Rita: For me, love is very deep, sex only has to go a few inches.
Cheech: It stinks on fucking hot ice.
Olive: Hey, didn't I tell you to make "horse durves"?

Venus: I don't make nothin' out of horses, especially "horse durves", 'cause I don't know what they are, and neither do you.

Olive: Oh, aren't you the big mouth since you hit your number!

[raising her voice]

Olive: And I said the imported stuff!

Venus: The imported stuff ate through the bottle! It's gone!

Olive: A likely story!

[composing herself - to David]

Olive: It's very hard to get good help these days.
Sid Loomis: You're a star because you're great and you are a great star, but let me tell you something, Helen. In the last couple of years you're better known as an adulteress and a drunk. And I say this in all due respect.

Helen Sinclair: Look, I haven't had a drink since New Year's Eve.

Sid Loomis: You're talking Chinese New Year's.

Helen Sinclair: Naturally. Still, that's two days, Sid! You know how long that is for me?
Nick: Open your gift.

Olive: You open it, can't you see I'm dressing?

Nick: Here.

Olive: What is it?

Nick: Pearls. What the hell do you think they are?

Olive: Pearls are white.

Nick: These are black pearls.

Olive: Oh, don't give me that. I never heard of black pearls.

Nick: Just becaus you never heard of them don't mean it don't exist.

Olive: What do think I am, some kind of chump? They're black for God's sake. They probably came from defective oysters.
Helen Sinclair: Two martinis please, very dry.

David Shayne: How'd you know what I drank?

Helen Sinclair: Oh, you want one too? Three.
Cheech: She can't act. Are you listening to me? She makes stuff not work - stuff she ain't even in - it comes out all twisted!
Helen Sinclair: You stand on the brink of greatness. The world will open to you like an oyster. No... not like an oyster. The world will open to you like a magnificent vagina.
Helen Sinclair: She's perky all right. She makes you want to sneak up behind her with a pillow and suffocate her.
[Cheech is helping Olive rehearse a scene]

Olive: Can't you see? You're living out the exact same pattern your mother lived out with your father.

Cheech: I am? Pray tell.

Olive: In some way you're trying to relive it and in the process of reliving it, correct it. As if that were possible. HA.

Cheech: It don't say "ha."

Olive: I know it don't say "ha," I added that.

Cheech: Are you allowed to do that? I don't think you're allowed to do that.

Olive: We're allowed to add things. It's called ad-libbing.

Cheech: Well, I think the whole thing stinks.

Olive: Well, I think you're a degenerate zombie so shut up and read.

Cheech: You shut up.

Olive: You shut up and read.

Cheech: You're lucky you're Nick's girl.

Olive: You're lucky you're an idiot.
Cheech: You're lucky you're Nick's girl!

Olive: You're lucky you're an idiot!
Nick: Let's avoid confusion. She'll get some lines, or I'll nail your knee caps to the floor.
Cheech: Where I come from, nobody squeals!
Olive: [to Venus] Ain't you the big mouth since you hit your number.
Sheldon Flender: Let's say there was a burning building and you could rush in and you could save only one thing: either the last known copy of Shakespeare's plays or some anonymous human being. What would you do?
[Helen is late for rehearsal]

Helen Sinclair: Please forgive me. My pedicurist had a stroke. She fell forward onto the orange stick and plunged it into my toe. It required bandaging.
David Shayne: Maybe Olive's got stage fright. Maybe she won't show.

Julian Marx: Not Olive. That dame doesn't have a nerve in her body. I don't think her spinal cord touches her brain.
Sheldon Flender: [bragging] I have never had a play produced. That's right. And I've written one play a year for the past twenty years.

David Shayne: Yes, but that's because you're a genius. And the proof is that both common people and intellectuals find your work completely incoherent. Means you're a genius.
Venus: Do you want the blue stuff or the green?

Olive: The imported, dummy.

Venus: Oh, you mean from the *clean* bathtub.
David Shayne: Your taste is exquisite.

