Primer Movie Quotes

millions—often more than the budget of the movie itself—studios regularly write off major releases as complete washes. And when they do succeed, no one has any idea why or which of the ingredients were responsible for it. As screenwriter William Goldman famously put it, nobody knows anything—even the people in charge. It’s all a big gamble. Which is fine, because their system is designed to absorb these losses. The hits pay for the mistakes many times over. But there is a big difference between them and everyone else in the world. You can’t really afford for your start-up to fail; your friend has sunk everything into her new business; and I can’t allow my book to flop. We don’t have ten other projects coming down the pike. This is it.

The movie marketing paradigm says throw an expensive premiere and hope that translates into ticket sales come opening weekend. A growth hacker says, “Hey, it’s the twenty-first century, and we can be a lot more technical about how we acquire and capture new customers.” The start-up world is full of companies taking clever hacks to drive their first set of customers into their sales funnel. The necessity of that jolt—needing to get it any way they can—has made start-ups very creative.

There’s no business like show business. Yet, when it comes right down to it, that’s the industry every marketing team—no matter what business they’re actually in—pretends to be in when they’re launching something new. Deep down, I think anyone marketing or launching fantasizes that they are premiering a blockbuster movie. And this illusion shapes and warps every marketing decision we make. It feels good, but it’s so very wrong.

Our first idea is a grand opening, a big launch, a press release, or major media coverage. We default to thinking we need an advertising budget. We want red carpet and celebrities. Most dangerously we assume we need to get as many customers as possible in a very short window of time—and if it doesn’t work right away, we consider the whole thing a failure (which, of course, we cannot afford). Our delusion is that we should be Transformers and not The Blair Witch Project. Needless to say, this is preposterous. Yet you and I have been taught, unquestionably, to follow it for years. What’s wrong with it? Well, for starters: most movies fail. Despite the glamour and the history of movie marketing, even after investing

Primer of Love [Lesson 3] I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book. ~ Groucho Marx Lesson 3) Television kills romance. Read my lips. No fucking broadcast or cable TV. Your 60" LED TV should only to be only used as a monitor to watch movies. Oh, you need the weather? Open the fucking window. The news? You shmuck, that's just a distraction to sell advertising. There are only five important news events per century. In this century, nothing significant has happened since Einstein, Hiroshima, the Human Genome Project, the smart phone and You Tube. All news is simply a variation on these same themes:science, war, health, technology and entertainment. If you're compelled to know the breaking bad news, watch it on your phone while you take a shit, not in the bedroom!

According to the director, Primer is a movie about the relationship between risk and trust. This is true. But it also makes a concrete point about the potential purpose of time travel—it’s too important to use only for money, but too dangerous to use for anything else.

Your movies tell the story of the great divide as if it is a premonition of things to come or burnt into your memory of prehistory. Yet, none of your movies stop to ask, "What was the last order humans gave the A.I. before the divide?

Knowledge was rarer then. A secondhand magazine was an occasion. For a Far Rockaway teenager merely to find a mathematics textbook took will and enterprise. Each radio program, each telephone call, each lecture in a local synagogue, each movie at the new Gem theater on Mott Avenue carried the weight of something special. Each book Richard possessed burned itself into his memory. When a primer on mathematical methods baffled him, he worked through it formula by formula, filling a notebook with self-imposed exercises. He and his friends traded mathematical tidbits like baseball cards. If a boy named Morrie Jacobs told him that the cosine of 20 degrees multiplied by the cosine of 40 degrees multiplied by the cosine of 80 degrees equaled exactly one-eighth, he would remember that curiosity for the rest of his life,