- Self - Host: The studios were self-sufficient. They wrote their own stories, made their own costumes, composed their own songs, and groomed their own talent. It was mass production for mass audiences.
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- Self - Host: The success of Hollywood began the moment it realized how to make America's dreams come true.
- Self - Host: The people who made the movies worked in factories from dawn to dusk, six days a week, but their factories had names like MGM, 20th Century Fox, and Paramount. For them, dreams were the stuff movies were made of, and the secrets of their manufacture were kept behind well-guarded studio gates; inside the Dream Factory.
- Angela Lansbury: The word that comes immediately to my mind is a word that was applied to it: The Factory. Isn't that strange? I think it was because MGM turned out such a tremendous product and they seemed to geared for nonstop production.
- Cyd Charisse: They had the best arrangers and the best writers and the best costumers and set decorations and the finest directors. You wanted 10 dancers, there were 10 dancers under contract, the best they could find. You wanted 10 singers, they were there. Whatever you needed was at the fingertips of the producer.
- Joan Leslie: The studio was big and strong and held all the cards. And they controlled the terms, and if you did not conform, they could drop you at the end of any option.
- Self - Host: Most stars were happy working for the dream factories. Often spending decades at a single studio. And while some may have hated the men they worked for, they never forgot how lucky they were.
- Virginia Mayo: A lot of people have said things against the studio system, but I think it was great. When a person that wanted to be in motion pictures got a contract, the studio used to build them up, used to give them good roles, and take care of them - publicity-wise. At every phase of their life, they would guide; you know, it took about five to six years to build up a person to stardom. It just doesn't happen over night.
- Janet Leigh: I remember when
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- Janet Leigh: first came on the lot, I was all of maybe 23, and people said, "She's a young Janet Leigh." And I was thinking, "A *young* Janet Leigh? So, what am I?"
- June Allyson: The studio used to pit us against each other. They would say, "June, if you don't behave, we'll give this movie to Judy." And they'd say, "Judy, you know, if you don't behave, we've got a new kid on this lot; you know, we'll just give her the film."
- Jane Russell: In the old studio days, you had dancing lessons, you had dramatic lessons. I got the dramatic lessons after the picture. You know, you were taught how to dress - what looked good and what didn't, and it was pointed out. They really were very supportive and very helpful.
- Self - Host: No wonder Hollywood was called a factory town. It was an assembly line, all right, but with a touch of glamour you just couldn't find in Detroit.
- Jane Wyman: I did a lot of Warner Brothers "B" pictures, and during the war we did 52 pictures a year. So, you can know how we were working - every single and solitary day. But, it was great training. Glenda Farrell was one of my favorites, because she was doing the Torchy Blane movies at that time. And, so, I had a little tiny bit part with one line in it, but then Glenda decided that she didn't want to do them anymore. And, so, Warner decided that I was going to do them. I mean, they weren't anything to brag about, but it was good experience.
- Sydney Guilaroff: I think of a girl, such as
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- Sydney Guilaroff: . The first time I ever saw her, she was 17 years old; she chewed gum. And there were other young people in the room ready to be tested. And I heard the cracking of gum, and I turned around, and I said, "Now, whoever's chewing gum can just spit it out." Well, she just swallowed it instead.
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- Sydney Guilaroff: She looked petrified.
- Self - Host: Warner Brothers had Bogart and Cagney; MGM - Gable and Tracy; and Paramount - Gary Cooper. But, the real tough guys of the dream factories were the ones who built them: the moguls. These were the most powerful, most respected men in Hollywood - and the most hated. Now, looking back, you have to wonder, did the movies get made because of them... or in spite of them?
- Ann Miller: He was a great gentleman. He didn't like anybody, any man, cussing in front of a woman. In fact, I saw him get up and knock down a man because he spoke four-letter words in front of my mother and in front of me. And Mr. Mayer got up and popped him one.
- Lyle Talbot: You couldn't refuse a part unless you wanted to go on suspension. And what suspension meant in those days was that they would take you off salary. No salary. And they could keep you off to - up to about six weeks. When you came back, you went on salary, but that was added - those weeks were added to your - your contract.
- Virginia Mayo: In the old days, you could go from one picture to the next and then the next and the next, till the people recognized you and that made you a star. In that context, I think it was a good idea to have people under contract. I tell you, I enjoyed myself so much, during that period, making all those films, I'd like to do it all over again.
- Self - Host: Moguls often became surrogate fathers. Big Daddies to the eager young actors they groomed for stardom.
- June Allyson: Mr. Mayer, "Pops" to us, he considered all of us his kids; you know, his children. He didn't allow any drinking or any smoking or any bad words. You had to really toe the line.