Helen Sinclair: [correcting] My taste is superb. My eyes are exquisite.
David Shayne: Suddenly I'm taking suggestions from some strong-arm man with an IQ of minus 50.
Helen Sinclair: Oh, Julian. Julian Marx. I do plays put on by Balasco, or Sam Harris, not some Yiddish pant salesman turned producer. My ex-husband used to say, "If you're gonna go down, go down with the best of them."

Sid Loomis: Which ex-husband?

Helen Sinclair: Oh, I don't know which ex-husband. The one with the moustache.
[Helen complains about her role]

Helen Sinclair: She's dowdy. Sid, the ingenue has all the hot lines. Even the female psychiatrist is a better role.

Sid Loomis: But the role of Sylvia Poston is the lead.

Helen Sinclair: "Sylvia Poston." Even the *name* reeks of Orbach's. I do Electra. I do Lady Macbeth. I do plays by Noel and Phil Barry, or at least Max Anderson.
Helen Sinclair: I'm still a star. I never play frumps or virgins.
Olive: [as Nick makes an advance on her] Stop it. Stop it. I'm not in the mood!

Nick: What do you mean you're not in the mood?

Venus: You better get in the mood, honey, 'cause he's payin' the rent.
Olive: [to Warner] I notice you have a really big appetite.
Helen Sinclair: No, no, don't speak. Don't speak. Please don't speak. Please don't speak. No. No. No. Go. Go, gentle Scorpio, go. Your Pisces wishes you every happy return.

David Shayne: Just one...

Helen Sinclair: Don't speak.
Cheech: [at the end, dying] No. Don't speak.
Cheech: Sylvia Pincus. Big fat Jewish broad, had a little tiny husband. She chopped him up with an ax and mailed his pieces all over the country. I don't know what she was tryin' to prove.
Eden Brent: [on David's new script changes] Congratulations. It finally has balls.
David Shayne: You're gonna write it?

Cheech: What am I? A fuckin' idiot? They taught me how to read and write in school before I burned it down.

David Shayne: You burned down your school?

Cheech: Yeah, it was Lincoln's birthday. There was nobody there.
David Shayne: You thought my first draft was c-cerebral and tepid?

Helen Sinclair: Only the plot and the dialogue. But this...

David Shayne: Was-was-was there nothing in the original draft that you feel was worth saving?

Helen Sinclair: The stage directions were lucid. Best I've ever seen... and the color of the binder. Good choice.

David Shayne: Thank you. I've always had a flair for stage directions.
David Shayne: I studied playwrighting with every teacher, I read every book...

Cheech: Let me tell you somethin' about teachers. I hate teachers. Those blue-haired bitches used to whack us with rulers. Forget teachers.
Lord Chafee: My tongue is hanging out to present it on the London stage.

David Shayne: London.

Lord Chafee: Look at his face, Helen. You're going to be the toast of Broadway. Why not the West End, hmm?
Sid Loomis: It's a little idea she's wanted to do for years. She plays Jesus' mother.

Partygoer: Oh.

Sid Loomis: It's a whole Oedipal thing - he loves her, wants to do in the father. Well, you can see the complications. Of course, we're talking to Ira Gershwin about a modern musical version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame. "Quasimodo Jones."

Partygoer: Helen has such a-a-a... a new vitality. Even her face looks so smooth.

Sid Loomis: I know. The monkey glands are working.
Sid Loomis: He's working on a vehicle for Helen for next season. She plays Jesus' mother. It's a whole Oedipul thing. He loves her... wants to do in the father... well you can see the complications.
Helen Sinclair: Make love to me.

David Shayne: Here? Now?

Helen Sinclair: I see no reason to wait.

David Shayne: Jerome Kern is on the other side of the door.

Helen Sinclair: Yes, he's a wonderful composer. You'll have to meet him. Now hang up your pants.
Olive: Don't tell me you still think the world revolves around...

Stage Manager: You.

Olive: ...you.
Eden Brent: There you are. Mr. Purcell, you have been stealing our dog yummies and eating them.

Warner Purcell: Absolutely not. That's an outrageous suggestion.

Eden Brent: Then let me see in your pockets.

Warner Purcell: Would I eat dog food?

