Horse Operas and the Horses They Rode

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Horse Operas and the horses they rode in on

An oil man is allowed to deplete twenty-seven percent annually as the oil is used up. An industrialist can depreciate his equipment as it ages. Now all I have to sell is me—this body of mine. If it’s maimed or broken, I can’t work. And it ages just as certainly as machine tools. But do they let me depreciate it? Heck, no. – Gary Cooper

I don’t know how much the Western film means to Europe; but to this country it means the very essence of national life. – William S. Hart

I’m going to stand up for America until somebody shoots me. – Roy Rogers

When you’re young and you fall off a horse you may break something. When you’re my age and you fall off, you splatter. – Roy Rogers

I told Dale, “When I go, just skin me and put me on top of Trigger.” - Roy Rogers

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• Roy Rogers rides again (telegraph.co.uk)

Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

Cover of Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It

Mae West –

Her autobiography – Goodness Had Nothing to do With It

Sex is an emotion in motion.

Love conquers all things except poverty and a toothache.

I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.

Every man I meet wants to protgect me. Can’t figure out from whom.

When they make a man better than George Raft, I’ll make him too.

Beulah, peel me a grape.

Kiss me, my fool.

Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

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The Gabors – The Hungarian born mother (Jolie)and two daughters (Eva and Zsa Zsa (my favorite from Green Acres – a situation comedy dying to be re-created). Eva wrote and autobiography – Orchids and Salami (you can’t make this stuff up)

Jolie
It’s as easy to fall in love with a rich man as with a poor man.(and certainly more profitable)

There are no wrinkles on the heart.

Zsa Zsa

Sure, dollink. Come back and see me after my next marriage.

Conrad Hilton and I had one thing in common. We both wanted his money.

I never hated a man enough to give him back his diamonds. Money? It’s expendable.

Husbands are like fires. They go out when left unattended.

A girl must marry for love, and keep on marrying until she finds it.

Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

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Brigitte Bardot

The French sex kitten

There is a French proverb: to live happily, live hidden. Where can Brigitte Bardot hide?

I leave before being left. I decide.

If you live with a man, you must conquer him every day. Otherwise he will go to another.

You must at least be amusing, the best at something, or interesting, otherwise you will be nothing.

I play myself. I’m not good enough to play somebody else.

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Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

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Jean Harlow – 1911-1937

The phrase “platinum blonde best describes Jean Harlow.

If audiences like you, you don’t have to be an actress.

The men like me because I don’t wear a brassiere. And the women like me because I don’t look like a girl who would steal a husband. At least not for long.

I like to wake up feeling a new man.

To a producer: What kind of whore am I now?

Louis B. Mayer about Harlow’s disastrous marriage to Paul Bern –
“Tell me, how does a girl like Harlow, a temple of sex, wind up married to a fairy bigamist? Tell me!”

Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

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Samuel Goldwyn (1884-1974) was the leading independent film producer for 35 years.

“Goldwynisms”

I was very pleasantly disappointed.

I don’t care if it doesn’t make a nickel. I just want every man, woman and child in America to see it.

1810? When was that?

You’re from Iowa? Out here we pronounce it Ohio.

First you have a story, then a good treatment, and next a first-rate director. After that, you hire a competent cast and even then you have only the mucus of a good picture.

Plenty of water’s passed between us.

It rolls off my back like a duck.

Color television! Bah, I won’t believe it until I see it in black and white.

Isn’t there a statue of limitation?

It’s no use. You’ve got to take the bull between the teeth.

Lobbying for Fun and Profit

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The following companies and groups have been lobbying – again. They do this for the benefit of every citizen of the United States. They feel it’s their “duty” to keep our Congressmen and Senators informed and inline.

After all having to vote on bills that are 1300 pages long they haven’t read can be stressful if they haven’t enough pork hidden in the fine print or their not getting their share of corporate manna.

In just the second quarter the following fine companies “contributed” to the greening of their corporations. (lobbying dollars usually return $10 for every $1 invested, not bad for just doing what’s right)

Nuclear Energy Institute - $570,000
Coca Cola - $580,000
Pacific Gas and Electric - $740,000
Duke Energy Corp - $1,500,000
Air Bus Americas Inc. - $190,000
Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association - $640,000
Microsoft - $1,900,000
Eli Lilly - $3,6000,000
Progress Energy - $440,000
MillersCoors LLC – $490,000
PepsiCo Inc - $650,000
The Beer Institute (You’ve got to love the name) - $200,000

Hey, I’ve got a great idea. Why don’t we, as citizens, get together and stop paying all our taxes and start lobbying. That way our Congressman and Senators will listen to what we need and represent voters instead of these big companies. Wouldn’t that be nice—for a change.

Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

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Samuel Goldwyn (1884-1974) was the leading independent film producer for 35 years.

