Beautiful actors are learning what beautiful actresses like Charlize Theron discovered a while ago – that they get taken more seriously when they trash the same beauty that got them taken seriously to begin with. – Steve Erickson
The witch-hunting McCarthy era found Hollywood’s view of the press growing bleaker along with the decade’s view of everything else. – Steve Erickson
For a writer, the Book Festival is interesting because you bump into all these other writers whose work you know, whose names you know, and you have a chance to put a person with the name and the work. – Steve Erickson
The notion of artistic responsibility begs questions with no satisfactory conclusions, the most inevitable and ineffectual being that we should just keep thinking and talking about it, given that the alternative – a governmental body monitoring the movies we make and see – is unacceptable. – Steve Erickson
Beautiful women get in Hollywood’s door quickest and then are shut out when their beauty no longer measures up to whatever it is that Hollywood or audiences decide is beautiful enough; once they’re inside, their choices are limited by the same beauty that won them their entree. – Steve Erickson
Inevitably, considerations of God in what otherwise intend to be mass entertainments come down to the same thing they come down to in any context, which is a consideration of humanity. – Steve Erickson
What we call ‘the news’ always has tried to tell a story, and it’s always told the story it wanted or, put most positively, whatever story it believed needed telling. – Steve Erickson
Slavery was the betrayal of the American Promise at the moment that promise was made. – Steve Erickson
Americans should be ashamed of how aflutter they get about Downton Abbey – it’s unpatriotic. I seem to remember we fought a revolution so as not to put up with this nonsense, where notions of station are so unforgiving that upper and lower echelons are practically different species. – Steve Erickson
It’s not always clear whether the filmmaker intends our alienation or is even aware of it. – Steve Erickson
I rode the buses in L.A. until I was in my early 30s, and there’s something about driving or riding through L.A. after sundown, when the Utopian city goes into hiding and another city comes out, more Doors and less Byrds. – Steve Erickson
White Americans believe we’ve made more progress since the end of slavery in 1865 than do black Americans for whom ’12 Years a Slave’ documents a collective memory, passed down in the genes and by the lore of generations. – Steve Erickson
‘Downton Abbey’ is a pageant, a cavalcade of a time when being born right is the first and most irrevocable career move, and in which an older order – whose passing ‘Downton’s’ creator, Julian Fellowes, clearly mourns – is submerging in icy seas as surely as a grand and extravagant ocean liner. – Steve Erickson
Among the mysteries of the creative ego is how the transcendence of what artists do is their own response to the darkness of who they are, and the same personal darkness that is at odds with the art is what propels artists to the light of what they create. – Steve Erickson
David Cronenberg’s ‘Maps to the Stars’ is a Hollywood monster movie in which Hollywood is the monster. – Steve Erickson
Two subsequent incidents of import established CNN: the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger in 1986, which CNN was the only network to cover as it happened, and the 1991 Gulf War, which CNN chronicled round the clock from a proximity as irresistible as it was alarming, bomb blasts and gunfire lighting up TV screens from coast to coast. – Steve Erickson
Besides inquiries as to our general well-being, the first thing asked about us, in our first seconds of being alive, is whether we’re a boy or girl. Our first passport through this world is our genitals. – Steve Erickson
Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of the supreme nut jobs in movie history, and of course I mean that in the nicest way. – Steve Erickson
Hopefully it doesn’t come as too much of a shock that artists we love watching or listening to for an hour or two aren’t always people with whom we otherwise would want to spend 20 minutes. – Steve Erickson
For thousands of years, we’ve insisted that art can make us better people. Unless a brief can be fashioned that, by its very nature, art appeals only to the best in people and never the darkness, which defies both logic and intuition, then we have to acknowledge that art can make some of us worse. – Steve Erickson
Struggling to end the war and to eliminate slavery once and for all by way of the 13th Amendment, with the amendment’s prospective passage undermining the effort to make peace with the Confederacy and vice versa, Lincoln embodied the Great Man theory that leftists disdain. – Steve Erickson
The instant that movies became described as character driven was the instant when characters stopped mattering in movies. In other words, the birth of the notion of the character-driven movie coincided with the birth of movies in which characters were incidental to the very activities in which they engaged. – Steve Erickson
Representing not just the resurrection of a career, 1953 marked 37-year-old Frank Sinatra’s creative emergence as the best singer of his century. – Steve Erickson
Movie directors who have filmed F. Scott Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ believe it’s a big book looming inside a small one, and they aren’t altogether wrong. – Steve Erickson
‘Homeland’ is necessarily open-ended since the idea behind television is to spend as much time as possible resolving as little as possible, with a story’s usual need for resolution replaced by an unrelenting urgency that always defers answers and constantly postpones closure. – Steve Erickson
Notwithstanding the likes of ‘All the President’s Men’ in the 1970s or HBO’s recent ‘The Newsroom,’ film and TV have always loved to hate the press. – Steve Erickson
That godfather of the modern action blockbuster, ‘The Godfather,’ is entirely character driven, propelled by the transformation of a crime lord’s youngest son, who breaks bad when he evolves from white-sheep war hero to blood-soaked inheritor of his father’s empire. – Steve Erickson
Scarlett Johansson has a smile she tries to suppress in every movie she makes. She’s been trying to keep a straight face since she appeared with Bill Murray 11 years ago in her breakthrough, ‘Lost in Translation.’ – Steve Erickson
Even to current-events junkies, the notion of a 24-hour news channel sounded like a gimmick when the Cable News Network launched more than 30 years ago. – Steve Erickson