Eden Brent: You'd eat anything that didn't eat you first, you big fat pot of helium.
Sheldon Flender: Hey, look who's here. The big Broadway success. I don't write hits. My plays are art. They're written specifically to go unproduced.
Olive: Why do you have to be so masso... masso...

David Shayne: Masochistic.

Olive: Masochistic? What the does that mean?

David Shayne: It means someone who enjoys pain.

Olive: Enjoys pain? What is she, *retarded*?
Nick: Sorry you guys had to hear that. Some problems with the firm.

David Shayne: Really? What type of firm is it, Nick?

Nick: It's a "don't stick your nose in other people's business and it won't get broken" type of firm.
Cheech: Olive, I think you should know this: you're a horrible actress.

[Cheech shoots Olive dead]
Eden Brent: [David has offered to get Eden's dog a saucer of milk] Oh, you needn't bother with that because I breast feed her!

Eden Brent: [awkward pause] Just KIDDING!
David Shayne: I've become involved with Helen Sinclair, and I feel terrible. But I can't help myself. She's so charismatic, and she's brilliant and beautiful. I mean, a real artist, and, and we speak the same language.

Sheldon Flender: You're wracked with guilt.

David Shayne: I'm wracked with guilt.

Sheldon Flender: You're wracked with guilt. You are wracked with guilt.

David Shayne: I don't know whether... I can't sleep.

Sheldon Flender: Guilt is petit-bourgeois crap. An artist creates his own moral universe.

David Shayne: I know that. I know...

Sheldon Flender: Well? What is the problem then? I'm gonna give you some advice. The same advice that was given to me many years ago when I had a very similar dilemma.

David Shayne: Similar to mine. To...

Sheldon Flender: Yes. Yes.

David Shayne: What did you do? What?

Sheldon Flender: You gotta do what you gotta do.
Warner Purcell: Get out of my trousers, you horrid woman.
Sheldon Flender: You, you, you're all missing the point, the point is I can give pleasure many times a day!

Rita: Oh, now, really Flender, what does quantity got to do with it?

Sheldon Flender: Quantity, quantity affects quality!

David Shayne: Says who?

Sheldon Flender: Karl Marx!

Rita: Oh, so now we're talking economics.

Sheldon Flender: Sex is economics!
David Shayne: I'll have a double anything.
Helen Sinclair: We're having dinner Sunday night with Gene O'Neill. He's heard that your writing is morbid and depressing. He's dying to meet you.
Helen Sinclair: [pointing wistfully out the train window, after taking a swig of paint remover] See the little towns going by.
Sheldon Flender: You are racked with guilt.

David Shayne: I can't sleep.

Sheldon Flender: Guilt is petty bourgeois crap. An artist creates his own moral universe.
[repeated line]

Helen Sinclair: Don't speak.

Bullets Over Broadway Quotes

Extended Reading

Bullets Over Broadway short comments

Miles 2022-01-07 15:54:20

A Woody Allen that makes people laugh cramping. 1. It not only presents the difficulties encountered by theater directors on stage and off the stage (bending for investors, being angry with wayward actors, and painstakingly changing the script), but also satirizes the chaos in the theater industry, the sentence " "The artist creates his own morality" is both self-deprecating and self-defending. The mediocre artist is willing to compromise, and the gangster is a genius artist who will not hesitate to kill and ruin his own life in order to defend the perfection of the work. 2. Woody Allen used a lot of paragraph long mirrors, and many scenes under the stage and outdoors also appeared to be very staged, especially the dock scene, where the murdered were all outside the painting. 3. John Cusack is too suitable to play this kind of hypocrisy and upright, but in fact inferior and obeys the conscience. Diane West’s past actress is the biggest laugh-"Don't speak" !" (Too close to Old Woody's words), as well as Browder Bent, who even steals dog food in the film. 4. The last paragraph talks about sex and the artist one after another. | Love is deep, only a few inches of sex is enough. | The world will open to you like a magnificent vagina. (8.8/10)
Jesse 2022-01-07 15:54:20

When Woody Allen became the director, every character in the play became Woody Allen