Studio Power Quotes

Once you work with a studio on a film, the studio is sort of like this enormous clam that just opens, takes everything and then closes, and no one enters again. They own it all.

We were all ruled by the studio system. I signed a contract for seven years.

There's been a slow death in a way. On the positive side, there are films getting into the Academy Awards that wouldn't have, but on the negative side, financiers are now dominant and making all the decisions. I can't count the ways a director's vision is compromised.

Whenever I'm asked about independent cinema, I think of what Fidel Castro said during the Cold War about the league of non-aligned nations. He said that really, there were only two non-aligned nations: the U.S. and the USSR. The rest of us have to be aligned somewhere. I say similarly, in a way, Paramount, Sony, and Warner Bros. are the only true independents, because they're the only ones who can do whatever they want and have distribution for their films built in.

Agents have enormous power that studios relinquished to them. The studios, when I first came to Hollywood, that's where the power was.

We were just trying to make the films that we could get made, and to push the envelope. We didn't realize how far we had pushed the envelope. That all came later. That all came from books and articles about the golden age of the '70s. Believe me, to a lot of us, it was no golden age. The studio heads were very powerful then. They would fire guys right and left. They would look at your dailies and tell you what was wrong with them... a lot of stuff that doesn't go on today. Young filmmakers who are successful today, they don't often have that to put up with.

Theater owners are exerting a lot of power over the studios to withhold access to content that people want to see. That's bad for consumers, that's bad for studios, and ultimately, I think it will be bad for theaters.

More and more, I've started to understand that no show is dead unless somebody decrees it's dead at a studio.