'Beverly Hills Cop' opened up a whole world. I got the television show and movies, and I would go sign autographs for one hour and get paid $25,000.
At the end of the day, audiences just want to laugh and be entertained. They want to escape from their reality, and that's why we make movies, to get people to escape from the realities.
One of the problems I have with a lot of movies these days is that everything is too well lit. In the world of digital creations there is a tendency to show too much.
I write screenplays that don't get made and pilots that don't get picked up, and I re-write other people's movies, and those are all different kinds of fees.
To be honest, I haven't seen a lot of the current crop of teen movies because there's only so much time and there's nothing that really drives me to do it.
As a kid, I said, 'I want to write for movies.' When I finally had that opportunity it was like I was able to exhale. 'Wow, I'm finally doing this for real.'
I think in the old days, films really went for the shock, with the blood and guts, but movies are getting better. The writing and directing have improved a lot, because the audience demands it.
People watch movies - and it's vague ideas, it's vague notions, but people pick up on these things, that they are supposed to think certain ways or that they're not supposed to think, basically, and they don't.
Television and movies just take so long. If you pitch a show or develop a project, it can be a year before your show even gets on the air, if it gets picked up.
For me, the movies I like are all independent. And getting an independent feature made, it's like you get down to the selling organs part, and it just loses some of its luster.
For years everyone looked toward the demise of radio when television came along. Before that, they thought talking movies might eliminate radio as well. But radio just keeps getting stronger.
When I was a little boy I used to borrow my father's hat, and make a press card to stick in the hat band. That was the way reporters were always portrayed in the movies.
There was a gap of seven years between the first and second Dracula movies. In the second one as everybody knows, I didn't speak, because I said I couldn't say the lines.
We did six records, then six movies. Now we need to do six of something else, so we get 666 - and then our master Satan can return!
I'm not allowed to see R-rated movies, but I did see 'Kick-Ass' because I'm in it. I'm not going to skip out on my own premiere!
You go back to those films of the '40s and '50s and hear the dialogue, the way the people played off each other - the wordplay. I think we've really lost that in movies.
The folks who read my books are so passionate about each one of them that the people making my movies are more afraid of my readership than they are of me.
I do not go out to dinner or to the movies with the neighbors, as I do with my friends. I don't make dates with them. I don't have to.
People say you never remember anybody who dies in movies, and it's true, you don't. You don't even remember people who disappear.
I'm surprised how many commercials and sitcoms and movies have a need for, 'We just need something to come by the camera that's really weird.' They call Doug Jones.
I have always done my own stunts, and I have been in hundreds of fights in films, but I have never been in a fist fight outside the movies.
