YOSSARIAN
Well, he died. You don’t get any older than that.
Dir: Mike Nichols • Scr: Buck Henry • Based on a novel by Joseph Heller • Cast: Alan Arkin (Captain John Yossarian), Olimpia Carlisi (Luciana)
1972 CABARET
MASTER OF CEREMONIES
Meine Damen und Herren, Madames et Messieurs, Ladies and Gentlemen. Where are your troubles now? Forgotten? I told you so. We have no troubles here! Here, life is beautiful. The girls are beautiful. Even the orchestra is beautiful. Auf Wiedersehen! A bientôt.
Dir: Bob Fosse • Scr: Jay Presson Allen • Based on a play by John Van Druten and stories by Christopher Isherwood • Cast: Joel Grey (Master of Ceremonies)
Liza Minnelli worked with her own father, acclaimed musical director Vincente Minnelli, to design her hair and make-up. She said she could tell she was the star of the nightclub because she was the only performer with shaved armpits.
1976 THE SHOOTIST
An ageing gunfighter contemplates his mortality.
BOOKS
You told me I was strong as an ox.
DR HOSTETLER
Well, even an ox dies.
Dir: Don Siegel • Scr: Miles Hood Swarthout, Scott Hale • Based on a novel by Glendon Swarthout • Cast: John Wayne (J. B. Books), James Stewart (Dr E. W. Hostetler)
1978 THE DEER HUNTER
A Vietnam veteran searches for an old friend in Saigon but is shocked to discover he has become a heroin addict.
MICHAEL
I came twelve thousand miles back here to get you. What’s the matter with you? Don’t you recognize me? Nicky, I love you, you’re my friend. What are you doing? We don’t have much time, Nick.
Nick holds a revolver to his own head. He pulls the trigger but it clicks on an empty chamber.
Is this what you want? Is this what you want? I love you, Nick.
Michael pulls the trigger again. Another empty chamber.
Come on, Nicky, come home. Just come home. Home. Talk to me.
He sees Nick’s needle marks.
What did you do to your arms?
He reminds Nick of their hunting days.
Do you remember the trees? Do you remember all the different ways of the trees? Do you remember that? Do you remember? Huh? The mountains? Do you remember all that?
NICK
One shot.
He smiles and laughs, remembering their old catchphrase.
MICHAEL
One shot, one shot.
Without warning, Nick pulls the trigger and shoots himself.
Nicky, Nicky, don’t, Nick, no!
Dir: Michael Cimino • Scr: Deric Washburn • Cast: Robert De Niro (Michael ‘Mike’ Vronsky), Christopher Walken (Nikanor ‘Nick’ Chevotarevich)
De Niro suggested the gun used for this scene should contain real bullets to heighten the tension. Only on the takes where the trigger was pulled did the actors check there was no live round in the chamber.
1982 BLADE RUNNER
An android fascinated by the possibility of his own humanity faces death.
ROY
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave. I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. . . Time to die.
Dir: Ridley Scott • Scr: Hampton Fancher, David Webb Peoples • Based on a novel by Philip K. Dick • Cast: Rutger Hauer (Roy Batty)
Ridley Scott had been impressed by Rutger Hauer’s performance in several films and cast him without ever having met him. In this project, Hauer was to play an icily murderous android (Batty), so for a joke he turned up on the first day wearing green sunglasses, pink satin trousers and a cuddly white sweater with animals on it. One production executive recalls that when Scott first saw him he ‘literally turned white’.
‘TEARS IN RAIN’
Blade Runner, Philip K. Dick and Ridley’s Scott’s provocative dystopian vision, polarized reactions on its first release and even if it is now widely agreed to be a masterpiece its ambiguities continue to intrigue. Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) is a cop whose task it is to seek out and destroy escaped replicants – robot workers ostensibly indistinguishable from humans. The story, set in 2019, invites us to explore notions of consciousness and emotion. Director Ridley Scott believed Deckard himself was a replicant, producer Michael Deeley and Harrison Ford felt he must be human, while writer Hampton Fancher wanted the audience to decide for themselves.
The uncertainty worked in reverse, too. Rutger Hauer, playing replicant Roy Batty, was determined to make his character as human as possible and felt the scene of his death was a perfect opportunity to challenge Deckard’s – and our – preconceptions about artificial intelligence. The lines he speaks in the film’s various released versions differ from all the earlier scripts and Hampton Fancher’s draft of 24 July 1980 contains no final speech at all apart from Batty taunting Deckard with the words:
Time to die.
Fancher’s script with David Webb Peoples from December 1980 has:
I’ve known adventures, seen places you people will never see, I’ve been Offworld and back. . . frontiers! I’ve stood on the back deck of a blinker bound for the Plutition Camps with sweat in my eyes watching the stars fight on the shoulder of Orion. . . I’ve felt wind in my hair, riding test boats off the black galaxies and seen an attack fleet burn like a match and disappear. I’ve seen it, felt it!
Fancher and Peoples’ draft dated 23 February 1981 reads:
I’ve seen things. . . seen things you little people wouldn’t believe. . . Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion bright as magnesium. . . I rode on the back decks of a blinker and watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments. . . They’ll be gone.
