I can’t think of any Disney movies that have black people. Abigail, age 9
The fourth Warner Brother. Bob Hope, re Bette Davis
The whole of life is just like watching a film. Only it’s as though you always get in ten minutes after the big picture has started, and no-one will tell you the plot, so you have to work it out all yourself from the clues. Terry Pratchett, Moving Pictures
Everything I learned I learned from the movies. Audrey Hepburn
Usually when you see females in movies, they feel like they have these metallic structures around them, they are caged by male energy. Björk
All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. Jean-Luc Godard
A good movie can take you out of your dull funk and the hopelessness that so often goes with slipping into a theatre; a good movie can make you feel alive again, in contact, not just lost in another city. Good movies make you care, make you believe in possibilities again. If somewhere in the Hollywood-entertainment world someone has managed to break through with something that speaks to you, then it isn’t all corruption. The movie doesn’t have to be great; it can be stupid and empty and you can still have the joy of a good performance, or the joy in just a good line. An actor’s scowl, a small subversive gesture, a dirty remark that someone tosses off with a mock-innocent face, and the world makes a little bit of sense. Sitting there alone or painfully alone because those with you do not react as you do, you know there must be others perhaps in this very theatre or in this city, surely in other theatres in other cities, now, in the past or future, who react as you do. And because movies are the most total and encompassing art form we have, these reactions can seem the most personal and, maybe the most important, imaginable. The romance of movies is not just in those stories and those people on the screen but in the adolescent dream of meeting others who feel as you do about what you’ve seen. You do meet them, of course, and you know each other at once because you talk less about good movies than about what you love in bad movies. Pauline Kael, For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies
The words ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’ which I saw on an Italian movie poster, are perhaps the briefest statement imaginable of the basic appeal of movies. Pauline Kael, American film critic
All I need to make a comedy is a park, a policeman and a pretty girl. Charles Chaplin
Movies are a fad. Audiences really want to see live actors on a stage. Charles Chaplin
People see so many movies that when they finally see one not so bad as the others, they think it’s great. An Academy Award means that you don’t stink quite as much as your cousin. Charles Bukowski, The Last Night of the Earth Poems
There are two things that can absolutely not be carried to the screen: the realistic presentation of the sexual act and praying to God. Orson Welles
The notion of directing a film is the invention of critics – the whole eloquence of cinema is achieved in the editing room. Orson Welles
They don’t exist ... In the old days the greatest thing in the world to be was a movie star. Today the greatest thing in the world is to be a pop singer. Orson Welles, interview The Parkinson Show 1973
I’m not a film star, I am an actress. Being a film star is such a false life, lived for fake values and for publicity. Vivien Leigh
If these Mount Everests of the financial world are going to labor and bring forth still more pictures with people being blown to bits with bazookas and automatic assault rifles with no gory detail left unexploited, if they are going to encourage anxious, ambitious actors, directors, writers and producers to continue their assault on the English language by reducing the vocabularies of their characters to half a dozen words, with one colorful but overused Anglo-Saxon verb and one unbeautiful Anglo-Saxon noun covering just about every situation, then I would like to suggest that they stop and think about this: making millions is not the whole ball game, fellows. Pride of workmanship is worth more. Artistry is worth more. Gregory Peck
My dentist said to me the other day, ‘I’ve enough problems in my life, so why should I see your films?’ David Cronenberg
Cinema is a matter of what’s in the frame and what’s out. Martin Scorsese
I never enjoyed working in a film. Marlene Dietrich
On April 14th 1894 the first commercial motion picture opened at a peephole Kinetoscope parlour in Manhattan. Some years earlier Edison had applied for a patent on a motion picture camera. Horizon: The Wizard Who Spat on the Floor, BBC 1972
Critics allege his role in the invention of the movie camera was minor. ibid.
The Edison Company went into film production. ibid.
Meet Marlene Dietrich: she is Shanghai Lily – a professional user of men … She is a goddess. Screen Goddesses: Arena ***** BBC 2012
In its golden age it was truly a mass entertainment. Everybody could enter the temple as if they were participating in a new religion. ibid.
Goddesses can also punish and destroy, they can be jealous and spiteful. In Mata Hari the infamous spy is played by Greta Garbo. ibid.
Lillian Gish … lit like a saint: Orphans of the Storm (D W Griffith 1912) ibid.
It starred Clara Bow as a shop-girl. ibid.
Gloria Swanson: Queen Kelly 1929 ... Sunset Boulevard. ibid.
Greta Garbo: Flesh and the Devil 1927. ibid.
In Queen Christina (1933) Garbo was at her most iconic. ibid.
Garbo made her last movie in 1941. ibid.
Marlene Dietrich: The Blue Angel: sleazy bar-room singer Lola-Lola. ibid.
Ecstasy 1933: the Austrian actress once called the most beautiful woman in the world – Hedy Lamarr … Lamarr was brought to America by MGM. ibid.
Mae West: (I’m No Angel 1933) ‘When I’m good I’m very good. But when I’m bad I’m better.’ ibid.
Jean Harlow: Hell’s Angels (1930): ‘Would you be shocked if I put on something more comfortable?’ ibid.
Jean Harlow – the blonde bombshell. ibid.
Bette Davis & Joan Crawford were said to be screen rivals – their currency was power and willpower. Bette Davis was a supreme technician of screen acting. ibid.
In All About Eve Davis is usurped by a younger woman. ibid.
Ingrid Bergman was another kind of goddess altogether. ibid.
Roberto Rossellini’s Rome, Open City revealed unflinchingly the terrible consequences of the Nazi occupation. ibid.
Director and star become lovers. When the already married Bergman also became pregnant she was exiled from Hollywood … She stuck with Rossellini. ibid.
Dark thrillers dubbed Film Noir – they brought to the screen a dangerous type of goddess. ibid.
Barbara Stanwyck’s glamour and her fast wit. ibid.
In The Big Sleep Lauren Bacall gives Humphrey Bogart as good as she gets. ibid.
No-one could match the actress dubbed the Love Goddess – Rita Hayworth as Gilda. ibid.
4She removes a single glove as only a screen goddess can. ibid.
Brigitte Bardot: ‘I want to be myself’ (And God Created Woman 1956). ibid.
Sophia Loren. ibid.
Grace Kelly really did walk in beauty … she might have been a goddess come to Earth – can we be sure she wasn’t? ibid.
Audrey Hepburn … European chic. ibid.
In George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun (1951) Elizabeth Taylor was cast as the rich girl. ibid.
Elizabeth Taylor: Cleopatra … the budget soared from two to forty-four million dollars. ibid.
The studio’s last great sensation – Marilyn Monroe. ibid.
Louise Brooks was rediscovered and elevated to the status of a cult icon: 1929 Lulu in Pandora’s Box. ibid.