“You’ve got people your age just coming into the business who will be running Paramount in five years, along with Warners and Columbia and Fox and MGM — all of which will be run by companies that have nothing to do with pictures — who have never heard of Minnelli or Preminger, or just might be erudite enough to think of Liza when you say her father’s name. Then you’ve got people like me who have been around long enough not to have much romance about any of it anymore and are just trying to find some cover because we have no idea what’s going on. Biker pictures are winning prizes at Cannes and pictures about cowboy hustlers in New York getting sucked off in the cheap seats are winning Oscars, so the execs upstairs who are old enough to be my grandfather — which means we’re talking Dawn of Man here — feel gripped by a kind of cultural dementia. When my mother was in her last years, in her mid-eighties, she would wake at four in the morning and look out the window and wonder why it was so dark at four in the afternoon. The reasoning process by which you realize it can’t be four in the afternoon but has to be four in the morning had broken down. That’s what’s going on with these gentlemen. . . .”