by Mardy Grothe
Technically, this is a mixed metaphor; but when a metaphor is badly mixed—a Sam Goldwyn specialty—it is often called a mangled metaphor.
Movies are just another form of merchandising—
we have our factory, which is called a stage;
we make a product, we color it, we title it, and we ship it out in cans.
CARY GRANT
I felt like a raisin in a gigantic fruit salad.
MARK HAMILL, on acting in Star Wars
Lana Turner is to an evening gown
what Frank Lloyd Wright is to a pile of lumber.
REX HARRISON
A movie without music is a little bit like an aeroplane without fuel.
However beautifully the job is done,
we are still on the ground and in a world of reality.
Your music has lifted us all up and sent us soaring.
Everything we cannot say with words or show with action
you have expressed for us.
AUDREY HEPBURN, to Henry Mancini
This came in a 1961 letter Hepburn wrote to Mancini, composer of the score for Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The movie, adapted from a Truman Capote novella, stars Hepburn as Holly Golightly, a glamorous New Yorker who is working as a high-priced escort. Her goal is to meet and marry a wealthy older man, but she becomes attracted to a handsome and struggling young writer (George Peppard), who moves into her apartment building (he, in turn, is being kept by a wealthy older woman). Of the seven Oscar nominations the film received, Mancini took home two, one for the sound track and one (with Johnny Mercer) for the song “Moon River.”
The stage is actors’ country.
You have to get your passport stamped every so often
or they take away your citizenship.
CHARLTON HESTON
This was Heston’s way of saying that film stars needed to occasionally appear on the live theatrical stage, even though stage roles are far less lucrative.
Drama is life with the dull bits cut out.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
For me the cinema is not a slice of life, but a piece of cake.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK
A good review from the critics is just another stay of execution.
DUSTIN HOFFMAN
Also employing an executioner’s analogy, Eli Wallach famously observed: “Having the critics praise you is like having the hangman say you’ve got a pretty neck.” Tyne Daly changed the metaphor, but made the same point: “A critic is someone who never actually goes to battle, yet who afterwards comes out shooting the wounded.”
Academy awards are like orgasms—
only a few of us know the feeling of having had multiple ones.
JOHN HUSTON
Huston was nominated for ten Academy Awards, winning two. He had his multiple orgasms in 1948, when he took home the Best Director and the Best Screenplay Oscars for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
The cinema, like the detective story, makes it possible to experience
without danger all the excitement, passion, and desirousness
which must be suppressed in a humanitarian ordering of society.
CARL JUNG
Glamour is just sex that got civilized.
DOROTHY LAMOUR
Producing is like pushing Jell-O up a hill on a hot day.
LUCY LIU
This is a variation on the metaphor nailing Jell-O to the wall, which describes a task that is virtually impossible. The expression originated in 1903 when Theodore Roosevelt was trying to finalize an agreement with the Columbian government to build a canal in (at the time) their province of Panama. Roosevelt was so frustrated with Columbian officials that he bellowed, “Negotiating with those pirates is like trying to nail currant jelly to the wall.”
Being a writer in Hollywood is like going into Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest
with a great idea for a bar mitzvah.
DAVID MAMET
Mamet’s dim view of Hollywood was also reflected in his 1988 play Speed the Plow, where a character says, “Life in the movie business is like the beginning of a new love affair: it’s full of surprises and you’re constantly getting fucked.”
A trip through a sewer in a glass-bottom boat.
WILSON MIZNER, on his years in Hollywood
Mizner was one of Hollywood’s most colorful characters (Anita Loos called him “America’s most fascinating outlaw”). He and brother Addison were the inspiration for Stephen Sondheim’s 2003 musical, Bounce. Like David Mamet earlier, Mizner also had a dim view of his bosses: “Working for Warner Brothers is like fucking a porcupine; it’s a hundred pricks against one.”
Hollywood is high school with money.
MARTIN MULL
If they tell you that she died of sleeping pills you must know
that she died of a wasting grief, of a slow bleeding at the soul.
CLIFFORD ODETS, on Marilyn Monroe
This appeared in a tribute Odets wrote a month after Monroe’s August 1962 death by an overdose of sleeping pills (it was ruled a probable suicide). In predicting that a legend would spring up around the blonde sex symbol, Odets quoted a magnificent metaphorical line from the poet William Butler Yeats: “The tree has to die before it can be made into a cross.”
The difference between being a director and being an actor is
the difference between being
the carpenter banging the nails into the wood,
and being the piece of wood the nails are being banged into.
SEAN PENN
Working with Julie Andrews
is like getting hit over the head with a valentine.
CHRISTOPHER PLUMMER, Andrews’s Sound of Music co-star
Bond smoked like Peter Lorre, drank like Humphrey Bogart,
ate like Sydney Greenstreet, used up girls like Errol Flynn—then went to a steam bath and came out looking like Clark Gable.
