that's crap. You want people and groups who are able to think thoughts before they share.

There is something about a mortarboard that gives otherwise sane and normal people the overwhelming urge to burden you with advice. Some of them cannot help themselves. They were asked to do it by a committee. But one can only take so many pieces of wisdom before they all start to blur together.

Modern animated movies are the products not of anyone’s individual vision, but rather a scattered accumulation of compromises made out of fear by members of large committees.

This is how good movies get made and always have: from the gut instinct of the financiers, not just by committee and research.

A curious observation is the uniform way that committees review curriculum for each field of study. Too often, authorities have a knee-jerk impulse to declare that 'all curriculum areas will be the same.' In fact, real and significant differences exist between fields of study.

The age of the rock star ended with the passing of physical product, the rise of automated percussion, the domination of the committee approach to hit-making, the widespread adoption of choreography, and, above all, the advent of the mystique-destroying Internet.

The big difference between the radio show and the TV work is that I don't have to work by committee on the radio show. I'm the DJ; I can play what I want and suffer or get praised by that. With a TV show, it's much more of a collaboration, and the song that I might think is perfect may get shot down and vice versa.

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

We always carry out by committee anything in which any one of us alone would be too reasonable to persist.

I think ultimately audience members like to see someone controlling the quality of a film. A lot of films you see are made by committees and studios and producers.