Quotes

When I see that I mourn for my lost hair. It was red.

[on what film that can accomplish that theater can't] For one thing, it's the record of a performance. The theater is ephemeral, it's gossamer. And films can reach many, many more people than a theater performance can reach by distribution. In a major sense, films are a record that the theater cannot keep.

[on Orson Welles] He was a genius. But (John) Houseman used to talk about Orson's self-destructiveness, and the not-finishing-things side. And then there was the ego. ... You know he and Welles were partners, and then that dissolved, and years later, Houseman was producing 'Julius Caesar' with Marlon Brando. And Orson ran into him at Chasen's and shouted, 'You son of a bitch, you stole my play!' His play, mind you, not William Shakespeare's. And then he threw a flaming can of Sterno at him. So you had that with Orson, too.

[1979] Milly remains to this day, a rebel.

[2003] Now, you begin to look at the cop from that vantage point, that the person who best understands the criminal mind-set is the policeman, and you've got an interesting dynamic.

Everyone heard that subpoenas were being handed out. [director Jules] Dassin lived on Bronson Avenue, and there was a knock on Jules's front door. Julie answered to find [20th Century Fox production chief] Darryl Zanuck, who said, 'You better get out of town.'

[who talked about the symbolic nature of all these places that Alfred Hitchcock used, and how American they were] Well, you're very sensitive and you got it. The thing is, if one looks at Saboteur again, which was made in 1942, when the war was on, you realize that this was - Hitch would never call this a 'political' picture. He did not believe in 'political pictures.' His whole feeling was, 'I don't like that social content in movies. I make entertainment.' To use Graham Greene's phrase. But... if you look at Saboteur again, you've got a political picture. Not only the fact that it's on the Statue of Liberty that the villain finally falls - although Hitch always said he made a mistake on that scene.

[who steadfastly believed that Hollywood Television Theater presented better drama than what was seen in the dark ages] We have better writers - [Arthur] Miller, [Christopher] Fry, [William] Faulkner, [Enid] Bagnold, [George Bernard] Shaw, [Henrik] Ibsen. Not only is the writing as good or better, but we can deal with more daring material.

[1972] People come to us because they know we're working on the highest level. That's immodest to say, but it's true. Partly because of the material we supply them.

[1974] I know there's a lot of reverence for the BBC. It's the best there is - but, we're good too.

[on whether he had any memories of "Shorty"] I don't have any except that I remember that he wasn't a dwarf, but he wasn't much taller than one. He was very short. And very, very strong. He could sort of push you over with his finger.

I saw [Dr. Daniel Auschlander on St. Elsewhere] as a man of some intellectual power. One of the best [U.S. Army generals of the Second World War]... was an intellectual: Vinegar Joe Stillwell. He was a small, wiry man. He'd been a schoolteacher. He would not have thought the way [Marine Corps General James] Masters did, however. Masters would have been closer to Chiang Kai-shek than Stillwell.

We were naive, but you need a kind of naiveté to keep up that level of energy. And you knew you were reaching people. The ticket prices were kept low -- I remember playing the Biltmore, with an 85-cent top -- and people would come in who had never been in a theater in their life. You'd give a speech and they'd shout out, 'That's telling 'em!' And you'd realize, well, we've struck a nerve.

[1989] As a heavy, you're always in conflict. You're into the energy of the piece. When you play a hero, you have to create situations of interest to the audience that aren't just white bread. It's easier to play a heavy. It's more dramatic. The new-found freedom of television helps.

[1978] I felt it would make a great musical. So, with all those thought in mind, I did absolutely nothing - for 10 days. Then I happened to be a dinner party where Jerry Lawrence was present. I suggested to him that he and Lee write it as a musical for the Hollywood Musical Theatre.

[on his friendship with Charles Chaplin] I did a picture with [Chaplin] called Limelight, and even before Limelight, I had become a friend of his as did my wife. We went out on the boat with him socially and so forth. This was all rooted in tennis. Charlie was passionate about tennis as I am and I used to play with him about four times a week. Out of that grew a real friendship. And one day he asked me if I wanted to be in Limelight. I had the great experience of doing the last picture he made in this country. It was a very personal story - it was really about a man who could no longer make people laugh, and Charlie really felt that he had lost that ability. He was an extraordinary man - he was a genius. To work with him was fascinating.