Hauer described the speech in the shooting script he was given as ‘opera talk’ and set about revising it the night before the cameras rolled; his amalgamation of scripted ideas and improvisation is frequently cited as the greatest dying speech on film.
1983 MONTY PYTHON’S THE MEANING OF LIFE
A group of friends at dinner receive an unexpected visitor.
GRIM REAPER
Silence! I have come for you — to take you away. That is my purpose. I am Death.
HOST
Well, that’s cast rather a gloom over the evening, hasn’t it?
Dir: Terry Jones, Terry Gilliam • Scr: Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, Michael Palin • Cast: John Cleese (Grim Reaper), Graham Chapman (Host)
1985 BRAZIL
Sam, a government employee in an Orwellian world, asks his boss Kurtzmann what has happened to a citizen named Buttle.
KURTZMANN
You see? The population census has got him down as ‘dormanted’. The Central Collective Storehouse computer has got him down as ‘deleted’.
SAM
Hang on.
Sam checks another computer terminal.
KURTZMANN
Information Retrieval has got him down as ‘inoperative’. And there’s another one — security has got him down as ‘excised’. Administration has got him down as ‘completed’.
SAM
He’s dead.
Dir: Terry Gilliam • Scr: Terry Gilliam, Tom Stoppard, Charles McKeown • Cast: Ian Holm (Mr Kurtzmann), Jonathan Pryce (Sam Lowry)
1986 ALIENS
Ripley reassures Newt, the child she has rescued, that the alien threat is over as they prepare to return to Earth from deep space.
NEWT
Are we gonna sleep all the way home?
RIPLEY
All the way home.
NEWT
Can I dream?
RIPLEY
Yes, honey. I think we both can.
She tucks Newt in.
RIPLEY
Sleep tight.
NEWT
> Affirmative.
Dir: James Cameron • Scr: James Cameron • Cast: Carrie Henn (Rebecca ‘Newt’ Jorden), Sigourney Weaver (Ellen Ripley)
Despite the apparently lavish budget, the film-makers had to cut corners wherever they could. The room with the hypersleep capsules was made to look larger with the use of mirrors; only six alien suits were used, constructed from a handful of latex appliances stuck on black leotards. The assault vehicle was a modified airport towing vehicle and Ripley’s cabin bathroom is actually a British Airways toilet.
1986 STAND BY ME
The narrator recalls an unforgettable summer from his childhood.
NARRATOR
I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was twelve. Jesus, does anyone?
Dir: Rob Reiner • Scr: Raynold Gideon, Bruce A. Evans • Based on a novel by Stephen King • Cast: Richard Dreyfuss (Gordie Lachance/Narrator)
1991 CITY SLICKERS
Mitch attends Career Day at his son’s school.
MITCH
Value this time in your life, kids, because this is the time in your life when you still have your choices, and it goes by so fast. When you’re a teenager, you think you can do anything, and you do. Your twenties are a blur. Thirties — you raise your family, you make a little money and you think to yourself: ‘What happened to my twenties?’ Forties — you grow a little potbelly, you grow another chin. The music starts to get too loud and one of your old girlfriends from high school becomes a grandmother. Fifties — you have a minor surgery. You’ll call it a ‘procedure’, but it’s a surgery. Sixties — you’ll have a major surgery, the music is still loud but it doesn’t matter because you can’t hear it anyway. Seventies — you and the wife retire to Fort Lauderdale. You start eating dinner at two o’clock in the afternoon, you have lunch around ten, breakfast the night before. You spend most of your time wandering around malls looking for the ultimate soft yogurt and muttering: ‘How come the kids don’t call?’ ‘How come the kids don’t call?’ The eighties, you’ll have a major stroke. You end up babbling to some Jamaican nurse who your wife can’t stand but who you call mama. Any questions?
Dir: Ron Underwood • Scr: Lowell Ganz, Babaloo Mandel • Cast: Billy Crystal (Mitch Robbins)
1991 THELMA & LOUISE
Two women on the run are surrounded by police but decide they would rather die free than return to their former lives.
THELMA
OK, then listen — let’s not get caught.
LOUISE
What’re you talking about?
THELMA
Let’s keep going!
LOUISE
What d’you mean?
Thelma nods at the sheer drop ahead of them.
THELMA
Go.
LOUISE
You sure?
THELMA
Yeah.
The car begins to gather speed...
Dir: Ridley Scott • Scr: Callie Khouri • Cast: Geena Davis (Thelma Dickinson), Susan Sarandon (Louise Sawyer)
1991 THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS
A killer known for his cannibalistic tastes has escaped from prison.
LECTER
I do wish we could chat longer, but I’m having an old friend for dinner.
Dir: Jonathan Demme • Scr: Ted Tally • Based on a novel by Thomas Harris • Cast: Anthony Hopkins (Dr Hannibal Lecter)
1992 UNFORGIVEN
Reformed gunfighter Will consoles a young colleague who has shot an adversary.
WILL
It’s a hell of a thing, killin’ a man. You take away all he’s got and all he’s ever gonna have.
SCHOFIELD KID
Yeah, well, I guess they had it comin’.
