85 Production Quotes

Consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attended to, only so far as it may be necessary for promoting that of the consumer.

The myth of unlimited production brings war in its train as inevitably as clouds announce a storm.

Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

The first thing I did in the studio was to want to tear that camera to pieces. I had to know how that film got into the cutting room, what you did to it in there, how you projected it, how you finally got the picture together, how you made things match. The technical part of pictures is what interested me. Material was the last thing in the world I thought about. You only had to turn me loose on the set and I'd have material in two minutes, because I'd been doing it all my life.

There's an expectation these days that novels - like any other consumer product - should be made on a production line, with one dropping from the conveyor belt every couple of years.

When you hear an instrumental song someone is singing over, you know right away it's wrong.

The trouble with a movie is that it's old before it's released. It's no accident that it comes in a can.

It's like the high school production of something you saw at Steppenwolf, with the most gifted students in drama class playing the John Malkovich and Joan Allen roles.

The script [for the movie based on the life of singer Connie Francis -- 'Who's Sorry Now?'] is finished and is in the hands of several artists to see if somebody wants to film at the start of [2006].

It has been shown that, in contrast to everything which classical national economy has hitherto taught, not the producer but the consumer is the ruling factor in economic life.

I've always run by the hierarchy of 'If not funny, interesting. If not interesting, hot. If not hot, bizarre. If not bizarre, break something.'

I got a job at Metro and went in to see Louis Mayer, who told me he wanted me to be a producer. I said I wanted to write and direct. He said, 'No, you have to produce first, you have to crawl before you can walk.' Which is as good a definition of producing as I ever heard.

Modern methods of production have given us the possibility of ease and security for all; we have chosen, instead, to have overwork for some and starvation for the others. Hitherto we have continued to be as energetic as we were before there were machines; in this we have been foolish, but there is no reason to go on being foolish for ever.

I gotta do some sad scenes. Why, I never tried to make anybody cry in my life! And I go 'round all the time dolled up in kippie clothes-wear everything but a corset! Can't stub my toe in this picture nor anything! Just imagine having to play-act all the time without ever getting hit with anything!

Our economy is a hundred times better, than the average African economy. Outside South Africa, what country is [as good as] Zimbabwe?...What is lacking now are goods on the shelves - that is all.

... this dream that men shall cease to waste strength in competition and shall come to pool their powers of production is coming to pass all over the earth.

The producer. This is a person engaged by the management to conceal the fact that the players cannot act.

The mountains of things we throw aware are greater than the things we use. In this, if in no other way, we can see the reckless exuberance of our production and waste seems to be the index.

A spider web of metal, sealed in a thin glass container, a wire heated to brilliant glow, in short, the thermionic tube of radio sets, is made by the hundred million, tossed about in packages, plugged into sockets- and it works! Its gossamer parts, the precise location and alignment involved in its construction, would have occupied a master craftsman of the guild for months; now it is built for thirty cents. The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.

In the social production of their life, men enter into definite relations that are indispensable and independent of their will; these relations of production correspond to a definite stage of development of their material forces of production. The sum total of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society - the real foundation, on which rises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness. The mode of production of material life determines the social, political and intellectual life process in general. It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness. At a certain stage of their development, the material productive forces in society come in conflict with the existing relations of production, or - what is but a legal expression for the same thing - with the property relations within which they have been at work before. From forms of development of the productive forces these relations turn into fetters. Then begins an epoch of social revolution. With the change of the economic foundation the entire immense superstructure is more or less rapidly transformed. In considering such transformations a distinction should always be made between the material transformation of the economic conditions of production, which can be determined with the precision of natural science, and the legal, political, religious, aesthetic or philosophic - in short, ideological forms in which men become conscious of this conflict and fight it out. Just as our opinion of an individual is not based on what he thinks of himself, so we can not judge of such a period of transformation by its own consciousness; on the contrary, this consciousness must be explained rather from the contradictions of material life, from the existing conflict between the social productive forces and the relations of production. No social order ever disappears before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have been developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore, mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, we will always find that the task itself arises only when the material conditions necessary for its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation. In broad outlines we can designate the Asiatic, the ancient, the feudal, and the modern bourgeois modes of production as so many progressive epochs in the economic formation of society. The bourgeois relations of production are the last antagonistic form of the social process of production - antagonistic not in the sense of individual antagonism, but of one arising from the social conditions of life of the individuals; at the same time the productive forces developing in the womb of bourgeois society create the material conditions for the solution of that antagonism. This social formation constitutes, therefore, the closing chapter of the prehistoric stage of human society.

