Paramount Movie Quotes

Went to Studio 54 where there was a birthday party for the black star on Saturday Night Live who's just signed to do a movie with Paramount. Eddie Murphy.

Jerry thought of Dean as a brother, but in time, tempers and egos flared in the partnership, leading to their headline-making breakup in 1956, exactly ten years after they had joined forces. People worried what would become of Dean Martin, but Jerry Lewis flourished in his first solo films: The Delicate Delinquent, The Sad Sack, Rock-a-Bye Baby, and Don't Give Up the Ship. His directors include such comedy pros as Taurog and Frank Tashlin. Eventually, Lewis decided that he wanted to write and direct his own films. As a steady and stellar money-maker for Paramount, no one at the studio was prepared to stand in his way. His first effort was his most daring: The Bellboy,

It is a painful irony that silent movies were driven out of existence just as they were reaching a kind of glorious summit of creativity and imagination, so that some of the best silent movies were also some of the last ones. Of no film was that more true than Wings, which opened on August 12 at the Criterion Theatre in New York, with a dedication to Charles Lindbergh. The film was the conception of John Monk Saunders, a bright young man from Minnesota who was also a Rhodes scholar, a gifted writer, a handsome philanderer, and a drinker, not necessarily in that order. In the early 1920s, Saunders met and became friends with the film producer Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s wife, Bessie. Saunders was an uncommonly charming fellow, and he persuaded Lasky to buy a half-finished novel he had written about aerial combat in the First World War. Fired with excitement, Lasky gave Saunders a record $39,000 for the idea and put him to work on a script. Had Lasky known that Saunders was sleeping with his wife, he might not have been quite so generous. Lasky’s choice for director was unexpected but inspired. William Wellman was thirty years old and had no experience of making big movies—and at $2 million Wings was the biggest movie Paramount had ever undertaken. At a time when top-rank directors like Ernst Lubitsch were paid $175,000 a picture, Wellman was given a salary of $250 a week. But he had one advantage over every other director in Hollywood: he was a World War I flying ace and intimately understood the beauty and enchantment of flight as well as the fearful mayhem of aerial combat. No other filmmaker has ever used technical proficiency to better advantage. Wellman had had a busy life already. Born into a well-to-do family in Brookline, Massachusetts, he had been a high school dropout, a professional ice hockey player, a volunteer in the French Foreign Legion, and a member of the celebrated Lafayette Escadrille flying squad. Both France and the United States had decorated him for gallantry. After the war he became friends with Douglas Fairbanks, who got him a job at the Goldwyn studios as an actor. Wellman hated acting and switched to directing. He became what was known as a contract director, churning out low-budget westerns and other B movies. Always temperamental, he was frequently fired from jobs, once for slapping an actress. He was a startling choice to be put in charge of such a challenging epic. To the astonishment of everyone, he now made one of the most intelligent, moving, and thrilling pictures ever made. Nothing was faked. Whatever the pilot saw in real life the audiences saw on the screen. When clouds or exploding dirigibles were seen outside airplane windows they were real objects filmed in real time. Wellman mounted cameras inside the cockpits looking out, so that the audiences had the sensation of sitting at the pilots’ shoulders, and outside the cockpit looking in, allowing close-up views of the pilots’ reactions. Richard Arlen and Buddy Rogers, the two male stars of the picture, had to be their own cameramen, activating cameras with a remote-control button.

They thought they’d completed their assignment when the studio asked for one more, something punchy for a big production number. So they returned to the piano in their office on the Paramount lot. Several unproductive hours later, they gave up and took a drive in the Los Angeles hills, each of them in an irritable mood. Mercer, trying to think of something cheerful, remembered an “offbeat little rhythm tune”8 he’d heard Arlen humming a few days earlier, one that brought to mind a three-word phrase that had long intrigued him, “Accentuate the Positive.” Later, he gave differing accounts of where he’d first heard that phrase. One was that he’d been in an African American church in Savannah when the preacher, Bishop Grace—called Daddy Grace by his congregation—used it in a sermon. The other was that he’d been told that Father Divine—a Harlem preacher who claimed to be God—had used it. Either way, it was perfect for a song, which he and Arlen created by singing to each other as they continued their drive. Given the source of its lyric and the music’s gospel feel, it’s ironic that it was used in a racially offensive way. In the movie, Bing Crosby and Sonny Tufts performed it in blackface. But “Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive” became a jukebox hit and an enduring pop classic.

Where Jolson conquered, Bing Crosby convinced and charmed, and like Astaire, Jolson too for that matter, he did not possess the physical gifts of a standard leading man (angles and ears and hair, yet again). Also like Astaire, he made it all seem easy, with the laid-back acting and the unforced way that devastating baritone could pour out and swing out. In one crucial sense he was more beholden to Jolson than Astaire, being primarily a solo performer who sang to people more than he sang with them. Recall: who was Crosby’s only steady partner on film? Bob Hope, in a partnership based in jokey rivalry. Other singers in Crosby films, besides Hope and Dorothy Lamour, seldom counted. Nor did most of Crosby’s films. Paramount, his home studio, was a formula-bound factory for most of the 1930s and ’40s, and the golden goose of the Crosby films did not countenance feather-ruffling. One after another, they were amiable time-passers, relaxed escapism that made a mint and sold tons of records and sheet music. For many then and some now, these vehicles offered unthreatening comfort—few chances taken, little deviation from formula, a likable guy ambling through some minor plot and singing mostly great songs. On occasion there was something as glaring as the ridiculous Dixie: as composer Dan Emmett, Crosby speeds up the title song into an uptempo hit only because the theater’s caught on fire. Generally, his films lacked even that cuckoo invigoration, which is why posterity dotes on Holiday Inn and its splashy, inferior semi-remake, White Christmas, and few of the others. While it would not be accurate to view Crosby as another megalomaniacal Jolson type, he lacked Astaire’s forceful imagination. Greater professional curiosity might have made his films—not simply his singing—transcend time and circumstance.

