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	MICHAEL CAINE	Maurice Micklewhite 1933- ; British film actor
	1 British films are box-office poison.	• quoted in Screen International, 29 July 1978
	2 I was offered a small part in the fourth of the Jaws series of films at a tremendous fee and I took it. I have never seen the film but by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.	• What’s It All About?: An autobiography, 1993, explaining his absence from the 1986 Academy Awards at which he won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters
	3 The British film industry is alive and well and living in Los Angeles.	• 'Sayings of the Week', The Observer, 20 March 1994
	JAMES CALLAGHAN	Leonard James Callaghan, Baron Callaghan of Cardiff 1912-2005; British Prime Minister 1976-1979
	As we all know, changes in broadcasting arrangements are in the wind. The government will shortly have to consider the recommendations of the Annan Committee of Inquiry into Broadcasting which has been working for two years. The consideration of their report may well be followed by fresh legislative proposals. But we all confidently expect that, whatever these proposals may be, they will be such as to preserve the independence of British broadcasting.	• opening BBC’s New Broadcasting House, Manchester, June 1976
	JAMES CAMERON	1954- ; Canadian-born film director
	Film-making is a battle between business and aesthetics.	• quoted in The Observer, 23 November 1997
	ROBERT CAMPLIN	Secretary, Cinematograph Exhibitors Association of Great Britain and Ireland
	The producer who does not license his films for private and domestic videocassette use is in the strong position, if a copy turns up in a pub, to proceed against it as a pirated copy.	• letter in Screen International, 24 January 1981 cf Kenneth Maidment
	Sir CHARLES CARPENDALE	Vice Admiral Sir Charles Douglas Carpendale 1874-1968; BBC Deputy Director-General 1935-38
	If television had come before the movies I might think otherwise, but the cinema today is so cheap and so perfect and so universal in its appeal that I doubt if television can stand up to it for a long time to come.	• 20 November 1934
	TEDDY CARR	United Artists film executive
	To my mind it is nothing short of sacrilege to see a great picture massacred in the public interest of having to associate it with tripe contained in a totally unnecessary second feature.	• Kine Weekly, 9 January 1941
	JOHNNY CARSON	1925- ; US comedian and TV talk show host
	If it weren't for Philo T Farnsworth, inventor of television, we'd still be eating frozen radio dinners.	• Source unknown
	CLAUDE CHABROL	1930- ; French film director
	I'm fascinated by the technology and the huge amount of money that goes into making them—and by their unbelievable stupidity.	• 'Sayings of the Week', The Observer, 9 May 1993
	RAYMOND CHANDLER	1888-1959; American crime novelist and screenwriter
	1 The challenge of screenwriting is to much in little and then take half of that little and still preserve an effect of leisure and natural movement.	• Atlantic Monthly, November 1945
	2 If my books had been any worse, I should not have been invited to Hollywood, and if they had been any better, I should not have come.	• letter to Charles W Morton, 12 December 1945, quoted in Raymond Chandler Speaking, 1962
	3 The motion picture made in Hollywood, if it is to create art at all, must do so within such strangling limitations of subject and treatment that it is a blind wonder it ever achieves any distinction beyond the purely mechanical slickness of a glass and chrome bathroom.	• Atlantic Monthly, March 1948
	4 Television's perfect. You turn a few knobs, a few of those mechanical adjustments at which the higher apes are so proficient, and lean back and drain your mind of all thought. And there you are watching the bubbles in the primeval ooze. You don't have to concentrate. You don't have to react. You don't have to remember. You don't miss your brain because you don't need it. Your heart and liver and lungs continue to function normally. Apart from that, all is peace and quiet. You are in the man's nirvana. And if some poor nasty minded person comes along and says you look like a fly on a can of garbage, pay him no mind. He probably hasn't got the price of a television set.	• source unknown
	CHARLES CHAPLIN	1888-1959; American crime novelist and screenwriter
	1 The cinema is little more than a fad. It's canned drama. What audiences really want to see is flesh and blood on the stage.	• c1916, source unknown
	2 They [talkies] are spoiling the oldest art in the world—the art of pantomime. They are ruining the great beauty of silence.	• interview in Motion Picture Magazine, May 1929
	see also Practical and Amateur Wireless
	CHARLES, Prince of Wales	1948- ; heir to the UK throne
	1 I imagine it’s a bit like watching The Sun on video.	• about Sky Television, April 1989
