Industry Obstacles Quotes

I struggled with working with producers because no one openly wanted to give me a chance to rap on their beats. That's just honest talk. No one really wanted to take that risk.

The music business is a weird business. Sometimes licensing doesn't happen because some business component that you never knew about stops it.

I was very surprised that for a while I could only get cast as straight. It was that way for a few years.

There was no studio system to let me work my way up through small roles. When I got up on my hind legs, no one would believe it.

There are a lot of doors that still get shut, and there are a lot of walls to still breach. But, the stuff that does come across to me, or that I hear about or read about, that I'm willing to go out there and fight for, I still have to go audition. I do have a certain leeway to choose, from that group, what I want to say, as an artist.

Since I started acting, I've always been aware of the sort of 'beastly entity' that is America and Hollywood, and semi-consciously, I devised a kind of route in - I'd seen a lot of people try and fail.

When 'Firefly' was canceled, we had just a few other places to shop it to - to take it over... And all of them had reasons why they couldn't do it that time.

When you're faced with challenges in any industry, but especially the music industry, it tests you in a lot of ways, both personally and professionally.

With no back-up in the industry, it is tough to prove yourself.

I'm trying to work in studio movies, but they won't hire me.

The intersection of being female and a showrunner carries difficult challenges.

I thought I'd give myself 10 years as an entertainment journalist and build up so much clout that there was no way Hollywood could ignore me when I started delivering scripts. Little did I know they were very good at ignoring it.

With instrumental music, it is traditionally hard to get exposure.

I'd say it's far more challenging to be female and be a showrunner. People are not surprised to see a black person running this show, but the female aspect is the thing that I get asked about.

Making a movie in Hollywood is a bit like playing a board game, where you have to throw a six to start.

One of the things I haven't been ready for is how male-dominated the music industry is. I just didn't have a clue.

This is still a big barrier for me and it is for a lot of foreign actors.

I was managing editor for a while [in National Lampoon ], and it does cause business problems when your circulation goes up.

I've had quite a wide spread of a career. But it's not like I've had to negotiate what Sienna Miller has had to negotiate, or even Felicity Jones, for example.

At almost forty years old, I assumed my career on camera was over. And I was certainly given that message by all the TV managers and news directors who passed on me when I was trying to get a job back in the business.

If I were a star kid, I wouldn't have tried so many things. I would have done theatre and directly joined movies. I did radio and TV shows because I had to carve my own way. Outsiders like me have to reach Bollywood through modelling, theatre, or radio.

I wanted to be the first female, young teenager producer, and it didn't happen. And when it finally did happen, I was shelved because I was signed to Warner Bros.

In Mexico, you need to be a bulldog to make a movie because everything is set up for you to go back home and get depressed and not do the movie.

It's hard in this business to get the opportunities to show off range.

The really cool challenge of '24' was learning on camera how to be a dramatic actress. The biggest difficulty was the industry side of things. I was very lucky that I had Joel Surnow, one of the creators of '24,' in my corner. Early on, the Fox executives couldn't believe that I was on the show.