HARRY REASONER, on Sean Connery’s James Bond
It’s hard to act in the morning. The muse isn’t even awake.
KEANU REEVES
Every playwright should try acting, just as every judge should
spend some weeks in jail to find out what he is handing out to others.
ERICH MARIA REMARQUE
The camera is a little like the surgeon’s knife.
JEAN RENOIR
Being given good material is like being assigned to bake a cake
and having the batter made for you.
ROSALIND RUSSELL
My native habitat is the theatre. In it, I toil not, neither do I spin.
I am a critic and commentator.
I am essential to the theatre—as ants to a picnic,
as the boll weevil to a cotton field.
GEORGE SANDERS
This is a classic line in cinema history, delivered by Sanders in the role of critic Addison de Witt in the 1950 film All About Eve (screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz). The line captures how critics have been viewed by playwrights and actors (and writers as well, as you will see in the upcoming literary life chapter). The most colorful remark about critics from a stage performer, though, comes from George Burns, who said, “Critics are eunuchs at a gang-bang.”
Acting is like roller skating.
Once you know how to do it, it is neither stimulating nor exciting.
GEORGE SANDERS
Making a film is like going down a mine—
once you’ve started, you bid a metaphorical goodbye
to the daylight and the outside world for the duration.
JOHN SCHLESINGER
A fellow with the inventiveness of Albert Einstein
but with the attention span of Daffy Duck.
TOM SHALES, on Robin Williams
Another well-known attention span comparison was Robert Redford’s lighthearted jab at Paul Newman: “He has the attention span of a lightning bolt.”
Going to Hollywood to talk about menopause
was a little like going to Las Vegas to sell savings accounts.
GAIL
SHEEHY
This was Sheehy’s explanation for the lack of interest Hollywood producers showed when she pitched them on doing a film adaptation of The Silent Passage (1992).
The body of an actor is like a well in which
experiences are stored, then tapped when needed.
SIMONE SIGNORET
Careers, like rockets, don’t always take off on time.
The trick is to always keep the engine running.
GARY SINISE
This is great advice for anyone, but especially for people in an occupation with long periods of inactivity between gigs and even longer odds against success.
In the creative process there is the father,
the author of the play; the mother, the actor pregnant with the part;
and the child, the role to be born.
KONSTANTIN STANISLAVSKY
Remember this practical piece of advice:
Never come into the theatre with mud on your feet.
Leave your dust and dirt outside.
Check your little worries, squabbles, petty difficulties
with your outside clothing—all the things that ruin your life
and draw your attention away from your art—at the door.
KONSTANTIN STANISLAVSKY, advice to actors
Directing is like being a father on a set; comedy is like being a kid.
DAVID STEINBERG
Steinberg was one of the best-known comics in the 1970s (he appeared on The Tonight Show 130 times and was the youngest person ever to guest-host the show). He went on to achieve great success behind the camera, directing such TV sitcoms as Seinfeld, Mad About You, and Designing Women. In 2005, he returned to the front of the camera with his TV Land talk show Sit Down Comedy.
It’s a little like wrestling a gorilla.
You don’t quit when you’re tired, you quit when the gorilla is tired.
ROBERT STRAUSS, on acting careers
A film is a boat which is always on the point of sinking—
it always tends to break up as you go along and drag you under with it.
FRANÇOIS TRUFFAUT
By increasing the size of the keyhole,
today’s playwrights are in danger of doing away with the whole door.
PETER USTINOV
The reference here is to the increased appearance of gratuitous sex in modern plays. Ustinov, a talented writer as well as a great actor, was suggesting that what used to be peeked at through keyholes was now in plain view.
Choice is to the cable monopoly what sunlight is to the vampire.
JACK VALENTI
Valenti said this in 1987, as president of the Motion Picture Association of America. At the time, five companies controlled over 40 percent of cable-TV subscriptions and dictated what viewers would get to watch on television.
A film is never really good unless the camera is an eye in the head of a poet.
ORSON WELLES
In 1938, Welles achieved national notoriety and everlasting fame when his War of the Worlds radio broadcast created a panic on the East Coast. Two years later, the twenty-five-year-old Welles was lured to Hollywood by RKO studio executives. In 1941, he came out with Citizen Kane, often hailed as America’s greatest film. Welles once described the RKO lot as “The biggest electric train set any boy ever had.”
I hate television. I hate it as much as peanuts.
But I can’t stop eating peanuts.
ORSON WELLES
This observation, made in 1956, nicely communicates the ambivalence so many people feel about television. More recently, Dennis Miller made a similar point: “Bad television is three things: a bullet train to a morally bankrupt youth, a slow spiral into an intellectual void, and of course, a complete blast to watch.”
Making movies is a little like walking into a dark room.
Some people stumble across furniture, others break their legs,
but some of us see better in the dark than others.
BILLY WILDER
Many plays, certainly mine, are like blank checks.
