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Media Insults
In answer to a notice which appeared in a New York magazine the novelist, Edna Ferber wrote to the editor:
'Will you kindly inform the moron who runs your motion picture department that I did not write the movie entitled Classified"? Neither did I write any of the wisecracking titles. Also inform him that Moses did not write the motion picture entitled The Ten Commandments.'
Reviewing the opening night of a Broadway show, Hey-wood Broun wrote:
The play opened at 8.40 sharp and closed at 10.40 dull.'
'I am not the editor of a newspaper and shall always try to do right and be good so that God will not make me one.' — Mark Twain
On television and its stars:
These days a star is anyone who can hold a microphone. A super star is someone who has shaken hands with Lew Grade, and a super-super-star is someone who has refused to shake hands with Lew Grade.' — Harry Secombe
On a musical:
'I have knocked everything but the knees of the chorus girls, and nature has anticipated me there.' — Percy Hammond
On a Broadway comedy:
'There was laughter at the back of the theatre, leading to the belief that someone was telling jokes back there.' — George S. Kaufman
On an American actor named Creston Clarke, made famous by this notice:
'Last night Mr. Creston Clarke played King Lear at the Tabor Grand. All through the five acts of that Shakespearean tragedy he played the King as though under momentary apprehension that someone else was about to play the Ace.' — Eugene Field
On television:
'Time has convinced me of one thing. Television is for appearing on, not looking at.' — Noel Coward
On actress Helen Hayes, playing Cleopatra in Shaw's Caesar and Cleopatra; critic Franklin Pierce Adams wrote that she appeared to be suffering from:
'Fallen archness.'
On Tallulah Bankhead, playing Cleopatra, this time in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra:
'Tallulah Bankhead barged down the Nile last night as Cleopatra and sank.' — John Mason Brown
On a new play entitled House Beautiful:
'House Beautiful is play lousy.' — Dorothy Parker On a new play entitled Hook and Ladder:
'Hook and Ladder is the sort of play that gives failures a bad name.' — Walter Kerr
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