	2 It is really a television version of The Archers.	• about Coronation Street, during a visit to the set at Granada Studios Manchester on the programme's 40th birthday, 8 December 2000
	3 One of the great battles we face today is to persuade our children away from the computer games towards what can only be described as worthwhile books.	• Speech at the British Museum, 10 July 2001
	4 I much prefer videos to DVDs. I find it so annoying having to go through the menu and finding the spot where you left off every time you try watching it in a different location.	• Interview in Esquire magazine, April 2007
	PADDY CHAYEFSKY	1923-1981; American television dramatist
	1 Television is not the truth. Television is a god damned amusement park. Television is a circus, a carnival, a travelling troupe of acrobats, storytellers, dancers, singers, jugglers, sideshow freaks, lion-tamers and football players. We're in the boredom-killing business.	• source unknown
	2 People are instant now. Thanks to TV we have all developed a ten-minute concentration span.	• 1970s, source unknown
	ED CHILTON	Head of Rank Leisure
	It was felt there were better things we could do with our money based on our shareholders’ interest.	• announcing Rank’s withdrawal from film production, June 1980
	MAX CHOP	1862-1929; German music critic
	The range of repertoire in this field [symphonic orchestral music] remains narrow. First of all there are the marches, dances, medleys, abbreviated overtures, and little salon pieces of rather questionable merit—all of it rather mediocre entertainment music. Next to this we find the growing repertoire of ‘hits’. I will not deny the hit’s right to existence. As a child of the times, begotten of the shallow and the trivial, toward which a wide segment of the popular taste is oriented, it has a right to live. ... But it certainly need not spread itself as widely as it does.	• Die Phonographische Zeitschrift, 1909
	Sir WINSTON CHURCHILL	1874-1965; British politician, Prime Minister 1940-45, 1951-54
	The longer I have studied this matter the more convinced I am that the present complete monopoly should not continue.	• of television, 1951
	RENE CLAIR	1898-1981; French film director
	If there is an aesthetics of the cinema ... it can be summarised in one word: ‘movement’. The external movement of the objects perceived by the eye, to which we are today adding the inner movement of the action.	• 1924, collected in Réflexion faite
	Sir/Lord KENNETH CLARK	1903-1983; art historian; first chairman of the Independent Television Authority
	Can television be used to increase the enjoyment and understanding of art? Can it do for painting and sculpture what sound radio has done for music? In answering that question, one thinks at once of three peculiarities of the medium. First it is a medium of popular entertainment. The popularity of television is largely due to the ease with which it may be switched on and off. ... The second limitation of television is that we expect its images to move. ... Thirdly, the curved window of television distorts far more than we imagine. When it shows us imperfect humanity we make allowances for it. But when it distorts a perfect construction of art, we are shocked. A Raphael is made to look like a Modigliani. ... Finally, people listening to sound radio are in a more serious or docile frame of mind, and are more prepared to make an effort in order to understand what is unfamiliar.	• ‘Art on Television’ in Kenneth Baily (ed): The Television Annual for 1960
	Mr Justice CLARK	Thomas Campbell Clark 1899-1977; Associate Justice, US Supreme Court 1949-1967
	Neither Congress nor any Court is required to disregard the impact of world events, however impartially or dispassionately they view them. It is equally beyond dispute that the motion picture industry plays a critically prominent role in the molding of public opinion and that motion pictures are, or are capable of being, a potent medium of propaganda dissemination which may influence the minds of millions of American people. This being so, it is absurd to argue, as these appellants do, that questions asked of men who, by their authorship of the scripts, vitally influence the ultimate production of motion pictures seen by millions, which questions require disclosure of whether or not they are or ever have been Communists, are not pertinent questions.	• judgment in the Washington DC Court of Appeals in the case of the Hollywood Ten, 13 June 1949 See also Dalton Trumbo
	ARTHUR C CLARKE	1917- ; British-born scientist and science fiction writer
	1 An artificial satellite at the correct distance from earth would make one revolution every 24 hours. Three repeater stations 120 degrees apart in the correct orbit could give television and microwave coverage to the entire planet.	• article in Wireless World, October 1945. The first description of a geostationary satellite system.
