Quotes from William J. Mann

Too often have we believed the old lie that says we're bad, we're perverted, we're abominations. But those who spread the lie don't know. They don't know how we love, how we hurt, how we live.

Barbra [was a] different-looking, different-sounding, different acting lad[y] of great personal charisma who redefined what it meant to be glamorous.

All of which goes to prove that there is so much good in the worst of us and so much bad in the best of us that it ill behooves any of us to talk about the rest of us.

He hasn't been in San Francisco for a number of years. He's looking forward to being in the city again. It's a town that knows how to have a good time, but without all the mess and craze of New York. San Francisco always does things with a touch of of class.

When the cops were unable to catch a man named James "Bluebeard" Watson, who'd married eighteen women and killed at least seven of them, Harris

The movies, once the nation's happy diversion, had become a scapegoat for those who were frightened by the changes rocking American society since the end of the war.

Theater owners told horror stories of church ladies and civic reformers, many brandishing crucifixes as if to ward off vampires, barging into their offices and demanding they never again show Arbuckle's films.

Hays was thinking of Prohibition, "which had by no means produced the era of national sobriety its proponents had contemplated.

In a world where everything is hyped and hawked, where every available space, even the risers of subway steps, is claimed for advertising, Brando's admonitions against the monetization of the culture, voiced frequently from the 1960s on, feel extremely prescient.

An artist is, of course, entitled to make money, and Brando didn't claim otherwise. What he struggled with was the conflation of art and commerce, a phenomenon he first observed in the 1960s and watched mushroom beyond all expectation into the twenty-first century. "I don't know if there are any artists left now," he said. "They are so degraded and so confused by the mercantile mind.

had taken it upon herself to sit through as many of the devil's entertainments as she could tolerate, cataloging every sin.

white sheet draped over his head. And Peavey knew enough about men in white sheets to understand they were nothing but cowards and posers.

Yet Arbuckle's fate didn't rest with the entire public. It was decided in white, middle-class drawing rooms where the Federation of Women's Clubs took their votes, and in church halls where ministers whipped their flocks into outrages over Hollywood.

The film industry, Crafts charged, was in the hands of "the devil and 500 non-Christian Jews

he abhorred these self-righteous, self-appointed arbiters of morality. He called them "the Anvil Chorus," pointing out that every new development in history had drawn the fear and suspicion of people like them.

I do not ask autocratic exclusion of films," Crafts said, trying to seem less fanatical in the press, "but only such supervision as the Government gives to all other great financial interests.

Their intention, clearly, was to beat the censors at their own game. If pictures had to be neutered, they'd rather do the castration themselves.

He wanted to feel as if he were—to play on his famous line from On the Waterfront—a "contender," someone who mattered, someone who had fought the good fight. He wanted to feel as if he had made a difference, left a mark, and not just on acting. What he did not want to be was an "unthinker," the way he described those people who never examined themselves or their place in the world.

then it is up to the public to patronize only those places that least offend its taste. A man may be imbued with the ideas of a vegetarian, but he can't run a vegetarian restaurant successfully when all his patrons demand beef.

They had come to toast Hays, their new "czar," as the papers were calling him.

Democracy was wrong, Kahn declared, when "it countenances government commissions giving to endless innuendo and irresponsible gossip the place and the scope that belong to trustworthy testimony.

History is nothing more than a series of small yesterdays.

In Hartford, Connecticut, after calls from religious organizations, theater owners pledged that Fatty's face would never again be seen on their screens.