Pauline Kael Quotes

We originally developed 'The Client List' along with Lifetime as a TV movie - my manager and I became partners on the project. Then, we brought in Howard Braunstein on the project and produced it along with Lifetime.

I never really watched the TV series.

TV isn't like films; you can't rest on your laurels.

One musical that deeply influenced me - and continues to do so - is the 1997 ABC TV movie of Rodgers and Hammerstein's 'Cinderella,' starring Brandy, with Whitney Houston as the Fairy Godmother and Whoopi Goldberg as the prince's mom.

The thrill of doing television versus features is, in television, you get to focus more on the characters.

Television is very different than working on film. With films, you get to develop a set of characters, and then, at the end of the film, you have to throw them away.

I love doing 'Castle.' We pump out 24 episodes in 10 months, and we work long hours. We do lots and lots of takes, and everyone there is a talent machine. It is a taxing endeavour to say the least, but when you get into a groove, it doesn't matter if you're tired, it doesn't matter if you're sick. You can do it.

TV is where writers get to tell interesting stories. Because writers, for the most part, run television.

Reality television is a scripted hyper-life that employs writers, but won't allow them to call themselves writers or join the union.

I was doing an hour drama on television and a Jackie Chan movie in Toronto, so I was on a plane every three days.

I make my living doing freelance directing for North American television shot in Toronto, series like Alfred Hitchcock Presents, Twilight Zone, and so forth.

Back when we started this show, the hottest program on television was 'Keeping Up With the Gabors.'

American television is very much created by the writers, just the volume of it. The writers are so key. You're just trying to do something that serves that script. And in general, film isn't all about the script, really.

Local television shows do not, in general, supply make-up artists. The exception to this is Los Angeles, an unusually generous city in this regard, since they also provide this service for radio appearances.

When I finished the series, I wasn't going to do television again. I never wanted to do television to begin with, and I was so exhausted by the process that I was wary of being in front of the camera again.

Unless you're a directing producer of a television show, for the most part, the director comes in one week to direct and episode, and then leaves. I'd much rather produce television and occasionally direct an episode of a show I'm producing, then just come in as an outside director.

Television is a runaway train that you have to get on for nine months of the year. But at the same time, it has a wonderful immediacy.

In television, the creator is really the voice...

[Television] is a great medium for writers, because there's just no time for a studio to interfere very long. You write it, you shoot it; it's on TV.

If I want a television, I would love the buy American-made televisions like they used to have where they had GE and Sylvania and all of the different. Today, it's Samsung, it's LG, it's Sony. We don't make televisions anymore.

As far as the difference for me between television and movies, I really thrill to the pace of television. As exhausting as it can be - there was actually one day when we never went to bed.

Doing reality TV is a lot harder than I thought because I come from the world of [scripted] television where everything is thought out and you know what's going to happen, your lines, what your wardrobe is going to be, etc. But with reality, it's very spontaneous and the cameras are around for 12 hours a day.

When I write a film, the film gets handed off to a producer and a director and I go my merry way. With television, I am expected and contracted to stick around and actually produce what I've written.

"Dukes of Hazzard" or something you could, you know that, your work is going to be made up of that - episodic television shows. Not that I got many of them, but that was where I - but actually oddly enough though, they were teaching camera terminology at the same time in this acting class, so I actually was able to understand what rack focus and whip pan and all that stuff meant.

The show [ StarTalk ] was born as a radio program out of a National Science Foundation grant.