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| Ben Hecht
A man nearly always loves for other reasons than he thinks. A lover is apt to be as full of secrets from himself as is the object of his love from him. Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos. He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.I discovered early in my movie work that a movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. There are times when this distinction may be given to the writer or director. Most often it belongs to the producer.I have written a raucous valentine to a poet's dream and agony. I know that a man who shows me his wealth is like the beggar who shows me his poverty; they are both looking for alms from me, the rich man for the alms of my envy, the poor man for the alms of my guilt.In Hollywood, a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel. In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.In the court of the movie Owner, none criticized, none doubted. And none dared speak of art. In the Owner's mind art was a synonym for bankruptcy. The movie Owners are the only troupe in the history of entertainment that has never been seduced by the adventure of the entertainment world.Love is a hole in the heart. Love is the magician that pulls man out of his own hat.Movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century. Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them -- as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.Much more frequent in Hollywood than the emergence of Cinderella is her sudden vanishing. At our party, even in those glowing days, the clock was always striking twelve for someone at the height of greatness; and there was never a prince to fetch her back to the happy scene.Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.Time is a circus, always packing up and moving away. Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock. We looked on the hopheads, crooks and gunsels and on their bawdy ladies as members of a family among whom we were privileged to move. There was no caste system, moral or social, in our manners. When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance. He becomes a source of blessings rather than wages. Criticism is sacrilege, doubt is heresy. |
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