I notice when I'm at a party where I don't know anybody - even if I have nothing in common with somebody - we can still talk because we were raised by the same TV and cartoons and movies.
The comics I read as a kid were much more influenced by TV and movies. Encountering superheroes as an adult without that kind of childhood sentimentality, it just doesn't allow you, or in my case at least, it wouldn't let me take the characters serio...
Prior to that I produced a couple of TV movies for CBS, but the truth of the matter is that I burned out for a couple of years. I didn't do anything for a while, apart from taking up golf, for which I got a four handicap.
My father is an actor, and I used to go on set to visit him. I saw the stories he was telling and said: 'That's what I want to do.' I was always in awe whenever I went to the movies or when I watched television.
Some people think literature is high culture and that it should only have a small readership. I don't think so... I have to compete with popular culture, including TV, magazines, movies and video games.
My choices in projects have all been character or role-based, and on a financial level, it's obvious: as an actor on a TV series, I get a wonderful paycheck, and a consistent paycheck, which doesn't always happen when you're doing theater or movies.
In the 1950s we use to feel that television was taking away our comic readership; with today's exciting, powerfully visual movies I have to wonder about their effect on the kids' loyalty to the comic book medium all over again.
'Banshee' was kind of a lark. I was getting paid pretty well to write movies no one was making - and so I decided to try my hand at TV and get paid much less to actually get something produced.
I like the idea of a TV show. You take time to get to know your characters. You can introduce a lot of characters. You don't need your three-action set pieces that you usually need for movies.
In the theater, it's a visceral and physical response because you move around so much. You have to do something physical to pull you in. On TV or in movies, everything is so small. You can just lock into a character and ease yourself into that way.
Born of the impossibly varied options we have to amuse ourselves, cutting-edge companies are finding innovative ways to tailor our entertainment choices to who we are, relieving us of the burden of finding the diamond in the rough of 500 TV channels ...
Whether it is the cavemen in the caves thousands of years ago, Shakespeare plays, television, movies and books, stories and characters take us on a journey. All I do is tell those stories without scripts and without actors.
Well, it was actually - I brought the idea of doing a documentary to HBO back in 2000, when there were some press reports sort of were bandied about that there were going to TV movies based on some of the books that were out.
Stand-up keeps you on your toes because it's instant. With TV and movies, you have to wait for the numbers to come in to see what happened at the box office. With stand-up, it's right there, that night, in your face.
Amy Rapp, my producing partner, and I are drawn to character-driven material. We're developing and producing movies and TV, fiction and non-fiction, studio and independent, broadcast and cable, theatre, and web so our slate is really diverse.
Television announcer: Broadcasting beautiful views 24 hours a day: you're tuned to the Scenery Channel.
As far as 'Birdsong' is concerned, I think the television program made a very honorable attempt at it, but the truth of the matter is that adaptations of long, ambitious books very seldom transfer well to the screen, and why would they?
I think a lot of self-identity and inner-personal development is hampered by consumerism and capitalism because we see ourselves as a reflection of the TV, rather than as a reflection of the people who are around us, truly.
Most Americans don't think about antitrust law when they look at their cable bill, flip channels on TV, or worry about what their favorite website knows about them. But they should.
I feel that a lot of roles in television can really typecast someone as one type of actor or playing one type of role, but I really don't think that my role in 'Weeds' did at all.
If you're a singer, you do concerts, and you get that interaction with fans and see what cities in what part of the world come out to see you. When you're on television, you're removed from that.
