I got a chance to work with Mel Brooks on two of his films: Silent Movie and High Anxiety.
BARRY LEVINSONStudios just sometimes make decisions on their own that you’re always flabbergasted by. It just happens that way for whatever reason – not even pointing fingers, it just is.
More Barry Levinson Quotes
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I think certain movies work and that is part of the magic of it all. We can’t truly define why something succeeds.
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I think when Sarah Palin opened her mouth and started talking, the more she talked, the less appealing she became.
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I do know when you look at some ballplayer and all of a sudden he is the size of a truck something is wrong.
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I’m fascinated by documentaries, to begin with. Because of the nature of television, as opposed to theatrical, documentaries can be in this long form and take you on a journey.
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A lot of time mistakes are very interesting – you look for the behaviour that’s not the one you expect.
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Ronald Reagan was this actor who was going to be president, and he was very charming. What he had was, he talked about America in ways that got people all caught up in it. He was creating this America – it could even be the mythical “America” – that we subscribe to.
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They’re intimidating the networks and levying these fines, so the networks are not sure of what they can or can’t do.
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You do understand that you can’t force the situation, but in terms of how you edit, you can define that to take the audience along, whether it be a storyline or a character moment that we can play out. The more experience you’ve had, the more beneficial it is, period.
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You don’t always have to have the ending, but you want to have a satisfactory conclusion.
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I think it’s a promising time which will show a lot of diversification that we’ve seen in the past.
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When I began to think about the head of the family, the storyteller, the rise of television which became the new storyteller, the break-up of the American family as an idea and then Avalon came.
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I think test screening works at its best when the audience knows what it’s getting.
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It’s always hard to explain why an audience ultimately responds to a movie.
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I play around with human things, human relationships and that, and allow that kind of talk to work in that way, on that level.
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I worked at a local television station and I got a chance to direct and do all those things – worked kiddie shows, Ranger House show with the hand puppets and things like that.
BARRY LEVINSON