	2 Clarke's First Law: When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.     Clarke's Second Law: But the only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.     Clarke's Third Law: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.	Profiles of the Future, 1961
	3 The main result of all these developments will be to eliminate 99 per cent of human activity, and to leave our descendants faced with a future of utter boredom, where the main problem in life is deciding which of the several hundred TV channels to select.	The World of 2001, 1968
	4 A hundred years ago, the electric telegraph made possible—indeed, inevitable—the United States of America. The communications satellite will make equally inevitable a United Nations of Earth; let us hope that the transition period will not be equally bloody.	First on the Moon, 1970
	5 CNN is one of the participants in the war. I have a fantasy where Ted Turner is elected president but refuses because he doesn't want to give up power.	• source unknown
	6 When the printing press was invented, people said: ‘What’s the use of printing when only a few people can read’. People in virtually all societies will, by the first decade of the 21st century, be able to communicate through these broadband digital networks and information highways.	• July 1997
	LEON CLORE	1918-1992; British film producer
	If Americans didn't speak English, we'd have no problem.	• On British films lack of success, New York Times, 13 July 80
	R H COASE	Ronald Harry Coase 1910- ; Nobel prize-winning British economist
	Had the Labour Party been in power at the time of the formation of the BBC; had the independent broadcasting systems not been associated in the minds of the Press with commercial broadcasting and finance by means of advertisements; had another department, say the Board of Trade, been responsible for broadcasting policy; had the views of the first chief executive of the British Broadcasting authority been like those of the second; with this combination of circumstances, there would be no reason to suppose that such a formidable body of support for a monopoly of broadcasting would ever have arisen.	• British Broadcasting: A study in monopoly, 1950
	GERALD COCK	1887-1973; first Director of BBC Television
	1 The growth of a Television Service will see a revolutionary change in the gramophone record industry. ‘Telegram’ sets will replace radiograms and long-running film records will be used instead of discs, the picture track being shown on the home television screen.	• 1935; one year before the high definition service began
	2 I believe viewers would rather see an actual scene of a rush hour at Oxford Circus directly transmitted to them than the latest in film musicals costing £100,000.	• Radio Times, 23 October 1936
	3 Television would, of course, have been the ideal ‘black-out’ entertainment. It is sad to think of the thousands of receivers now standing idle, of their disappointed viewers, and of the many skilled research and other workers in the television field diverted from their other tasks. Many of the purely physical obstacles which had seriously impaired the service during the first two years had been eliminated by October 1938. ... Plans had been made in anticipation of Christmas [1939] to increase and alter certain transmissions and to devise specialized programmes, as a result of a questionnaire. There had even been the hint of agreement to a first regional relay station, an advance of major importance now likely to be pioneered not by Great Britain but by our American friends. ... The brightness of the outlook for British television in the summer heightened the general sense of disappointment at its unavoidable discontinuance when war came.	• ‘Notes of the Year’, BBC Handbook 1940
	JEAN COCTEAU	1889-1963; French poet and artist, occasional film-maker
	1 The tragedy of the cinematograph lies in its having to be successful immediately. It takes such a vast sum of money to make a film that it is necessary to get that money back as soon as possible by massive takings. That is a terrible, almost insurmountable handicap. ...     To this we must add that, for the public, films are just a pastime, a form of entertainment which they have been accustomed alas, to view out of the corners of their eyes. Whereas for me the image-making machine has been a means of saying certain things in visual terms instead of saying them with ink on paper. ...     What is commonly called ‘cinema’ has not been up to now, a pretext for thought. People walk in, look (a little), listen (a little), walk out, and forget. Whereas the cinematograph, as I understand it, is a powerful weapon for the projection of thought, even into a crowd unwilling to accept it.	• Jean Cocteau and André Fraigneau: Cocteau on the Film, 1954; translated by Vera Traill
	2 A film is a petrified fountain of thought.	• Esquire magazine, February 1961
	3 Mirrors should reflect a little before throwing back images.	• Des Beaux-Arts
	4 Ce dragon qui veille sur nos trésors. (This dragon who protects our treasures.)	• epitaph on the tomb of Henri Langlois (1914-1977), founder of the Cinémathèque Française, in Montparnasse Cemetery, Paris
	DAVID S COHEN	Animation scriptwriter
	1 Very few cartoons are broadcast live, it's a terrible strain on the animators' wrists.	• The Simpsons Episode 4F12: ‘The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show’
	2 [June provides the voices for the animated characters Itchy and Scratchy in an animation within an animation] Homer: How'd you get to be so good? June: Oh, just experience I suppose. I started out as Roadrunner. [as Roadrunner] Meep! Homer: You mean "meep-meep"? June: No, they only paid me to say it once, then they doubled it up on the soundtrack. [to herself] Cheap bastards.	• The Simpsons Episode 4F12: ‘The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show’
