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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.

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
Today
Puts
Years
Christmas
Theatre
York
Tree
Hope
Mug
White
Alley
Three
Alleys

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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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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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Prejudice is a raft onto which the shipwrecked mind clambers and paddles to safety.
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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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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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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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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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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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Despite all our toil and progress, the art of medicine still falls somewhere between trout casting and spook writing.
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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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There's one thing that keeps surprising you about stormy old friends after they die - their silence.
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He was in love with life as an ant on a summer blade of grass.
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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.'
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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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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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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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The only practical way yet discovered by the world for curing its ills is to forget about them.
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Love is the magician that pulls him out of his own hat.
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In moderating, not satisfying desires, lies peace.
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