- Timothy Wurtz: The reality is that good ideas are a dime a dozen, great ideas and concepts are hard to come by. And so the currency that we deal with, are great concepts, great ideas.
- Matthew Hintlian: My first entrée into business was loading trucks, anything at that point was like, you know I couldn't get a job if I had a fist full of hundreds.
- James G. Robinson: And there may be 300 people who are sitting in there saying "Hey, that's my picture", cause every people believes it's their picture and rightfully it is, because everyone, that's a collaborative effort, that movie came about because of one person. It's a lot of fun and it's permanent, it's permanent, it's forever.
- James G. Robinson: Cause I don't care how much mud or shit you stood in, or how miserable you were, you get all cleaned up and you put your suit on, or whatever it is, and you go to the premiere and you say, "Hey, that's my picture up there".
- Kevin Jarre: High Noon, Gary Cooper, how many people have ever been faced with some kind of terrible decision, and you know, they think of Gary Cooper, and that kind of puts starch in their backs, which is not to say, which is that to overvalue movies, I mean they're just movies, and you have to make decisions on your own, but still there's something about it, you can think back and say "Yeah, I was Gary Cooper", or "God, I should've been Gary Cooper".
- Karl Schaefer: There's a lot of great writers who are nervous wrecks and can't pitch to save their life.
- Phil Alden Robinson: If it's a good movie, when it's over, you want to know more. You want to go back and visit them again.
- Karl Schaefer: I'm hit and miss on pitching because, I mean, one of the reasons I'm a writer and not a performer is I'm, I get nervous. I, you know, and, and it depends too, cause it's a little bit like tennis. If you're pitching to an idiot, you're going to break out.
- Michael Reaves: Most people become writers because they're very shy, quiet, retiring people, and they like to hunch behind their word processors and just type and tell their stories, they don't like to get out in the limelight.
- Matthew Hintlian: It's a city like any other city, there are people out there that'll take your eye out and eat it for an olive if they had an opportunity.
- Michael Reaves: And yet when you sell the story, you got a, you know, it's a show, you got to put it on. You got to say "And this happens", and the dam breaks.
- Michael Reaves: So you have to pitch to somebody, a producer or a story editor who usually has 50,000 things on his mind. His attention span is, you know, like that of a Jack rabbit on Angel-dust anyway. And your trying to hold his attention by selling him a story that's better than the other 50 stories he's heard today, and which are all jumbled up in notes on his desk.
- Matthew Hintlian: It's truly an addictive industry, and you really have to love what you're doing to deal with a lot of the rejection and the headaches, and the screwing around with money that goes on.
- Karl Schaefer: No other business or, are business decisions have such massive scale and importance made on, you know, the, the whims of, if the guy had a bad lunch or he got in a car accident that day, you're out of there, forget it.
- Jeremy Bertrand Finch: The first fellow we pitched it to said, "Wait, wait, stop, stop right there. Everyone on earth dies, who cares? Go on to the next story". We thought, you know, bad idea. Later on that day, we get that part of the story he says "That's fabulous, everyone on earth dies. How important these people's lives become, just what a great idea, go on, go on!" Now the important thing to remember is both of them were probably mistaken, so where in the middle, you know, there was the truth and it's very easy to get swayed by their title, by the fact that you know that their shoes cost more than you made last month.