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Notebook

Thursday, 11th September 2008

This book will refer to several actors or directors who went on "forever": Fritz Lang, Hawks, Hitchcock, Katharine Hepburn, John Wayne. But among directors there are many who had a brief heyday and never regained it: Griffith, Preston Sturges, Orson Welles, Nicholas Ray, Michael Cimino. Quentin Tarantino? It's too pressing a pattern to ignore, and it speaks not just to work so killing that it can take away appetite. It's a bigger issue than that: on a film set, the director must command 200 people; he must answer all their questions and still hold a creative vision intact. This is prodigious, awful, and inhuman, for it easily encourages tyranny and a woeful exaggeration. Whereas to be creative, in so many ways, is to stay inward, alone, shy, inarticulate.
David Thomson, "The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood".

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