“Goldwynisms”

Send in two cups of demi-tasses

No thanks. Coffee isn’t my cup of tea.

Excuse me, I’m going out for some tea and trumpets.

Eat your vichyssoise before it gets cold.

All the lies they tell about me are true.

If Roosevelt were alive today, he’d turn over in his grave.

When it comes to ruining a painting, he’s an artist.

It’s more than magnificent- It’s mediocre.

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Darkly Comical Health Insurance

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This is my letter to the White House

8/22/09

To President Barack Obama

I have listened to the debate on health reform quietly but now I can see the writing on the wall. The entire civilized world (excluding the United States) has health insurance for everyone.

My wife and I had our first health insurance plan in 1973(Golden Rule). We never missed a payment. (We have never missed a health insurance payment in 36 years.)

In 1992 I had non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Fighting for my health care from our carrier was almost a full time job for my wife. I had surgery and six months of chemotherapy. I actually preferred cancer to fighting the health insurance battle.

The next year our health care (with the same carrier) doubled. We went to the insurance commissioner in Florida and we were informed that the commissioner’s job was not to represent citizens but to prevent fraud.

Our health carrier kept raising our fees until we were forced to change companies.

The first year in our new company (Blue Cross) the price was less, but then they raised our fees prodigiously until we were forced to the next company.

This bait-and-switch process went on until finally my wife went with one insurance carrier and I went with a lovely little company by the name of Megahealth. Basically I paid almost $600 per month and what I got was negotiated prices.

Megahealth has a manipulative policy of raising fees, Increasing your deductable and finally forcing you to pay a $5000 deductible for each medical incident.

I have not had to have any further cancer treatment since 1992, yet I have the stigma and it effects me 18 years later. Shouldn’t there be some point where they admit you’re cured? My doctor says at this point I have no higher chance of recurrence than a “normal” person.

I finally realized I was paying so much that I couldn’t afford to go to a doctor. I couldn’t afford my medications.

At 58 years of age I told them to kiss off and now I have no health insurance.

At this point I’m a cancer survivor and I have type-two diabetes. No insurance company my wife has contacted will cover me. They simply state that I’m not eligible.

It makes me angry because if I had avoided ever paying a health insurance company for 36 years and banked or invested the money I could fund my own health insurance plan. If I had understood the way insurance carriers worked I would not have played their game. There is a reason they hire actuaries and have big buildings.

It’s my understanding that 10% of the employed people in the United States work for some type of insurance company. If this is true, what do they produce? What’s their product?

If you have any assets and you have no health insurance then you pay much higher fees. In other words you subsidize the insured patients. An MRI for my insured father was $1400 and an MRI for me was $5600. Where is the fairness in that? Should an MRI cost 4x as much for the uninsured as the insured?

My wife and I have determined that our best tactic in dealing with the situation if nothing is done is to get a divorce (We’ve been happily married 39 years this September) and put everything in my wife’s name. Then I will qualify for care without losing everything we have worked for.

While we appreciate all that President Obama is attempting we believe the United States is run by lobbyists and Congressmen and Senators whose votes have been purchased by campaign contributions and political favors.

One way out of this mess is that our Senators and Congressmen should voluntarily give up their health benefits and be forced to go into the marketplace to purchase health insurance. Otherwise they will never understand that 58 year-old cancer survivors are not lazy and feckless. It seems incongruent to me that a Senator or Congressman can serve one term and have health insurance benefits for life.

People who never have a serious medical problem are not marked with the scarlet C. For the most part they pay their health insurance and go merrily along. This pleases the health insurance companies as their monthly payments translate into high profitability.

My other suggestion is that everyone who doesn’t have health insurance should march on Washington and camp out on the mall in a peaceful manner until our Senators and Congressmen see the extent of the problem.

I believe you should call for such a march to shut down Washington D.C. until our Senators and Congressmen understand that they serve at the will of the voters and not the will of the lobbyist $$$$s.

Do you have better suggestions?

Sincerely,
Alan H. Bush

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Woo Burgers in Paradise - Blatant Book Plug

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Woo Burgers in Paradise - A dark-comedy mystery

‘Woo Burgers in Paradise’ is a character-driven dark-comedy mystery about finding love and serial killers in a small but complicated seaside community.

She’s a cop who will shoot you and he’s a veterinarian with a soft heart. She’s tough on crime and he can’t seem to follow the rules. She’s an insider and he’s an outsider. Her friends are normal and the few friends he has are just beyond the fringe or shed twice a year. She’s got a big family and he’s lonely.

Doc and Sergeant Viki are drawn together by a tumor nestled in the brain of her narcotic-sniffing German shepherd.

‘Buskers on the Half Shell’, the second in the Gator-Crossing mystery series, continues Doc’s pursuit of Sergeant Viki. Oscar has been gator-napped and Sergeant Viki doesn’t want to pursue the case, but she’s forced to when it’s her only chance to regain her position as a detective in the Isle-of-Palms Police Department.


A cheerful romp interrupted now and then by sulfurous whiffs of stuff the tide washed in. It’s like a stroll in Mallory Square at sunset in March—exotic, entertaining, and bizarre. The author has molded the Florida Keys’ deeply wacky raw material into a charming cast of eccentric underachievers. – Hal O’Boyle


Woo Burgers in Paradise by Theophilous Thorne-Bush

Darkly Comical News Headlines

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You can't make this up -

"Tinker - the 65 million-year-old T-rex back in court"

"Man with Spears tattoo steals earring-wearing dog"

"Official: slain ex-model ID'd by breast implants" (is it anybody's business that the ex-model had implants much less that they are trackable?)

Woo Burgers in Paradise - A dark-comedy mystery by Theophilous Thorne-Bush

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A cheerful romp interrupted now and then by sulfurous whiffs of stuff the tide washed in. It’s like a stroll in Mallory Square at sunset in March—exotic, entertaining, and bizarre. The author has molded the Florida Keys’ deeply wacky raw material into a charming cast of eccentric underachievers. – Hal O’Boyle

See it soon coming to a multiplex near you!

Blatant Book Plug

Bubbocracy: Government of the Bubbas, by the Bubbas and for the Bubbas

28ehqnxmyw

28ehqnxmyw

Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

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Samuel Goldwyn (1884-1974) was the leading independent film producer for 35 years.

“Goldwynisms”

Let’s have some new cliches.

Here I am paying big money to you writers and what for? All you do is change the words.

There is not enough sarcasm in the musical score.
A wide screen just makes a bad film twice as bad.

We put the money in the escarole.

I want this to be fifty-fifty like I said. But I want you to see that I get the best part of it.

I know you’re getting nothing, but I won’t pay you a cent more.

Spare no expense to make everything as economical as possible.

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Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

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Samuel Goldwyn (1884-1974) was the leading independent film producer for 35 years.

“Goldwynisms”

A verbal contract isn’t worth the paper it’s written on.

A producer shouldn’t get ulcers; he should give them.

Most directors bite the hand that lays the golden egg.
The scene is too dull; tell him to put more life into his dying.

This is it. You’re fired. You’re fired. Definitely. Wait a minute I didn’t say positively.

The book has too much plot and not enough story.

I read part of it all the way through.

She’s a lesbian? We’ll get around that. We’ll make her an American.

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Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

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Samuel Goldwyn (1884-1974) was the leading independent film producer for 35 years.

“Goldwynisms”

Ah, to be immortal for a day!

Actors think with their hearts. That’s why so many of them die broke.

I’m having more trouble with these stars than Mussolini with Utopia.

She’s pregnant? You know what you did? You didn’t just screw her – you screwed me.

The most important thing in acting is honesty; once you learn to fake that, you’re in!

You’re a dunce who lived by the sweat of his frau. (to an actor married to a German woman)

Bill, you and I should start doing each other favors. Let’s start by you doing me one.

I apologize for calling you a crook, Doug. I can’t prove it.

I’ll cable Hitler and ask him to shoot around you. (to David Niven when he enlisted)

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Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes


Samuel Goldwyn (1884-1974) was the leading independent film producer for 35 years.

“Goldwynisms”

Anyone who sees a psychiatrist should have his head examined.

I tell you, Marion, you just don’t realize what life is all about until you’ve found yourself lying on the brink of a great abscess!

If I did that I would be sticking my head in a moose.

I’ve been laid up with intentional flu.

It’s a dog-eat-dog world, and nobody’s going to eat me.

I love the ground I walk on.

You may include me out.

I’ll give you a definite maybe.

Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

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The Screenwriters –

Each of these quotes are from authors who have written or adapted original screenplays or properties.

If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come. – Raymond Chandler

When a man of forty falls in love with a girl of twenty, it isn’t her youth he is seeking but his own. – Lenore Coffee

Whatever will bring in the most money will happen. – Elinor Glyn

A screenwriter is a man who is being tortured to confess and has nothing to confess. – Christopher Isherwood

A movie star is a creation that, like a painting or a statue or a symphony, does not age. – Garson Kanin

The films take our best ideas. We work like slaves, inventing, devising, changing, to please the morons who run this game. We spend endless hours in search of novel ideas, and, in the end, what do we get for it? A lousy fortune. – Alexander King

Gentlemen prefer blondes, but marry brunettes. – Anita Loos

The Hollywood version of the Twenty-third Psalm is “My pool runneth over.” – Harry Kurnitz

Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

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The director is the artist of the cinema.

Frank Capra (It’s a Wonderful Life)

Directors have the power to speak to hundreds of millions for two hours—and in the dark.

Movies made here have Americanized the world.

My measure of all things was simple: was it good for Frank Capra.

In short: “the audience is always right” is a safe bet.

There are no rules in film-making, only sins. And the cardinal sin is Dullness.

About Capra

I’d rather be Capra than God. If there is a Capra. – Garson Kanin

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Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

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The Director is the artist of the cinema

Directors: John Huston

The cinema sees deep

The director is the actor's sole audience

Fear makes you run one way--courage makes you run the other.

You need about twenty million dollars to live properly. My life span would probably be lengthened if I had that much. It's only trying to make twenty million dollars that cuts short a man's years. Spending it would be healthy.

Each film is a little lifetime.

Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

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The director is the artist of the cinema.

The directors: Ingmar Bergman

Whenever I am in doubt, I take refuge in the vision of a simple and pure love.

A film is a tapeworm, a tapeworm 2,500 meters long that sucks the life and spirit out of me.

I think it's terrbly important that art exposes humiliation, that art shows how human beings humiliate each other, because humiliation is one of the most dreadful companions of humanity, and our whole social system is based to an enormous extent on humiliation.

Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

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The director is the artist of the cinema.

The Directors: Alfred Hitchcock

Some films are slices of life. Mine are like slices of cake.

If I make a film of Cinderella, people will immediately start looking for the corpse.

In feature films the director is God; in documentary films God is the director.

I have a little phrase of my own. I always say logic is dull.

The chase seems to me the final expression of the motion-picture medium.

Actors? Cattle.

I deny I ever said that actors are cattle. What I said was, “Actors should be treated like cattle.”

What is drama but life with the dull bits cut out.

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Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

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Marlene Dietrich

To make a man happy is a full-time job – with no holidays

The average man is more interested in a woman who is interested in him than he is in a woman with beautiful legs

A man would prefer to come hoe to an unmade bed and a happy woman than to a neatly made bed and an angry woman.
Tenderness is greater proof of love than the most passionate of vows.

On Friends –
It’s the ones you can call up at 4:00 who matter

Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

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Charley Chaplin

Frankly I enjoy my comedies even more than the audience.

I had stumbled on the secret of being funny: an idea going in one direction meets an opposite idea suddenly.

Figuring out what the audience expects, and then doing something different, is great fun for me.

I have no design for living, no philosophy – whether sage or fool, we must all struggle with life.

I was loved by crowds, but I didn’t have a single close friend – I felt like the lonliest man alive.

You have to believe in yourself, that’s the secret. Even when I was in the orphanage, when I was roaming the streets trying to find enough to eat to keep alive, even then I thought of myself as the greatest actor in the world. I had to feel the exuberance that comes from utter confidence in yourself. Without it you go down in defeat.

Quotes about Charlie Chaplin

Chaplin is the one man in the world I want to meet. – Nikolai Lenin

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Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

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About Marlon Brando

An angel as a man and a monster as an actor. – Bernardo Bertolucci

He constantly surprises me—he’s the only one who does. – Richard Burton

He was antisocial because he knew society was crap; he was a hero to youth because he was strong enough not to take the crap. – Pauline Kael

Most of the time he sounds like he has a mouth full of wet toilet paper. – Rex Reed

Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

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Marlon Brando Quotes

If you play a pig, they think you’re a pig.

If you’re successful, acting is about as soft a job as anybody could ever wish for. But if you’re unsuccessful, it’s worse than having a skin disease.

Quitting acting – that is the mark of maturity.

I suppose it’s like the old Indian proverb about the leaf and the tree—“not a leaf move that the tree does not know.” Maybe a film does have influence on people’s lives.

I’m convinced that the larger the gross the worse the picture.

After you’ve got enough money, money doesn’t matter.

Tommorrow – Quotes about Marlon Brando

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Darkly Comical Hollywood Quotes

Marilyn Monroe via last.fm

About Marilyn Monroe –

“There’s a broad with a future behind her.” – Constance Bennett

“Necking with Marilyn is like kissing Hitler.” – Tony Curtis

“If it wasn’t for some of her friends, she wouldn’t be where she is.” – Joe DiMaggio

“You are a very lovely young lady.” – Nikita Khruschchev

“Mr. President, this lovely lady, this one lovely lady who has done so much, who has meant so much, here she is, Mr. President, the late Marilyn Monroe.” – Peter Lawford, introducing the star at President John F. Kennedy’s birthday party

“Now I can retire from politics after having had “Happy Birthday” sung to me by such a sweet, wholesome girl as Marilyn Monroe.” – John F. Kennedy

“Marilyn Monroe? A vacuum with nipples. – Otto Preminger

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