- Bill Thomas: Their figures had to be - you all had to be like Venus de Milo. And the designers' job was, and still is, to take anybody, any *body*, and make it look like a perfect body.
- Michael Woulfe: [referring to Howard Hughes talking about Jane Russell] He kept wanting her decolletage on her costume lower and lower and lower and lower. And he finally said, "I want her tits bouncing off the screen, hitting them in the eye, and then bounce back onto the screen." And I think we did it.
- Self - Host: Moguls managed to stay in power for years and years. In fact,
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- Self - Host: was still running Warner Brothers in 1967 when we made
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- Self - Host: . He hated the picture. Oh, yeah, until he saw the long lines around the movie theaters. Then he said, "Now I like it!"
- Edward Dmytryk: I hate the auteur theory. Because, everybody - in the first place, the auteur says the director does it all. That's a lot of crap. The director has a crew of anywhere from 50 to 150 people helping him. You take a Rolls Royce, right. A Rolls Royce is a very wealthy, very rich car. If you take a one dollar spark plug out of the engine, one dollar, the thing doesn't run well. Hardly runs at all. Now, this is the same thing in a crew. You depend on everybody doing his best work for that picture to be 100% perfect. I could labor like hell and if they weren't working, it would be nothing. It would be nothing!
- Self - Host: The first time Orson Welles went to work in a movie studio, he said, "This is the biggest electric train set any boy has ever had." Practically everybody who worked in the dream factories felt the same way. The work was hard, the hours were long, but everyone knew even then, that it was something special.
- Self - Host: Studio contracts then had what was known as the potato clause - requiring stars to maintain a certain ideal weight.
- Self - Host: With so many great-looking stars in the dream factories and so many of them famous as great lovers, fans just assumed there was as much romance and seduction off screen as on. They were right.
- Self - Host: From the beginning, publicity has been as important to the movie industry as talent. Today they politely call it marketing, but during the heyday of the dream factories, there was another word for it. One that was right on the money - exploitation.
- Michael Woulfe: I firmly believe that everybody connected with the studio at that time, whether you're a grip, whether you're a director, whether you're an art director, a music director, choreographer, the designer, or whatever you want, there's a degree of ham in everyone of them. Otherwise, they would not choose this industry.
- Angela Lansbury: I didn't have very happy memories at Universal in those days, except... except the Commissary! They had great patty melts.
- Self - Host: Cheesecake. Almost every starlet, except Lassie, was subjected to it. The studios felt it would do wonders for their careers. After all, look how it immortalized
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- Ann Miller: If you didn't have a fur coat to wear to a premier, they furnished it. If you didn't have a car, they furnished one. If you didn't have an escort, you got one. They wanted you to look the best. It was a fairy-tale world.
- Self - Host: When stars got in trouble with the police, their first call wasn't to a lawyer; it was to the studio's publicity department. So, within minutes, a publicist would arrive and discreetly offer money, a few tickets to a premier, or a generous donation to the Policemen's Benevolent Association. And, suddenly, the incident never happened. There were some close calls though. In 1955, MGM was throwing a lavish press screening, you know, for the musical
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- Self - Host: . And one of the picture's stars showed up, after more than a few drinks, wearing a lovely white dress with matching gloves, hat, and high heels. Which would have been very tasteful had he been a woman. Luckily, studio publicists whisked him away, and the truth never got out.
- Jane Wyman: They invented us. They made of you what they wanted you to be at that moment. Not realizing that you had to live it down.
- Jane Russell: [link=nm0001328] - I went to him in tears one day because the photographer came in, and he was very loaded, and so was the publicity man with him, and they wanted me to do a lot of bouncing up and down on the bed in a nightgown with nothing on under it. He said, "Look, you're a big girl now - and you have to learn to take care of Jane." And, he said, "So, just get tough and say no." So, I did, from then on.
- Julius J. Epstein: Each studio made, on the average, a picture a week, about 50 pictures a year. So, it had to be an industry. It had to be an assembly line. I mean, the wonder is, under those conditions, a few good pictures came out of it.
- Sam Marx: Howard was called the "fixer" around MGM, mainly because we had some lusty stars who would get themselves in trouble all the time. Some of them got picked up on little charges, and somehow they had to get stifled, and Howard was fabulous at doing it. In the early days, after Joan Crawford came back and began to be a star in
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- Sam Marx: and things like that, they discovered she had made some pornographic films in New York, and they went after them, and I'm confident that they found them and bought them up and destroyed them. It was part of the way Strickling protected and defended and, in many ways, elaborated on the glamour of our MGM players.
- Sam Marx: They virtually wrote a scenario for each one: what to wear, how to look, where to go, who to go with, and who not to go with. Now, if you were going to put your whole life into a career and you wanted to be a movie star, you generally had to obey that.