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For many years Hollywood held this double lure for me, tremendous sums of money for work that required no more effort than a game of pinochle.

Ben Hecht

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Ben Hecht
Age: 71 †
Born: 1893
Born: February 28
Died: 1964
Died: April 18
Film Director
Film Producer
Journalist
Novelist
Playwright
Screenwriter
Writer
New York City
New York
Work
Tremendous
Years
Held
Hollywood
Game
Effort
Sums
Games
Lure
Money
Double
Many
Required

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I have known a number of Don Juans who were good studs and who cavorted between the sheets without a psychiatrist to guide them. But most of the busy love-makers I knew were looking for masculinity rather than practicing it. They were fellows of dubious lust.
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H.L.Mencken's war aims, according to the handful of observers who deigned to notice his conflict, were the overthrow of American Democracy, the Christian religion, and the YMCA. He was also credited with trying to wipe out poets and luncheon orators.
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Out of the seventy movies I've written some ten of them were not entirely waste product.
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When you overpay small people you frighten them. They know that their merits or activities entitle them to no such sums as they are receiving. As a result their boss soars out of economic into magic significance.
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Writing a good movie brings a writer about as much fame as steering a bicycle. It gets him, however, more jobs. If his movie is bad it will attract only critical tut-tut for him. The producer, director and stars are the geniuses who get the hosannas when it's a hit. Theirs are also the heads that are mounted on spears when it's a flop.
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Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit or talent. The rest of the fraternity is deadwood. Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.
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In Hollywood a starlet is the name for any woman under thirty who is not actively employed in a brothel.
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They're a symbol of the whole town, pretending to fight, love, weep and laugh all the time - and they're phonies, all of them. And I head the list...their phony hearts were dripping with the milk of human kindness.
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The honors Hollywood has for the writer are as dubious as tissue-paper cuff links.
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That God has managed to survive the inanities of the religions that do Him homage is truly a miraculous proof of His existence.
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The movies are one of the bad habits that corrupted our century.Of their many sins, I offer as the worst their effect on the intellectual side of the nation. It is chiefly from that viewpoint I write of them - as an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming a cultured people.
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In the court of the movie Owner, none criticized, none doubted. And none dared speak of art. In the Owner's mind art was a synonym for bankruptcy. The movie Owners are the only troupe in the history of entertainment that has never been seduced by the adventure of the entertainment world.
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Socially, a journalist ranks somewhere between the madam of a whorehouse and a bartender. but spiritually he ranks with Galileo, for he knows the world is round.
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The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
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Television excites me because it seems to be the last stamping ground of poetry, the last place where I hear women's hair rhapsodically described, women's faces acclaimed in odelike language.
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Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
Ben Hecht
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The movies are an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.
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The rule in the art world is: you cater to the masses or you kowtow to the elite you can't have both.
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There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.
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Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
Ben Hecht