But that's another show... or at least it could be.

Everyone that works on the show (on the TV side) has done serious time in commercials and movies and we tend to treat every episode of Good Eats like a little movie. I direct them just as I did commercials, heavy on composition.

on Iron Chef America: To be honest, I don't know who the competitors will be. When taping the episodes, I know what the secret ingredient is going to be ahead of time, but that's about it. But even that information is highly privileged. It's like they send me this encrypted message that says, 'Go to the phone booth near the corner and await further instructions. This message will self destruct in five seconds...' It's very secretive, but it's a really fun show to do.

on starting to shoot Good Eats in HDTV format: But, although our look may have gotten expensive, I assure you our props, sets, costumes, actors, and general mentality are still budget basement. Good Eats is still held together by dental floss, duct tape, peanut butter and brine. We still don't spend as much per episode as American Idol spends on Paula Abdul's hair. And unlike much of what goes out on those 315 or so channels that pass for television, Good Eats is hand made:no committees, no corporate spank, and no stinkin' focus groups.

I keep reading about this, erm, Indian guy that turns out like three or four thousand pictures a minute...or maybe it's a day.

To the individual can belong only the products to be consumed, not the means of producing them. A man may own his clothes and his food, but not the sewing-machine which makes his shirts or the spade which digs his potatoes.

Schenck was supposed to be my producer but he never knew when or what I was shooting. He just turned me loose.

'Tighter and Tighter' was actually written around the same time as 'Black Hole Sun.' In fact, I did a demo with four songs on it to play for the band. 'Black Hole Sun,' 'Sounds Like Days,' 'Tighter and Tighter' and a song called 'Anxious.' We blew off 'Anxious' entirely and recorded 'Tighter and Tighter' for the last record. It was the last song we did. It was number 16 and we ran out of studio time. We had the rhythm tracks done and it was just needing vocals and my guitar solos. We just ran out of time. It was falling flat anyway. I changed the arrangement a little bit.

It wasn't supposed to be pink vinyl; it's supposed to be peppermint vinyl, so it's supposed to look like one of those peppermint candies with the red and white swirlies. They fucked it up so it's pink. What's the name of that pressing plant? Well, whatever it is... don't use it! You'll be on Frilly Pink and you'll be forced to buy flowers from Adama's Flower Shop.

I believe in producers, creaters, manufacturers, distributors, and in all industrial workers of the world who have a job, and hold it down.

So what it boils down to was Elvis produced his own records. He came to the session, picked the songs, and if something in the arrangement was changed, he was the one to change it. Everything was worked out spontaneously. Nothing was really rehearsed. Many of the important decisions normally made previous to a recording session were made during the session. What it was was a look to the future. Today everybody makes records this way. Back then Elvis was the only one. He was the forerunner of everything that's record production these days. Consciously or unconsciously, everyone imitated him. People started doing what Elvis did.

'Sam Phillips used what we call 'slapback' or 'tape delay', which lent an otherworldly patina to Presley's voice. And I don't know if Sam was really conscious of it at the time, but if you listen to old pop and country records back then, the voice was always so much farther out from the music; Sam kept Elvis' voice close to the music, so, in essence, Elvis' voice became another instrument'

