I'm affected by my environment. Los Angeles makes me defensive and wary.
I'll co-host TODAY from Los Angeles Saturday morning and then make my way up to Merced for that evening's graduation ceremony. I'm still touching up my remarks, but my challenge to the Class of 2010 will be to break through the deafening and too often negative echo chamber of the digital era and become critical and independent thinkers.
I have a passion for modern and contemporary art. I spend a lot of time in museums; I particularly like the Guggenheim, MoMA in New York or LACMA and the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, for example. I cannot wait for the Louis Vuitton Foundation to open.
Learning the craft as an actor in Los Angeles is a very hard thing to do, in my opinion. We all come from a certain world and when you start learning the craft, you need material to read/study that you can relate to. We do not have too many Latino writers on the West Coast that I was able to relate to (or at least, I didn't know at the time). I came from the streets, so the most published authors had no relation to my world. As soon as I picked up Pinero & Guirgis, it was all over. It was my world, just in a different location. They cracked me open inside and out.
You can become an alcoholic working in an office in Los Angeles. It's very easy to say because I do this shameful job I take drugs or drink, but the real reason prostitutes take drugs and drink is because prostitution is a party area. It's not about desperation, it's the surroundings.
Most indie shoots, or any kind of film shooting, even TV, it's out of Los Angeles, unfortunately. I wish that would change, that people could work where their families are, across the board - crew, cast. I wish we could all stay here.
Growing up in Los Angeles, I was incredibly fortunate to be taken to theatre by my parents to see everything at the Music Center, at UCLA and beyond. I just adored it.
As someone who was born and raised in Los Angeles, I was really interested in the idea of people who move here to get into the business, and some of them do become famous and then oftentimes they fall out of that fame in very terrible ways.
The biggest thing about growing up in Canada is you know that Los Angeles and New York are not the only places in the world. They're not the only places where brilliant acting happens.
The brown toxic cloud strangling Los Angeles never lifts and grows thicker with every immigrant added. One can't help appreciate the streets of Paris will soon become the streets of LA. However, Paris' streets erupted while LA's shall sink into a Third World quagmire much like Bombay or Calcutta, India. When you import that much crime, illiteracy, multiple languages and disease-Americans pick up stakes and move away.
When I moved to Los Angeles, I wrote spec screenplays. I was really poor, and I thought I was just gonna do this for a while to make a little money so I could write novels. I thought movies were a second-class art form. I condescended to it - I didn't know enough to know it was really gonna be hard.
I was busy with my family, my budding career as a TV writer, my antipathy for the Los Angeles Lakers, and my general reluctance to engage in anything that might force me to leave my comfort zone. But sometimes ideas won't let you go. For me, educating girls was like that.
I owe my whole acting career to the fact that I'm a singer. I went out to Los Angeles and auditioned for a TV show called 'Fame L.A.' The original role was for a comedian, but they said I wasn't very funny, so they asked me, 'What else can you do?' So I played a singer.
Shooting at night in Los Angeles is amazing. The city shuts down at 10 P.M. every night, and a whole different cast of characters comes out.
I would like to get married, actually. I've done everything else in my life now except that, but where do I find the real thing? The non-phony? In Los Angeles? I am not so sure.
There's a certain attitude to Los Angeles.
The problem with the British film industry is the nervousness and insecurity about - and genuflection toward - Los Angeles.
I remember being really interested in the sad parts of Los Angeles, of which there are many, and knowing we weren't up in the citadel on the hill, but we also weren't on the bottom. I was very interested in the poetry of failure as a child.
When I have children that go home and mom and dad are not home because they're working, they're trying to get food on the table, and they come home to an empty house and they go to sleep in an empty house, there is no way that child can compete against a child from the west side of Los Angeles who both parents went to Stanford. Well, good for them, God love them. That's not an equal playing field.
The most disgusting, appalling horror of our world that we live in, to me, is sex trafficking and the enslavement of men and women, boys and girls, in the sex industry. That is the most horrific, horrific thing that's happening and it's happening in all of our towns here in Los Angeles, in New York, in London, in Paris, all over the world, and I think that's really what has to be addressed.
[On Los Angeles:] This city is a hundred years old but try and find some trace of its history. Every culture is swallowed up and spat out as a franchise. Taco Bell. Benihana of Tokyo. Numero Uno Pizza. Pup 'N' Taco. Kentucky Fried Chicken. Fast food sushi. Teriyaki Bowl.
Within one generation, Los Angeles will be uninhabitable if people don’t do something about it. The world is going to get smaller and be uninhabitable and impossible to live in.
In terms of driving, I actually don't have a driver's license, and it's kind of ridiculous. I've lived in Los Angeles for a couple of years and just have somehow managed to avoid taking the test, which I did last week and failed. I couldn't find the honker. I felt bad about it, but it's just a little bit embarrassing, I guess, to be in this film and not have a license.
I started studying herbalism and edible plants that existed in the wild. And then I realized, "Okay, cool. I know how to make a fire with sticks and I know how to build a shelter, but I live 90 percent of my life in an urban environment, so these skills aren't really going to help me because there aren't trees that grow in Los Angeles that I can just take a branch and make fire out of, because that wood isn't conducive for that. So I started learning urban survival skills.
Every time someone does a Western movie, people flock to it. It's like, we're continually programming to people who are least likely to watch us. People in Nebraska aren't watching things on the computer, they're watching television. Why aren't we programming things for them? We only program things that appeal to New York and Los Angeles and in many ways spit on the rest of the country.
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