Old Hollywood Quotes

“For eight years I was an inmate in a state asylum for the insane. During those years I passed through such unbearable terror that I deteriorated into a wild, frightened creature intent only on survival. And I survived. I was raped by orderlies, gnawed on by rats and poisoned by tainted food. I was chained in padded cells, strapped into strait-jackets and half-drowned in ice baths. And I survived. The asylum itself was a steel trap, and I was not released from its jaws alive and victorious. I crawled out mutilated, whimpering and terribly alone. But I did survive.”
― Frances Farmer, Will There Really Be a Morning?

“Today...major actors and actresses develop their own projects or, at the very least, cherry-pick their roles carefully to suit not only their tastes but also whatever image they have cultivated to present to their public. Most major stars have their own production companies through which such projects are developed and even financed. While the biggest male stars of that time did in fact have their own production companies--Jimmy Stewart, Kirk Douglas, John Wayne, and Burt Lancaster, to name a few--and thus exerted creative and financial control over their careers, that was not the case with female stars. But Marilyn Monroe was about to change that.”
― J. Randy Taraborrelli, The Secret Life of Marilyn Monroe

“She ran her own train. She didn't feel she had to get married, she wore her hair and makeup the way she wanted to, she furnished her home the way she wanted to, she did everything the way she wanted to.”
― Barry Paris, Garbo

“To MGM fell the thankless task of policing the Garbo name and its commercial use. Several years earlier, J. Robert Rubin in MGM's New York office was panicked to learn of a trademarked product called Garbo - which turned out to be a new fangled garbage unit. The final cable from headquarters in Culver City concluded, 'It would be fairly hard to stop the word Garbo in connection with a refuse container. It does not seem anyone is going to confuse the two.”
― Barry Paris, Garbo

“She looked Spencer over, tip to toe, as though she were considering buying him. Then she smiled her friendliest smile and said, "You're rather short, aren't you?" "Don't worry honey," said Mankiewicz, trying desperately to extinguish Spencer's glare. "He'll cut you down to size.”
― Garson Kanin, Tracy and Hepburn

“...they had us working days and nights on end" Judy complained in McCall's. "They'd give us pep-up pills to keep us on our feet long after we were exhausted. Then they'd take us to the studio hospital and knock us cold with sleeping pills- Mickey sprawled out on one bed and me on another. Then after four hours they'd wake us up and give us the pep-up pills again so we could work another seventy-two hours in a row. Half of the time we were hanging from the ceiling, but it became a way of life for us.”
― Anne Edwards, Judy Garland

“Women were never absent from film history; they often simply weren’t documented as part of it because they did “”
― Erin Hill, Never Done: A History of Women's Work in Media Production

“Women were never absent from film history; they often simply weren’t documented as part of it because they did “women's work”, which was—by definition— insignificant, tedious, low status, and noncreative. In the golden age of Hollywood, women could be found in nearly every department of every studio, minding the details that might otherwise get in the way of more important, prestigious, or creative work (a.k.a. men's work).
If film historians consider the classical Hollywood era’s mode of production a system, we ought to consider women this system’s main-stay, because studios were built on their low-cost backs and scaled through their brush and keystrokes.”
― Erin Hill, Never Done: A History of Women's Work in Media Production