Quantity is quality

The fact is, therefore, that definite individuals who are productively active in a definite way enter into these definite social and political relations. Empirical observation must in each separate instance bring out empirically, and without any mystification and speculation, the connection of the social and political structure with production. The social structure and the state are continually evolving out of the life-process of definite individuals, but of individuals, not as they appear in their own or other people's imagination, but as they really are; i.e. as they are effective, produce materially, and are active under definite material limits, presuppositions and conditions independent of their will. The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness, is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life. Conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behaviour. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of the politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics of a people. Men are the producers of their conception, ideas, etc. - real, active men, as they are conditioned by a definite development of their productive forces and of the intercourse corresponding to these, up to its furthest forms. Consciousness can never be anything else than conscious existence, and the existence of men is their actual life-process. If in all ideology men and their circumstances appear upside down as in a camera obscura, this phenomenon arises just as much from their historical life-process as the inversion of objects on the retina does from their physical life-process.

The commodity is first of all, an external object, a thing which through its qualities satisfies human needs of whatever kind. The nature of these needs, whether they arise, for example, from the stomach, or the imagination, makes no difference. Nor does it matter here how the thing satisfies man's need, whether directly as a means of subsistence, i.e. an object of consumption, or indirectly as a means of production

Come the recording day, a group of male choristers, more accustomed to singing church services than backing vocals, descended on Bush's home, which was equipped with its own studio. Doubtless they were imagining that they were about to meet a wild-eyed rock babe, but Kate, quiet and unassuming - the kind of sympathetic, slightly shy girl who greets you from behind the counter at the local chemist - introduced us to her friend the bass player Del Palmer, who engineered the session. None of the singers or Richard had ever gone over and over four or five phrases so exactingly. No measure of Bach or Mozart had, in their experience, been subjected to such surgical scrutiny, and I began to worry that their voices might begin to tire. But Bush knew and got what she wanted and Hello Earth is, I think, a remarkable track on the album that finally broke the American market and established her as an iconic and hugely influential figure. I can't wait to hear what she has been up to now.

I stood in front of a hundred and one critics at a critic's convention, ... and a critic asked me, 'Miss Cho, isn't it true that your management asked you to lose weight to play the part of yourself in your own TV show?' Gail [the producer] grabbed the mike from me and said, 'There is no truth in that whatsoever.' I... was so... hungry.

When I had my own company on Traffic and Coonskin, all metaphors were able to get to the screen clearly. In Cool World, with the producer and Paramount watching me carefully to make sure I was in good taste, I instinctively poured stuff into the picture that I wanted to talk about. But when you force stuff, it's not really very clear. But, I have a great love for Max Fleischer, especially some of his Black & White Betty Boops with their strange Cab Calloway and Louis Armstrong black folk tale jazz hipness that part of Cool World was a homage in style to those films and that style of cartooning. The Grim Reaper is right out of a Max Fleischer cartoon or old Terrytoons, which is why I hired and love Milton Knight the artist. He understands totally the Uncle Remus fable like qualities behind Fleischer and Terrytoons. Milton Knight is probably the purest artist of that style in the business. He has a hard time because studios think he is old fashioned...but that's the point.

We must be the great arsenal of Democracy.

Speer, as Minister of Armaments and Production, joined in planning and executing the program to dragoon prisoners of war and foreign workers into German war industries, which waxed in output while the laborers waned in starvation.

Walt Disney has the best casting system. If he don't like an actor, he just tears him up.

We've got known in Britain for making the smaller films. Recently we've been pulling out of that into the more Trainspotting area, but the smaller films, they got the Room with a View with a Staircase and a Pond type movie.

Those who produce should have, but we know that those who produce the most - that is, those who work hardest, and at the most difficult and most menial tasks, have the least.

Creation always involves building upon something else. There is no art that doesn't reuse. And there will be less art if every reuse is taxed by the appropriator. Monopoly controls have been the exception in free societies; they have been the rule in closed societies.

Give me a museum and I'll fill it.

I co-wrote all the songs on my album, and co-produced a lot of them as well, So being involved in the creative aspect and not just singing is so important to me because, above everything, I love to create and I love to express myself.

Mozart shows a creative power of such magnitude that one can virtually say that he tossed out of himself one great masterpiece after another. ~ Claudio Arrau