Hollywood Shuffle Quotes

In keeping with its code-breaking theme, the opening credits of Sneakers has the names of some of the film’s major players presented as anagrams before they get unscrambled: “BLOND RHINO SPANIEL” becomes “PHIL ALDEN ROBINSON,” while “FORT RED BORDER” turns into “ROBERT REDFORD” and “A TURNIP CURES ELVIS” reveals itself as “UNIVERSAL PICTURES.” Not all cast members got their names shuffled—if they had, the world might have discovered that one anagram for “RIVER PHOENIX” is “VIPER HEROIN X.

Privately, she was proud of her Oscar for The Big House because she had conquered a variety of obstacles to create a realistic film where for the first time audiences heard prison doors slam shut, inmates’ steps shuffle down the corridors, and metal cups bang on the mess tables.

He shared his place with a Dr. Tubeside, whose practice consisted largely of injecting people with "vitamin B12", a euphemism for the physician's own blend of amphetamines. Today, early as it was, Doc still had to edge his way past a line of "B12"- deficient housewives of a certain melancholy index, actors with casting calls to show up at, deeply tanned geezers looking ahead to an active day of schmoozing in the sun, stewardii just off in some high-stress red-eye, even a few legit cases of pernicious anemia or vegetarian pregnancy, all shuffling along half asleep, chain-smoking, talking to themselves, sliding one by one into the lobby of the little cinder-block building through a turnstile, next to which, holding a clipboard and checking them in, stood Petunia Leeway, a stunner in a starched cap and micro-length medical outfit, not so much an actual nurse uniform as a lascivious commentary on one, which Dr. Tubeside claimed to've bought a truckload of from Fredericks's of Hollywood, in a variety of fashion pastels, today's being aqua, at close to wholesale.

Mary had been the object of a war between ordinary solid American values and Hollywood, where even money is lost in the shuffle among the hard floors and 5:00 a.m. wardrobe calls of an invisible city named for a plant that never existed, named by a clan that waits for the next movie to sail away on.

He took this door differently, turning the knob slowly, easing the door open, standing off to the side. The smell intensified, but even worse than that, he heard a soft, unpleasant noise, something he couldn’t identify but he instantly hated. He didn’t want to hear it, wanted to run away from it. It was a kind of card-shuffling sound, real low, lots of little sounds joined together, one after the other, but it wasn’t hard-edged like with cards. It was wetter, softer around the edges, and constant. Jordan peeked inside, his heart hammering worse than it had even when he was on the firing step, waiting for the word, for the whistles, to go over and up into the shrieking, machine-gun-drumming terror of an assault… There was a body on the narrow bed. A woman. Probably. She had been wearing a nightdress, which had been white, and was now uniformly a faded pink, and shredded into fragments. Things moved on the body. Insects, Jordan thought. Or worms. Or something…his eyes and brain couldn’t process what he was seeing. Lots of tiny things roiling across what was now just a lump of meat, the skin long since gone, half the flesh, too, and even the bones diminished, foreshortened… Eaten. Jordan choked back the bile in his throat as he worked out what he was seeing.