Hollywood Evolution Quotes

Times change; Hollywood is not the same as it was when I first entered the business. It felt to me like it was starting to narrow down and centralize itself around what would... make money.

When I got to Hollywood, there wasn't even a Boulevard. I'm that old. It was just a little dirt trail. I'm kidding.

Hollywood embraced me in the late '80s because there was a good project I was in and it was different. Nowadays, it's about corporate mentality, box office, youth.

Hollywood used to be run by artists and people who loved artists... people who wanted to make movies for all the right reasons. For the love. The Art. To tell stories. Yes to make money as well, but it was about both. Now I feel, it's mostly about bottom line and making money.

I love directors who aren't going back to the stereotypes, who are helping write and create roles for women that are not in the typical Hollywood box. I'm very, very interested in films that are going outside of stereotypical roles for women.

I'm fascinated by how Hollywood has changed since I started. Today it's about immediate delivery. There's less risk and less art.

[Virginia Madsen] big part in that movie ['Class'] required her shirt to get ripped off, and looking back, it couldn't be a more egregious, vintage, lowbrow, 1980s Porky's-esque, shoehorned-in moment. Like, you would never have that moment in a movie that aspired to be what that movie did today.

There's a trend toward anti-heroes now, and I think it goes back to guys like Bogart and Cagney. They seemed to have no compassion, and they were always alone.

Hollywood changed to become a more marketing-driven Hollywood, where people who are running the studios are more like marketing people, and they need titles.

When I was coming up, it was the golden age. It was Julia Roberts and Meg Ryan, and Reese Witherspoon was starting. You really had, 'Who is America's Next Sweetheart?' every couple of years. And then this sort of bromance slacker thing took over.

For a while, all the studios had their art-house divisions, but that went by the by pretty quickly. Now, they're really focusing on these huge blockbusters, spending a fortune on cartoon pictures and comic-strip movies and superhero movies, and they aren't making pictures like 'How Green Was My Valley,' which was an Oscar winner in its day.

If you look at Hollywood today, compared to five years ago, 10 years ago, 20 years ago or 30 years ago, the change from moment to moment has always been extraordinary. It never stops moving.

There's more empathetic representations than we're used to seeing. I honestly feel like in the early days of Hollywood, women did have those. Women had very traditional roles in society of wife and mother, but when they went to the movies, they got to see women be, like, really cool, amazing characters and femme fatales and all of this. And then there was just this systemic reaction where it was all about, "How do we make money?" And everybody wants to sell things to boys. And then women's entertainment became devalued in a way that I think is disrespectful and hurtful.

I left L.A. and moved to Cleveland for four years in the early 2000s or whatever. I came back and thought that everything had changed. I was like, 'Oh my God, I don't think I ever fit in here. And wait, who are all of these celebrities that are not actors? Where did all of the actors go?'

I love Marlon Brando and James Dean. That was when it was all about the star and the script. Nowadays, everything has to be action-packed.