[who recalled telling the lady at the box office] Well, you know, right across the street, at the Longacre Theater, I played that theater in 1935 with one of the really great actors in the world, Pierre Fresnay... I was in a play with him called Noah [where he gave] one of the great performances. The top was $2.20.'

[The legitimate stage is] based on economics. You know, we did Mercury [Theater productions ] on $6,000, I believe. True, it was the depths of the depression, 1937, so $6,000 represented a lot of money. But still it wasn't a lot of money - even as far as productions on Broadway went. When you get into [motion] pictures, the phrase I gave you - 'Too rich for my blood' - came from the head of a studio who said that to me. I was going in to see Ben Kahane, who headed RKO, and we were talking about the possibility of my producing there. And he said, 'I see you worked with Orson Welles - well, that's too rich for my blood.' And I knew I was a goner right there.

[2009] One day, Orson said we are going to do a play - I don't remember the name - but it was an Elizabethan dark tragedy. The point of the story is: He called a rehearsal, a reading after one of the shows at 11:30 at night. We come in and the theater is almost filled with actors who have been promised parts in this eight-character play. Chubby [Sherman] and I were assigned three lines each. I remember [Welles] sitting there with a dollar cigar and a gardenia.... It was then I made up my mind I was leaving. And Chubby, who was his oldest friend, in a way, also left.

[if comedy was harder than drama] Well, there's the great story of Edmund Gwenn on his deathbed. He was dying and someone said, 'Oh, this is very difficult, isn't it Teddy?' And he said, 'Not as difficult as comedy.' I wouldn't say that. He had a right to say that - he was a superb actor - but it depends on the writing, on a combination of circumstances. Sometimes comedy seems easier than drama. Drama can become incredibly laborious.

[When he was working on a movie with Daniel Day-Lewis]: He's terrific. I'll tell you a funny thing about him. Years ago I produced an hour show for Hitchcock with Robert Redford and an actress named Zohra Lampert. It was from a story by Nicholas Blake. Nicholas Blake was the nom de plume of a poet named Cecil Day-Lewis, who was the father of Daniel Day-Lewis. On The Age of Innocence, Daniel was very closed when I first came in - not snobbish, but he was very concentrated. Then one morning in makeup, I said, 'You know I once produced a Nicholas Blake show, which your father wrote - the book, he didn't do the screenplay.' And we got into the whole Cecil Day-Lewis thing, and Daniel opened up and was very friendly. So when I saw him at [the] Telluride [film festival] in 2007, he was the soul of warmth and joy and was wonderful. We had a marvelous time together. He's a marvelous guy. And what an actor. Terrific.

[2007] This clarity is what's so sadly lacking today in pictures. Most of these guys could never tell you what's happening on the screen, or what they're going to shoot. Hitch could tell you every shot.

What they did was take a radio studio and simply put the sets up against the wall. On this wall, they put a set, and maybe had room for another. That's how confined it was, and how primitive. And that was the days of the beginning of TV.

Oh, gee, when I think back on it, it's amazing what happens to us as we move out into the world. My family were Conservative Jews. My parents were both born in this country, but my father grew up on the Lower East Side and my mother was born and raised in Harlem when there was a large Jewish 'colony' there. Eventually they moved to Jersey City to get away from New York.

[on Elia Kazan] I remember a review [Elia] Kazan got as an actor in [Clifford] Odets' 'Paradise Lost,' a 'proletarian thunderbolt,' they called him then. And [years later, at the HUAC hearings] he named names. ... The story was that Zanuck told him, 'Look, your career's on the line.' The rationalization was, well, the authorities know the names anyway. But that's not sufficient. Not sufficient. People were ruined. Ruined.

[in 2011] Every director who went from silents to talkies wrote with the camera. They didn't need dialogue, they got you by letting you see it. Hitch brought that from silent films.

