 But I want to do good work, after this series. |
| So I felt, well, I'll make the money and, with the money, do what I want to do. |
| If it's boring, then it's tiring. |
| People like Spencer Tracy held up because they had the background originally, but to this day they never have changed Mr. Gable's role, or most of them. |
| So then you have to say to yourself: Do I want to be rich, or do I want to do good work? |
| A lot of people like to run in plays because it's a nice, steady job. |
| There was never any effort made out there to improve the artist. |
| The studio didn't ask them to learn their trade, they just worked them, and when that personality or that gimmick or whatever they had ran dry at the box office, they were dropped and out. |
| I just knew how to do the one thing I did, and whether I did it well or not depended on who the director was. |
| They kept me in short pants as long as they could, until they were shaving the hair on my legs because it was beginning to photograph. |
| So if I keep making mistakes on Broadway or tape or film, producing, directing or acting, I can go along and do it - so long as I'm not investing too much capital in these things. |
| But the working I would always want to do. |
| There was only so much television you could do. |
| I remember Mr. Mayer very well. He sort of liked to be the father - no, he liked to be treated like you thought he was Daddy, but he didn't treat you like Daddy at all. |
| A nice, steady job I don't need that bad. I'm not that satisfied with it. |
| They thought in terms of: whatever you had that started you at the box office, this was it. |
| Well, they just don't know anything else except that one form of their business, acting, and they don't really want to learn any other part of it, or they would. Directing and producing and putting a show together is very creative, for me. |
| I hope this series is good work, but it is in the half-hour medium, which is limited to a kind of mediocrity that sponsors are just dying to have right now, and the public, for some reason, is unconsciously demanding. |
| To me, the series was the end of the actor, when the series ended. |
| So whatever I might have started to learn at that age was all undone by the next director and next crew in the next cheap picture, because I was allowed to get away with murder. |