WILL
We all have it comin’, kid.
Dir: Clint Eastwood • Scr: David Webb Peoples • Cast: Clint Eastwood (Will Munny), Jaimz Woolvett (The Schofield Kid)
The long-suffering David Webb Peoples wrote the script in 1976, sixteen years before it was filmed. Eastwood resisted reading it for a long time because his assistant didn’t think it was any good; when he finally did, he loved it but felt his character should be older – and delayed production for a further ten years.
1992 THE PLAYER
A jaded Hollywood executive has rejected another unpromising screenplay.
GRIFFIN
It lacked certain elements that we need to market a film successfully.
JUNE
What elements?
GRIFFIN
Suspense, laughter, violence. Hope, heart, nudity, sex. Happy endings. Mainly happy endings.
Dir: Robert Altman • Scr: Michael Tolkin, based on his novel • Cast: Tim Robbins (Griffin Mill), Greta Scacchi (June Gudmundsdottir)
To add realism, Altman called on many of his showbiz friends and acquaintances to play themselves in the film. The roll call included Bruce Willis, Anjelica Huston, Jack Lemmon, Susan Sarandon, Julia Roberts, John Cusack, Cher, James Coburn, Elliott Gould and Burt Reynolds. A trade paper estimated that if they had all charged their normal salaries the budget would have risen by $100 million [$165 million].
TINSELTOWN
No business in history can have been so widely associated with a landmark which cost a mere $21,000 [$280,000]. The sign, originally reading ‘Hollywoodland’, was put up in 1923 by property developers encouraging Los Angelenos to colonize the hills. In the 1940s it was damaged when its caretaker drove his Model A Ford into the letter ‘H’, and in 1949 the local Chamber of Commerce entered a contract to restore the sign on condition it was amended to say ‘Hollywood’. By then the district was already a household name.
In its earliest years, American motion picture production was based on the East Coast where manufacturers of cameras and film stock were involved in bitter rivalry to establish supremacy through patents and rights agreements. When Thomas Edison began sending agents to impound unlicensed equipment, many film-makers headed west and in 1910 D. W. Griffith was the first director to complete a film (In Old California) shot entirely on location in the village of Hollywood, Los Angeles.
Since the slow photographic negatives of the time required a huge amount of illumination in order to yield a good image, and the crude artificial lighting then used was cumbersome and expensive, the wide open spaces and reliable sunshine of California proved a huge advantage. By 1915, Hollywood was established as the industry’s movie capital.
‘Industry’ is often seen as a pejorative description by the writers, directors and actors who work within the system but its founders, such as the Warner brothers, Louis B. Mayer at MGM and Adolph Zukor at Paramount, were under no illusion that what they wanted to create were empires – personal fiefdoms, where the talent they hired was kept on a tight leash to ensure affordable, efficient delivery of product for their audiences. Despite this, the studios liked to imagine their productions carried the gloss of respectable creative endeavour and MGM’s official slogan remains ‘ars gratia artis’ – art for art’s sake.
Thus was born a long-running rivalry between employers and employed. The talent, bound by lucrative contracts, found solace in snide remarks, while the paymasters took consolation from their profits and smiled tightly. The amour-propre of the industry is such that even when hit movies such as Sunset Boulevard, The Player and L.A. Confidential portray Hollywood as corrupt, venal and philistine, their producers are all too happy to stand on the red carpet and share the glory.
This is merely a smattering of the insults that have been hurled at the industry over the years:
Those who do not study history are forced to get it from Hollywood.
Allen Barra
Half the people in Hollywood are dying to be discovered and the other half are afraid they will be.
Lionel Barrymore
There are only three ages for women in Hollywood - Babe, District Attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.
Goldie Hawn
I’m a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain
.
Ben Hecht
Every country gets the circus it deserves. Spain gets bullfights. Italy gets the Catholic Church. America gets Hollywood.
Erica Jong
Hollywood amuses me. Holier-than-thou for the public, and unholier-than-the-devil in reality.
Grace Kelly
I always thought the real violence in Hollywood isn’t what’s on the screen. It’s what you have to do to raise the money.
David Mamet
Hollywood is a sewer with service from the Ritz Carlton.
Wilson Mizner
Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.
Marilyn Monroe
The only -ism Hollywood believes in is plagiarism.
Dorothy Parker
Hollywood is a place that attracts people with massive holes in their souls.
Julia Phillips
In Europe an actor is an artist. In Hollywood, if he isn’t working, he’s a bum.
Anthony Quinn
In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can’t read. If they could read their stuff, they’d stop writing.
Will Rogers
Agents are like tires on a car; in order to get anywhere at all, you need at least four of them, and they need to be rotated every 5,000 miles.
Billy Wilder
In Hollywood a marriage is a success if it outlasts milk.
Rita Rudner
Hollywood is loneliness beside the swimming pool.
Liv Ullmann
1994 FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL
Two old friends caught outside in a rain storm finally find the courage to confess their feelings.
CHARLES
The truth of it is, I’ve loved you from the first second I met you.
Carrie tries to digest his words.
CHARLES
All the Best Lines Page 32