Hollywood Ending Quotes

[Val has just seen the terrible work of his latest film he directed while blind]

Val: Call Dr. Kevorkian.

Ed: Look, I love Val. I love him. But with all due respect... he's a raving, incompetent psychotic.

Ellie: He's not incompetent.

Val: You know, part of me wants it so badly.

Lori: And the other part?

Val: Also wants it. That's the problem.

Val: For God sakes, this is a woman I was married to for 10 years. We made love. I'd hold her head over the toilet bowl when she threw up.

Lori: From making love with you?

Ellie: We didn't communicate.

Val: We had sex!

Ellie: Yes, we had sex. But we never talked.

Val: Sex is better than talk. Ask anybody in this bar. Talk is what you suffer through so you can get to sex.

Val: We once had a discussion about music and he threatened to push me down a flight of stairs.

Psychiatrist: What happened?

Val: It worked. He pushed me down a flight of stairs.

Val: This guy stole my wife.

Al Hack: He doesn't hold that against you.

Ellie: Our marriage wasn't going anywhere.

Val: Where do you want it to go? Where do marriages go? After a while they just lay there. That's the thing about marriages.

Al Hack: You don't have a brain tumor.

Val: Al, with all due respect, I have to hear that from someone who went to a greater medical school than the William Morris Agency.

Ellie: You were on the cutting edge of everything.

Val: So, how did I go from the cutting edge to the buttering edge?

[Ellie has called Lori a wind-up doll]

Val: That wind-up doll happens to have a Ph.D.

Ellie: In what? The history of gym?

Val: I came to hold out an olive branch.

Tony Waxman: "An olive branch"? What is this, the Israeli parliament?

Val: Lori, I can't stick my girlfriend in a movie.

Lori: I'm not just your girlfriend. I'm good!

Male Party Guest #1: We were just talking about Alfred Hitchcock. Truffaut says that "Notorious" is his best film.

Val: I agree! I agree. A masterpiece.

Lori: What are you talking about? You hate that - he hates that movie. The ending makes you crazy!

Val: Yes. Cause its a masterpiece. Every time I watch that movie, when Cary Grant is is carrying Ingrid Bergman down the staircase, I always think that the Germans are gonna catch them. No matter how many times I see it! I think the Germans are gonna get 'em.

Male Party Guest #1: Hitchcock was an artist, but, he was commercial.

Val: You say that like it's a good thing?

Female Party Guest: No. Well, you have to be both. I mean he knew what he was doing, you know. So, you know, in order to make movies you have to think about the audience. You have to - otherwise you're just making movies for yourself. It's like, eh, like artistic masturbation.

Male Party Guest #2: That's right. That's right. You're a narcissist.

Val: Well, I'm a classic narcissist then.

Ellie: You had all the symptoms but not the disease.

Val: You used to think I was creative and original.

Ellie: I still do, as a filmmaker. Its when you became creative as a hypochondriac - that was it.

Val: Hey, all those attacks were for real.

Ellie: Oh yeah?

Val: Yes!

Ellie: The Black Plague, Val? An allergy to oxygen? Elm blight? Only trees get elm blight - elm trees.

Hal: I said from the start to use Harold Pappas!

Val: Pappas is a hack! Pappas, Pappas is safe, but he's uninspired. I can't work with him!

Hal: Then you should bow out now!

Val: I said I can't work with him - I didn't say I wouldn't work with him.

Ellie: I hear that she's all sugar and sweetness and gets into your good graces and then - Wham! You know, she kept telling Sean Madigan how she loved all of his films and she was a big fan and how he was a great, I don't know, unique American artist. And then in the profile she did, she disemboweled him.

Val: If you happen to fall for that kind of flattery, you know, I can handle it, though.

Ellie: Please! You couldn't handle Shirley Temple.

Al Hack: I'm telling you, Val, you're going to muddle your way through until your sight returns.

Val: But, Al, I can't direct a picture. I'm blind!

Al Hack: Have you seen some of the pictures out there?

Al Hack: A hint of this can't get out. You will direct a hit picture. Sometimes God works in strange ways.

Val: Like Job.

Sharon Bates: If I act with a fine director, like yourself, I - there's nothing I wouldn't do sexual for him.

Val: Oh, well you should, you should take a full page ad in the DJ magazine stating that because you'll never stop working then. Can, is it possible to - to open the door for me because of all the heavy breathing, it has steamed my glasses.

Val: It's funny, because, my - unfulfilled life dream is that you and I would live in Paris together.

Ellie: You know, I was willing and you where the one that always lost your nerve.

Val: Well, it's funny, that seems like so long ago now. Its amazing how things change, isn't it?

Hal: Its not easy sitting through three hours of pure adulation.

Ellie: Frankly, I'll tell you, I don't, I don't know how you can do it.

Hal: Why? You don't want to rob them the opportunity of, you know, demonstrating their gratitude.

Ellie: Yeah, no wonder we both have to drink so much at these affairs.

Val: I've responsibility, Al, to Ellie and even to Hal.

Al Hack: You have responsibility to yourself.

Val: You know, you have agent's ethics. I can't go by you.

Al Hack: Don't hit me with oxymorons at this time we're in a crisis.

Lori: What are you doing home?

Val: I quit.

Lori: No, Val, not again! You quit over nothing again?

Val: Not over nothing.

Lori: What?

Val: I quit over a big thing.

Lori: What?

Val: They fired me. I thought that was big enough to quit over.