Quotes
I was an only child growing up in New York and reading was my escape. It was a place I went to very happily. I loved Sherlock Holmes. The books that probably had the biggest effect on me were Hound of the Baskervilles and also Mutiny on the Bounty.
I try to just communicate what I want done as clearly and simply as possible.
I think most people don't react well to being screamed at. It's counterproductive.
I read all the Sherlock Holmes books and realized that they're really not character-driven stories.
I honestly believe that anybody who does what I do and says they are not competitive is lying. You have to be competitive.
I hire obsessive people, people who literally work 60 to 70 hours a week for months on end and who have fine-tuned detectors for what's good and what's bad. A lot of them have been there for more than a decade.
I hardly see myself as a futurist.
I get bored with establishing shots of people getting out of cars and walking into buildings, getting into elevators and then 45 seconds later they have a line.
I don't think you can really make television based on what you think audiences want. You can only make stories that you like, because you have to watch it so many times.
I don't know if you have ever been in a Writers Guild meeting, but it's kind of like the Wobbly meetings in the 1930s, with people saying 'The heel of management is on our necks,' phrases that have not been in general usage for decades.
I do love television. But the business is accelerating and people are not getting the chance to fail.
Everybody knows things are not the same. The people running the TV end of a major vertically integrated company know how much money a successful show can make.
Drama or comedy programming is still the surest way for advertisers to reach a mass audience. Once that changes, all bets are off.
As soon as you become complacent your show gets canceled.
Any model that would change those numbers is categorized as elitist and non-inclusive.
And the consumer doesn't care. They don't watch networks, they watch TV shows.
Advertising is the art of the tiny. You have to tell a complete a story and deliver a complete message in a very encapsulated form. It disciplines you to cut away extraneous information.
You can't do anything if a person says no. In such a case, there's nothing you can do - unlike the popular cliche that pressure is exerted, or that maybe an unwilling source is done away with.
What we wanted from an agent depended on what he brought in.
We planted bugs, microphones, in premises which interested us in the West. We weren't too successful - I would have said unfortunately in former years, but I don't care anymore now.