Dreams on Spec

"[Hollywood] is a very male business, and it has in vast portions of it—the whole action movie part of it might as well be the United States Army in 1943 in that the ethics of it are, you know, boot camp and action movies and guns and explosions and all the rest of it, and that – so that means that about 50% of the business is not only pretty much closed off to women, but women don’t even wanna be in it!"

"I moved into directing for a couple of reasons. ... Most directors, I discovered, need to be convinced that the screenplay they’re going to direct has something to do with them. And this is a tricky thing if you write screenplays where women have parts that are equal to or greater than the male part. And I thought, Why am I out there looking for directors?—because you look at a list of directors, it’s all boys. It certainly was when I started as a screenwriter. So I thought, I’m just gonna become a director and that’ll make it easier."

"I think that it’s easy to give it away—give the definition of success away. Empower other people in determining whether you have talent. The catch-22 is that the more you do that the less you’ll be able to write. That’s the hard part – writing is all about the preservation of your own voice. So if you give that voice away by guessing what you think and you think and you think as you go, you’ll have less to say and then it’ll go away completely!"

"Oh, I remember on Dave, I’d written a bad draft. I was on page 150 and climbing and I had no money then. ... I went home and I said to my wife that I needed to write it again because I wasn’t satisfied. So we took out a loan—a second mortgage on the house—to finish the script and Mike Ovitz, who was a very powerful agent in Hollywood at the time was yelling at me to deliver the script to one of his very powerful clients ‘cause I was late. There was a huge amount of pressure. I literally threw away the first draft and started again from page one."

"Paul Guay (The Little Rascals, Liar Liar, Heartbreakers): For the first time, I heard actors saying my lines and my partner’s lines, and it was – it was extremely thrilling because the kids—most of them—were too young to change them, so they were actually reading them as written, which was nice, and it hasn’t happened a lot since then. Although I have to mention that one of the kids, who was ten, came up to us when we were doing rewrites and said, You know, can you write some more stuff for me? And I thought, This is good training for the Jim Carreys of the world."

"Steven E. de Souza (Die Hard): Well, Jack Warner may have been celebrated for calling writers Schmucks with Underwoods, but 20 years earlier Irving Thalberg … said, The most important person in the motion picture process is the writer, and we must do everything in our power to prevent them from ever realizing it."