Hollywood Hierarchy Quotes

I think Hollywood has a class system. The actors are like the inmates, but the truth is they're running the asylum.

The most despised sector of Hollywood are the writers. A good writer is quickly promoted to a 'concept man' - and then a producer - because he's too valuable to simply be a writer.

You can't manufacture a career as an actor because you aren't in control of what projects come to you, unless you are No. 1, two, three or four in the world.

You can think of Hollywood as high school. TV actors are freshmen, comedy actors are maybe juniors, and dramatic actors - they're the cool seniors.

There are all these levels of pretension in LA. Every time you walk into a café or a bar or a restaurant in LA everybody turns around to see if you're famous. Everybody can seem like a celebrity. You can meet somebody who looks like Joe Schmoe and he turns out to be the head of HBO or something. Or you meet a person who just won an Oscar and he looks like he just won an Oscar. And it's a sprawling city, there's so many different parts to it.

I hadn't made a big-budget film, and in Hollywood there's a sort of man and boys situation. You're a man, you make $80 million movies! As if it's harder to make an $80 million movie. Well, I guess businesswise it is because you have more executives to argue with.

An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer.

What I learned from my go-round with 'In the Heights' is that it's tough to make a movie. In Hollywood, even the people in charge have people in charge.

Hollywood is a whole other level of crazy. I've never met so many assistants who have assistants. It's a stratified society on its own.

We joke a lot about how, in Hollywood, the writer is one step below the doormat. That's not self-loathing. That's true!

I always think of young Hollywood as its own little high school. There are the girls who have been working for a while that are kind of like the Queen Bees and the new kids at 'school' just starting out.

They were grooming Doris Day to take over the top spot. Jack L. Warner asked me to play her sister in one picture. I said, "Come on, Jack. No one could ever believe that I would have Doris Day for a sister."

Any actress will tell you - it's really hard. If you're not an A-list Hollywood movie star, if you're in the middle, there are people who assume you wouldn't do certain things without even asking you, when actually you probably would. And there are people who always think you are busy doing something else.

They're working their way down. Next year, Todd Bridges gets the award. When I was a kid I wanted to be Eddie Murphy and now I'm a rip-off of Eddie Murphy.

There's a real separation between actors and all the other functions of Hollywood. If you're an actor you're somehow not a member of the crew. You're somehow more special. I hate that.

Relative to the power that movie stars have, and producers and directors, I would say that even the most respected screenwriters have very little power in Hollywood. I don't think it's in the nature of the writer's profession to go after that power. Writers spend their time alone, hallucinating, writing, making these things up, while these other people are out schmoozing, making connections, meeting each other. They are trotting the corridors of power and making sure they've put their own imprints in it. And they're promoting themselves and their images, as they should.

It was not my class of people. There was not a producer, a press agent, a director, an actor.

I've tried not to get sucked into the Hollywood hierarchy system. Personally, I don't like it when people are deferential to me because I'm an established filmmaker. It's a blue-collar sensibility.