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The factors that laid low so whooping and puissant an empire as the old Hollywood are many. I can think of a score, including the barbarian hordes of Television. But there is one that stands out for me in the post-mortem.... The factor had to do with the basis of movie-making: 'Who shall be in charge of telling the story.'

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
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Hollywood
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Barbarians
Thinking
Television
Factors
Empire
Shall
Stands
Factor
Movie
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Mortem
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Laid
Whooping
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Telling
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Many
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Barbarian

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Chicago is a sort of journalistic Yellowstone Park, offering haven to a last herd of fantastic bravos.
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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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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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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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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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The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
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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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Love is a hole in the heart.
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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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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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Immorality, perversion, infidelity, cannibalism, etc., are unassailable by church and civic league if you dress them up in the togas and talliths of the Good Book.
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Three years ago, the white hope of the theatre. Today, a mug. That's New York for you. Puts you on a Christmas tree, and then - the alley.
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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 an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind and retarded Americans from becoming cultured people.
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Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
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Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
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In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
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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.
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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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Much more frequent in Hollywood than the emergence of Cinderella is her sudden vanishing. At our party, even in those glowing days, the clock was always striking twelve for someone at the height of greatness and there was never a prince to fetch her back to the happy scene.
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