glimpses

“People with happy childhoods never overdo; they don’t strive or exert themselves. They’re moderate, pleasant, well liked, and good citizens. Society needs them. But the tremendous drive and dedication necessary to succeed in any field- not only show business- often seems to be rooted in a disturbed childhood. I wasn’t an unloved or an unwanted child, but I was moved around a lot, and then death and cruel circumstances brought many painful separations.”

-Ball, in her autobiography Love, Lucy


On Aging:

”Love affairs, adventures - these become less important and your work takes on greater meaning because it gives you the illusion of still being young. So you have a growing sense of security there - and less in life, where I am increasingly insecure. The public says bravo, but those close to you say, ‘You’re past 60 and you still have the brain of a 10-year-old. How is it possible? How else could it be? The Madonna, when I was born, said, ‘That one, he’s to remain forever a baby and become an actor.’

I work overtime with my fantasies and always have. Fellini said that when we got past 60, there’d be less trouble, more peace. Women are beautiful, but they complicate life. At night, you don’t sleep, you talk, you argue, you make love at 5 in the morning, then drag yourself off to the studio - a madhouse! But now, there’s still no peace, it’s even worse.

Sunday morning, at the beach at Ostia, I see these pretty girls in bathing suits and I go crazy. With my fantasies, it’ll never end, even at 100! Women see more clearly - too clearly sometimes, especially for an actor who does everything to make real something which, in reality, does not exist. In the theater, you turn a lie, a fiction, into a truth, an illusion into a reality. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been attracted to actresses. They understand this.”

-Marcello Mastroianni, 1987



“Man isn’t a noble savage, he’s an ignoble savage. He is irrational, brutal, weak, silly, unable to be objective about anything where his own interests are involved—that about sums it up. I’m interested in the brutal and violent nature of man because it’s a true picture of him. And any attempt to create social institutions on a false view of the nature of man is probably doomed to failure.”

-Stanley Kubrick, 1972



Don’t try to be original. Just try to be good:

“I haven’t come across any recent new ideas in films that strike me as being particularly important and that have to do with form. I think that a preoccupation with originality of form is more or less a fruitless thing. A truly original person with a truly original mind will not be able to function in the old form and will simply do something different. Others had much better think of the form as being some sort of classical tradition and try to work within it.”

-Kubrick, 1960



“Put me in the last fifteen minutes of a picture and I don’t care what happened before. I don’t even care if I was in the rest of the damned thing - I’ll take it in those fifteen minutes.”

-Barbara Stanwyck (photo by George Hurrell)


How could I have known that murder can sometimes smell like honeysuckle?


“Gentleman: A man who buys two of the same morning paper from the doorman of his favorite nightclub when he leaves with his girl.”

-Marlene Dietrich (photo by Eugene Robert Richee)