The actors and directors put their own signatures on them.
THORNTON WILDER
Wilder’s plays may have been blank checks, but the plays of many other playwrights are written for very precise amounts. Using two different similes, Vivien Leigh compared two famous playwrights this way: “Shaw is like a train. One just speaks the words and sits in one’s place. But Shakespeare is like bathing in the sea—one swims where one wants.”
A movie without sex would be like a candy bar without nuts.
EARL WILSON
chapter 13
Washington, D.C., Is to Lying What Wisconsin Is to Cheese
On September 17, 1787, the men responsible for drafting a constitution for the new American nation walked out of Independence Hall in Philadelphia. They had labored for nearly four months, first attempting a simple revision of the Articles of Confederation, and in the end drafting an entirely new document. It had been an unusually hot summer, and the framers of the constitution had sweltered inside the great hall with the windows closed to the throng of curious onlookers who had gathered outside to witness history in the making.
The Constitutional Convention, as it came to be called, was chaired by George Washington, who represented his home state of Virginia. Washington had planned to retire when the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, but his sense of duty took him to Philadelphia instead. His status as a war hero made him an obvious choice as chairman of the gathering. But many other luminaries were in attendance as well, including James Madison and Alexander Hamilton (Thomas Jefferson and John Adams were in Europe and did not attend). To the gathering crowd, though, the most familiar face was that of the eighty-one-year-old Benjamin Franklin, an original signer of the Declaration of Independence eleven years earlier and a resident of Philadelphia since he was seventeen. As the men descended the stairs, many people in the crowd shouted out questions about the nature of the new government. One female voice shouted at Franklin, “Well, Doctor, what have we got, a republic or a monarchy?” The Grand Old Man replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.”
In the years that followed, a lively debate ensued over whether a republican form of government was indeed the best model for America. As the new nation struggled to get established, there were a predictable number of second-guessers, and many even suggested a return to a monarchical form of government.
In a 1795 debate in Congress, this issue surfaced yet again. Fisher Ames, a congressman from Massachusetts, rose to speak in favor of the republican model. Ames, who would later become president of Harvard University, was one of the great orators of the era. And in one of the most memorable metaphors ever offered in a Congressional debate, he compared the competing forms of government to two very different types of eighteenth-century maritime vessels:
A monarchy is a merchantman, which sails well,
but will sometimes strike on a rock, and go to the bottom;
whilst a republic is a raft which would never sink,
but then your feet are always in the water.
As often happens with particularly apt metaphors, the remark helped put things into perspective for new Americans, reminding them that their fledgling government had a plain and simple seaworthiness that was far preferable to the elegant fragility of European governments. The image was so compelling, it had tremendous staying power. Two hundred years later, the sentiment showed up in an observation from Louisiana senator Russell B. Long:
Democracy is like a raft.
It won’t sink, but you’ll always have your feet wet.
With the Constitutional Convention over, George Washington left Philadelphia and headed back to Mount Vernon. He was fully expecting—at long last—to spend the remainder of his life pursuing his many interests and avocations. But private life was not in his future.
In 1788, after the Constitution was formally ratified by the states, a new entity called the electoral college selected Washington as the first United State
s president. Once again, the hero of the Revolutionary War struggled to reconcile his personal desires with his sense of duty. He had always harbored a deep disdain for politics, and even worried that the formation of political parties would deeply—and dangerously—divide the country. He finally accepted the nomination, but he approached the new role with great trepidation. In a letter he wrote to a friend on April 1, 1789, less than a month before his inauguration, he confessed:
My movements to the chair of Government
will be accompanied by feelings not unlike those of
a culprit who is going to the place of his execution.
Figurative language has had a long history in political life. In the sixth century B.C., the legendary Athenian lawmaker Solon embarked on a series of political reforms that repealed the harsh laws of the Emperor Draco (of draconian fame) and established the foundation for the world’s first democracy. In the early days of Solon’s reign, a bearded stranger showed up at his door and identified himself as Anacharsis, a prince from the distant Northern kingdom of Scythia (modern-day Ukraine). With his rustic appearance and well-worn clothing, Anacharsis was not exactly a regal sight, but he proved to be a man of uncommon wisdom, penetrating insight, and refreshing frankness. Within a short time, this curious man won over the citizens of Athens, much like Benjamin Franklin did in the 1770s when, as America’s first ambassador to France, he captivated the French people.
Anacharsis became a trusted advisor to Solon and was the first outsider to be made an Athenian citizen (he, along with Solon, went on to achieve immortality when ancient historians included them among the legendary Seven Wise Men of Greece). One day, in a show of confidence in his new confidante, Solon revealed his plans for a wholesale revision of laws governing the Athenian people. Expecting support for his great dream, the emperor was shocked when Anacharsis laughed at the idea. When pressed for an explanation, Anacharsis explained that it was impossible to restrain the vices of people by statute. And then he added: