Edward Jay Epstein Quotes

The discrepancy between what actually happened and the version of what happened provided by sources is an enormous gray area.

Bonnie and Clyde became not just a big hit, but a movie that went through young audiences like a first slug of Scotch. It affected clothes, talk, manners. Though set in the thirties it had the feeling of 1966, the most dangerous moment in American young people remembered.

In 1972 Charlie Chaplin was allowed back to America to receive an honorary Oscar, ‘for the incalculable he had on making motion pictures the art form of this century’. That’s what the Academy was always for – to blur the equation enough so that profit and fame could be called art.

I regret the way that America has elected to make films for its bluntest section of society and in ways that flatter them, and we have to recognize how much that is being done for money. We have to find another way of measuring ourselves. And film is one of the few ways that might be done.

Who can now deny the loss of natural light, of skin tones, of real place, and common but precious things in our movies, to be replaced by the gorgeous imagery of things that have never been and never will be? The most special effect in movies is always the human face when its mind is being changed.