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I have no trouble selling out—I’m a benevolent hack, in a certain way—but I want to pander for something I believe in.

Harold Ramis

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Harold Ramis
Age: 69 †
Born: 1944
Born: November 21
Died: 2014
Died: February 24
Actor
Comedian
Director
Film Actor
Film Director
Film Producer
Screenwriter
Television Actor
Writer
Chicago
Illinois
Harold Allen Ramis
Certain
Something
Believe
Pander
Way
Hack
Hacks
Benevolent
Selling
Trouble

More quotes by Harold Ramis

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Films are big hits when they touch a lot of people. Things are not funny in a vacuum, they're funny because we respond to some personal dislocation, some embarrassment, some humiliation, some pain we've suffered, or some desire we have.
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The cutting room is where you discover the optimal length of the movie.
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For me, most comedy scripts fail in the mechanical playing-out of the setup. They'll pay lip service to a moral lesson or a psychological progression.
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Groundhog Day was pretty clean. It may have to do with some puritanical feeling that comedy is a forbidden pleasure in a certain way. They make you laugh, and laughter is somehow an inferior emotion to tragedy.
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I'm thinking of doing a marital comedy for one of the studios, but I want it to be so painful that it'll have a profound effect on married couples who see it together.
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My characters aren't losers. They're rebels. They win by their refusal to play by everyone else's rules.
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I realized that my righteous indignation was a form of entertainment for me. I loved getting pissed off at injustice. I didn't do anything about it, I just liked the feeling of being pissed off.
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I'm sure that the liability for doing a tracheotomy would be tremendous. You make one mistake, and it's over. Most doctors won't even do it.
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I always think that the writer is doing the vast majority of the director's work, in a sense. If you're a writer who is also going to direct, you're doing all your preparation: You're already visualizing everything, you're imagining how the lines are going to be read, you see the blocking in your head, and you know the rhythm and the pacing.
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I can't imagine a successful comedy movie without a successful comedy performance at the heart of it.
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I collect spores, molds, and fungus.
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Where's the great pay? Where's the travel? Where's the Winnebago, Goddamnit!
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Life doesn't care about your vision. You just gotta roll with it.
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It's like the old rule-if you introduce a gun into the first act of a play, it's going to be used in the third act. So if you do a movie about criminals, you have to accept there's going to be Some action.
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As much as I liked acting for its playfulness and the reward of hearing big laughs wash over you on a stage, I always felt I should do something that I could control.
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I have tons of rescuing fantasies based on the movies I saw when I was growing up. I wanted to be Robin Hood and the Three Musketeers and the Scarlet Pimpernel.
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You can perceive life as tragic, or you can laugh at the tragedy of it and that turns it into comedy. It doesn't change the circumstances.
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Comedy is essentially made by young men, or older men with some form of arrested development, for young men or immature older men.
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I'm a writer-director-actor, which I've always kind of enjoyed. I compared it to the Olympic biathlon. Not only can he cross-country ski, but he's a terrific marksman as well. I want people to say, You mean that writer performed a tracheotomy? That's right, I do everything.
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I'm not a believer in the pratfall. I don't think it's funny just to have someone fall down.
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