The model today is that as much as 70 percent of the financing of the picture would come from overseas. Now we're beginning to run out of suckers, because there are not that many people overseas who are willing to put up more than half the money for a movie.

The green-light meeting, when I first started at Paramount, would consist of maybe three or four of us in a room. Perhaps two or three of us would have read the script under discussion.

Though gay lifestyles have certainly moved into the open, there's little evidence that society has become more open in its basic attitudes or that entertainers should feel cozy in emerging from the velvet underground.

It's only in relatively recent years that Hollywood became the playground of multinational corporations which regard movies and TV shows as a minor irritant to their overall activity.

The major media companies are significantly reducing their financial commitment to the motion picture sector.

It really hasn't been demonstrated at any level by any major corporation that it can nurture what is euphemistically called creativity.

Study the public behavior of top stars and you can detect a keen attentiveness to brand value.

The green-light decision process today consists of maybe of 30 or 40 people.

Analyses of the movie marketplace points to an interesting phenomenon: High-profile movies are continuing to do well year-to-year in the U.S. and overseas - this past summer, for example, the top 10 movies registered at the same level as in '04.

Historically, filmmakers always fall in love with every frame, but now that even neophytes are given final cut, this love affair carries with it serious economic implications.

Most movie-goers are overdosing on star coverage; it's the ultimate example of too much information.

Michael Eisner let it be known last week that he had no intention of leaving the entertainment business once he steps down as CEO of Disney in October.

One of Brando's problems is that he can't have a conversation with anyone.

We're going to see a very, very commercial kind of picture-making.

The biggest danger of Hollywood becoming a purely corporate town resides in the creative process.

A green-light meeting is when the decision is made finally whether or not to make a given picture.

The model today is that as much as 70 percent of the financing of the picture would come from overseas. Now we're beginning to run out of suckers, because there are not that many people overseas who are willing to put up more than half the money for a movie.

That's how you get surprises, because what movies are all about is surprises.

Substantially fewer films will be produced over the next year or two. And a significant portion of the production costs of the reduced slate will be borne by hedge funds and other investment groups.

I wasn't hanging around the movie theaters in New York where I grew up, a Manhattan brat.

Hollywood is going to have to find a way of meeting those profit goals.

Do your homework and stand your ground.

From the beginning, the series has been story driven - I began with a story idea - but research feeds it.

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.

Since the beginning, I always loved the game. When you grow up in Montreal, one day you want to be a professional hockey player. When I was six or seven, I knew that was what I wanted.

Before beginning, plan carefully.

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.

The people who voted for President Obama are just beginning to wake up to exactly what they brought in. The 'change' they envisioned is not the 'change' they have gotten.

Religion has caused more harm than any other idea since the beginning of time. There's nothing good I can say about it. People use it as a crutch.

And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.

In the beginning it was all black and white.

A palindrome is a word or pattern that instead of developing in different directions it folds in on itself so that the beginning and end mirror each other, that they are the same.

Learning is the beginning of wealth. Learning is the beginning of health. Learning is the beginning of spirituality. Searching and learning is where the miracle process all begins.

At the beginning of 1955 only about 60 percent of American homes had TVs.

Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.

Most musicians count at the beginning, and never count and talk to their musicians after that. They only talk to them at the end of the song. But I would count with them and talk.

What you really remember at the beginning was that you have to throw a budget together. We made some terrible mistakes at the beginning in my own budget that took us at least a year to catch up on.

There is a spirit and a need and a man at the beginning of every great human advance. Every one of these must be right for that particular moment of history, or nothing happens.

I am pleased to see that information campaigns, such as the America's WETLAND effort, are getting the message out, and people are beginning to realize that wetlands loss in Louisiana affects us all.

I started working on trying to sound like June from the very beginning.

The end comes when we no longer talk with ourselves. It is the end of genuine thinking and the beginning of the final loneliness.

Even though the future seems far away, it is actually beginning right now.

It is a curious sensation: the sort of pain that goes mercifully beyond our powers of feeling. When your heart is broken, your boats are burned: nothing matters any more. It is the end of happiness and the beginning of peace.

The American Revolution was a beginning, not a consummation.

All great deeds and all great thoughts have a ridiculous beginning. Great works are often born on a street corner or in a restaurant's revolving door.

The beginning of 1856 found me teaching in the family of a planter named Bryan, residing in Prince George County, Md., some fifteen or twenty miles from Washington.

I did all the work at the beginning up until the point where I couldn't handle the increasingly heavy art production burden alone. I needed, and got, assistance.

Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

You know, in the beginning when your first payroll comes up and you have to borrow money to meet the payroll, you lose sleep the night before, and you say to yourself real fast, 'Well, maybe I should keep working a couple more years. It's sobering.