[2012] I knew, way back before I came out here [must've been in the 1930s], I [got to know] a poet in New York named Alfred Craigborn [who] spoke German, very fluently. And so, he used to work at doing translations. Craigborn was working on translating a book by a biologist who had written a book in German, and was translating it into English. This German professor, who had a heavy accent, said, 'Your English language is not good. It doesn't have the right sound, you see, lack of poetry. It's so ugly.' [The German composer] Hans Eisler used to fall out of his chair, and, at any opportunity he got, he said, 'Tell that story, he loved that story,' it would knock him out. So, I got to roll my eyes each time, because Hans would go, his legs would go up, he was pretty short. So, that was Hans' humor, he had a wonderful humor.

[on his popularity of playing the seventy-something Dr. Daniel Auschlander on St. Elsewhere]: The style was interesting in that the [film] equipment that finally arrived at that point - like Panavision hand-held - you could do wonderful things. We used to say that the strength of the show was in the corridors of the hospital. As soon as it went away from the hospital it got, in my view, a little shaky. But as long as it was in the hospital it was dynamite, because they dealt with subjects that had never been dealt with before. And in the corridors, particularly, with these hand held cameras, the moving shots, and then going into these rooms and out of the rooms gave the [show] a very alive style.

[on Bernard Herrmann]: As fond as I was of Benny, I'm inclined to agree with [my wife] Peggy, because I was close to that situation. If one looks at the whole picture, it's what they call in sports a judgment call - what you call in the arts an aesthetic judgment. There was great pressure on Hitchcock not to hire Benny Herrmann. That pressure came from the front office at Universal, most notably from their so-called music department. The reason given was that Benny Herrmann wouldn't write a hit song. "Torn Curtain" was made at about the time that this vogue of having a hit song was becoming fashionable. We all know [that] Benny could write lovely melodies - he wrote a beautiful Malaguena for a Hitchcock TV episode called "The Life Work of Juan Diaz."

[1996] ...And he met the right people. He was one of the right people. And he did have charm; you couldn't take that away from him. During those times, he was not the [expatriate] English club member he was when he was an angry; he was himself. Benny was very East Side Jewish. He was like many talented people of that generation from that part of the world. He was a child of the Depression - we were all children of the Depression. Benny's speech never changed. His charm never changed. I would never take his grouching seriously. Once he was picking on a guy terribly; I didn't get angry, I just said, 'Benny, lay off. It might cost the guy a job.' And he laid off. Once you did that with Benny, he got perspective on what he was doing.

[2004] I'd been on the Federal Theatre in The Living Newspaper and I played prominent roles in the first three Living Newspapers. So when Orson and John Houseman left the Federal Theatre to form the Mercury [Theater], they asked me to go with them because of my work on The Living Newspaper.

And they need a million and a half dollars to get it out because it's in hock to the Shah's family. So there again, Orson ended up with misfortune.

[on the death of Ed Flanders, who played Dr. Donald Westphall]: What a way to be remembered if you're an actor of his quality!

[on the pilot of St. Elsewhere (1982) without Ed Flanders playing Dr. Donald Westphall]: The pilot was stopped in mid-air. Bruce [Paltrow] was unhappy with the way it was going and he was unhappy with some of the casting. For one thing, Auschlander [was supposed to have] originally come from Vienna and had a Viennese accent. We had to drop that. He was also unhappy with the photography, which was too pretty -- too romantic ... The cameraman was very good, but it didn't have the roughness Bruce wanted. ... [The man originally cast as Dr. Westphall] was a very good actor, but the quality was not what Bruce wanted, so he got Ed Flanders who, in my view, there was no finer actor in America.

[on the topics St. Elsewhere (1982) had to tackle] The show dealt with subjects never discussed before on television. To my knowledge, it was the first time that AIDS was featured. It also examined issues such as the expense of dialysis for patients, and other topics included religious themes. The writing was brilliant with a superb cast including Ed Flanders - I don't think there was a finer actor in America - and Denzel Washington who went on to have great success.

[who said in 2014 about his long-running marriage to Peggy Lloyd, who had died three years previously] A couple of days before she died, she asked how long we had been married. I told her 75 years and she said 'It should last.' I thought that was charming.

The year was 1916 and there were little Charlie Chaplins that you would wind up and they would walk. I remember vividly. I was sitting in the high chair with the little tray in front of me. My parents would wind it up and it would walk to me.