Myrna Loy Quotes

When I get called in for stuff for Hollywood, I get to be the best friend of the Caucasian leadIf I want to play the main guy, I have found, I have to write it.

In the world of animation, you can be anything you wanna be. If you're a fat woman, you can play a skinny princess. If you're short wimpy guy, you can play a tall gladiator. If you're a white man, you can play an Arabian prince. And if you're a black man, you can play a donkey or a zebra.

I have a no-die clause in every movie. The black people can't be dying all the time.

I've heard that Black people and Black faces don't sell magazines, but one day you're going to beg me to be on there.

If you go to a network and say, "I wanna do prison stories about black women and Latino women and old women," you're not gonna make a sale. But, if you've got this blonde girl going to prison, you can get in there, and then you can tell all the stories. I just thought it was a terrific gateway drug into all the things I wanted to get into.

When I was growing up, I didn't see me in the movies except in certain lesser roles. If it wasn't funny, I wasn't there. Then Sidney Poitier came along, and he wasn't funny. He was just good. There's me. So that was my pattern.

I'm just honest. They [asians] don't want to see black people generally in their movies.

I've done movies for certain reasons; I did 'Anaconda' because the black man lives. Simple. The black man isn't dead in the first three pages, like Jurassic Park. It's like, 'The black man kills the snake with a Latino girl? Damn! I got to do this.'

Sex in the City was a different kind of phenomenon because of the show itself is a phenomenon and to me that's successful because to resonate with women across the board for six years and have only one African-American actor pass through for one episode.

I would like to see more films being made with people of color behind the camera and in front of the camera, because the more times at bat we have, the better we get.

It's an ongoing joke that a black man is always the first one to get killed in movies.

Film was something I didn't really think about when I was young, because if you looked like me, you weren't a film star.

In most science-fiction pictures, the black guy is either an engineer or a radio operator, and he is the first guy killed - gone from the movie.

We all, white and black, carry various biases around with us.

Chris Nolan can put Batman in full body armor, have him drive a car that looks likes a tank, and make him political, and everyone says, 'Oh, that's OK.' But try making him Filipino, and everyone gets mad.

I don't think people realize what it's like for people of color to audition for film and TV.

I think that for the most part, black people specifically have sort of been used as props in TV shows as a way to move story along or as a way to make things more entertaining.

Until recently, Hollywood offered only a handful of roles to actors of color. The majority of my opportunities have fallen into two categories: Scary Black and Funny Black.

The people who can be helping to make movies that have blacks and Latinos and women and all that - that movie doesn't come to you. Because the idea is that there's no place for black movies.

Imagine a film such as Inception with an entire cast of black people - do you think it would be successful? Would people watch it? But no one questions the fact that everyone's white. That's what we have to change.

People often ask me if I feel discriminated against as a black female director. I don't. I'm actually offered a ton of stuff. But I only want to direct what I write. And I prefer to focus on black female characters. What's most important to me is to put characters up onscreen who are not perfect, but who are human and flawed.

Growing up, I was always the only black kid on my team and (sometimes) I'd get questions from my friends when I'd say, 'I want to be in the NHL' and they'd say, 'Well, there are no black people or not very many in the NHL' and as a kid, you'd wonder why. But overall, I didn't really face any racial difficulties. Nothing too bad or too lasting.

No matter how cutting-edge Hollywood may seem, it is still delayed in how it views people: If producers do not perceive me as an Iranian girl, then I cannot play an Iranian girl. If you aren't perceived as a full black girl, then it makes it more difficult to play a black girl on TV.

Stereotypes wouldn't be so bad if black people were nicer, in general.

My hope as an actress is knowing that I'm someone who is more privileged - I'm biracial and lighter-skinned - and I hope it can open up the door for more women of color, especially darker-skinned black women. I hope everyone hops on the bandwagon and decides to start putting women of color in movies that aren't just about race.