But the arbitrary cuts, edits, and other changes the studio bosses made before releasing that movie were a bitter lesson for my friend, who valued creative control of his work as paramount. When he went on to make a movie based on another script of his own, a big Hollywood studio offered him a standard deal whereby the studio financed the project and held the power to change the film before its release. He refused the deal—his artistic integrity was more important. Instead my friend “bought” creative control by going off on his own and putting every penny of his profits from the first film into this second project. When he was almost done, his money ran out. He went looking for loans, but bank after bank turned him down. Only a last-minute loan from the tenth bank he implored saved the project. The film was Star Wars.

LEO MCCAREY: Over at Paramount, I found myself directing the Marx Brothers in Duck Soup. The amazing thing about that movie was that I succeeded in not going crazy. They were completely mad.

Popularity at the box office did not translate into support from [director John Sturges'] peers in the Academy. In February, when Oscar nominations were announced, The Great Escape had to make do with one, for [Ferris] Webster’s editing. Paramount’s Hud and UA’s Tom Jones, which would bring Tony Richardson the best-director Oscar, dominated the field. Sturges’s rightful place in the best-picture category was taken by 20th Century Fox’s Cleopatra, a lavish flop.

In the spring of 1935, an editor at the New York publishing house Macmillan, while on a scouting trip through the South, was introduced to Mitchell and signed her to a deal for her untitled book. Upon its release in the summer of 1936, the New York Times Book Review declared it “one of the most remarkable first novels produced by an American writer.” Priced at $3, Gone with the Wind was a blockbuster. By the end of the summer, Macmillan had sold over 500,000 copies. A few days prior to the gushing review in the Times, an almost desperate telegram originated from New York reading, “I beg, urge, coax, and plead with you to read this at once. I know that after you read the book you will drop everything and buy it.” The sender, Kay Brown, in this missive to her boss, the movie producer David Selznick, asked to purchase the book’s movie rights before its release. But Selznick waited. On July 15, seeing its reception, Selznick bought the film rights to Gone with the Wind for $50,000. Within a year, sales of the book had exceeded one million copies. Almost immediately Selznick looked to assemble the pieces needed to turn the book into a movie. At the time, he was one of a handful of major independent producers (including Frank Capra, Alfred Hitchcock, and Walt Disney) who had access to the resources to make films. Few others could break into a system controlled by the major studios. After producing films as an employee of major studios, including Paramount and MGM, the thirty-seven-year-old Selznick had branched out to helm his own productions. He had been a highly paid salaried employee throughout the thirties. His career included producer credits on dozens of films, but nothing as big as what he had now taken on. As the producer, Selznick needed to figure out how to take a lengthy book and translate it onto the screen. To do this, Selznick International Pictures needed to hire writers and a director, cast the characters, get the sets and the costumes designed, set a budget, put together the financing by giving investors profit-participation interests, arrange the distribution plan for theaters, and oversee the marketing to bring audiences to see the film. Selznick’s bigger problem was the projected cost.

It is possible that one of the seven other major studios might have bought and made a movie from Everybody comes to Rick's, an unproduced play about a cynical American who owns a bar in Casablanca. (One producer at M-G-M, Sam Marx, did want to buy the play for $5.000, but his boss didn't think it was worth the money.) It wouldn't have been the same movie, not only because it would have starred Gary Cooper at Paramount, Clark Gable at M-G-M, or Tyrone Power at Fox but because another studio's style would have been more languid, less sardonic, or opulently Technicolored.

The main reason I’m writing is that I’ve finished the screenplay for my next film, and I’ve been thinking about you a lot. This character, this woman I’ve been writing about for the past year and a half, is someone that I couldn’t picture in my head without thinking of you. I guess, in a lot of ways, I wrote this character with you in mind. And I don’t know what your situation is right now, how interested you are in acting, but I think you’d be perfect for the part. I’m lining up financing, though after Paramount basically killed my last movie with all their bullshit, I think I’ll be going the independent route again. So there won’t be much money, but I hope you’ll consider it. I’ve attached it so you can read it if you’d like, and I’d love to get your thoughts on it and I would love it even more if the two of us could team up again. I would like to get that same feeling of excitement that I had when I was doing Date Due, and you played a huge role in that happening. Write me if you can,

I remember the first movie I ever saw at a theater. It was The Greatest Show on Earth. I saw it with my mother at the Paramount Theater in Denver in 1952. It was about the circus. I wet my pants.

Like many junior executives, Dawn Steel served as punching bag/chum for her bosses. Once the marketing chief, Frank Mancuso, asked her to tell Steven Spielberg the release date of one of his movies; Spielberg immediately retorted, “Who are you to tell me when the release date is?