	Sir JACK COHEN	1898-1979; founder, Tesco UK supermarket chain
	I used to manage without advertising and do very well. I used to do my own advertising. Actually, all advertising is very, very expensive and must add to the cost of things.	• 1968
	HARRY COHN	1891-1958; Head of Columbia Pictures
	Let me give you some facts of life. I release fifty-two pictures a year. I make about forty and buy the rest. Every Friday the front door opens on Gower Street and I spit a picture out. A truck picks it up and takes it away to the theatres, and that’s the ball game. Now if that door opens and I spit and nothing comes out, it means a lot of people are out of work—drivers, distributors, exhibitors, projectionists, ushers, and a lot of other pricks. So let’s cut this crap about only good pictures. I run this place on the basis of making one good picture a year. I’ll lay everything on the line for that one. I don’t care if it’s a Capra, or Ford, or Riskin, or Milestone—that’s the good one. The rest of the time I just have to keep spitting out. ... I want one good picture a year. That’s my policy. Give me a Mr Deeds or a Jolson Story or an All the King’s Men or a Lost Horizon and I won’t let an exhibitor have it unless he takes the bread-and-butter product, the Boston Blackies, the Blondies, the low-budget westerns, and the rest of the junk we make. I like good pictures too, but nobody knows when they’re going to be good, so to get one, I have to shoot for five or six, and to shoot for five or six, I have to keep the plant going with the program pictures.	• quoted in Robert Parrish: Growing Up in Hollywood, 1976
	NORMAN COLLINS	British novelist, Controller BBC Television 1947-1950, pioneer commercial television executive
	1 The economic possibility of running an extended television service depends on recorded television programmes or the access to other sources of film material. Possibly on both.	• source unknown
	2 I regard the development of television recording as the first of the BBC Television engineering priorities, with development of microwave a close second.	• source unknown
	3 I don't believe that the country has nearly so long to wait for free television as some people would appear to believe.	• quoted in Bradford Telegraph & Argus, 14 October 1952
	4 Television ... could be used by the film industry to sell the idea of going to the Kinema. ... With the coming of VHF in a few years’ time it will be possible to operate 96 TV stations. ... Why not own and operate the local stations?	• Kine Weekly forum on television and the cinema, December 1953
	TONY CONVERSE	Director of Daytime Programs, CBS Television
	Strictly from the network’s point of view a good soap opera is one that has a high rating, and a bad one is one that doesn’t.	• Magazine, 2 May 1974
	PETER COOK	1937-1995; Humorist, satirist, actor
	Experts are the last people to come up with the solution to anything. It would be far better to set up a team of five old idiots to probe matters.     It heartens me, therefore, that Sir Harold Wilson is looking into what's wrong with the British film industry. What's wrong is that it is scarcely financially worthwhile to make films in this country, because of our tax laws.     Talking about his new role, Sir Harold said he had scarcely seen a film for 30 years but had remained awake during The Omen, the movie about the devilish Damien, the male counterpart of Amy Carter. Sir Harold also told us he had an ability to go to sleep at any given moment.	• Daily Mail, 30 May 1977 See Harold Wilson and 1977 April 29. Amy Carter: daughter of President Jimmy Carter
	GARY COOPER	1901-1961; American film actor
	Gone with the Wind is going to be the biggest flop in the history of Hollywood. I'm just glad it will be Clark Gable who's falling flat on his face and not Gary Cooper.	• 1938, after turning down the role of Rhett Butler See also King Vidor
	AARON COPLAND	1901-1990; American composer
	Film music is like a small lamp that you place below the screen to warm it.	• cited in Nat Shapiro (compiler): An Encyclopaedia of Quotations about Music
	ALAN COREN	1939-2007; British humorous writer
	Television is more interesting than people. If it were not, we should have people standing in the corners of our rooms.	• cited in The Penguin Dictionary of Modern Quotations
	NOEL COWARD	1899-1973; British actor, singer, writer, screenwriter, producer, songwriter
	I'm not very keen on Hollywood. I'd rather have a nice cup of cocoa really.	• letter to his mother, 1937, quoted in Cole Lesley: The Life of Noel Coward, 1976
	RICHARD H S CROSSMAN	1907-1974; British politician
	Unlike the Pilkington Committee, I do not despise the mass audiences or deny that the citizen has as much right to relax at home watching a trivial TV programme as he has to relax in a pub or a cinema. It is one of the proper functions of broadcasting—whether organised as a public or commercial service—to provide the kind of trivial mass entertainment all of us want most of the time. But if there are already two television channels, one BBC and one commercial, competing to satisfy the lowest common denominator of popular taste, surely it is the sheerest folly to add yet another competing commercial channel. All this would ensure is that out of four television services, three would be broadcasting almost indistinguishable light entertainment every evening between six and nine o’clock.	• Manchester Guardian, 6 July 1962
	CHARLES CURRAN	Sir Charles John Curran 1921-1980; BBC Director General 1969-1977
	Once the nation has invested a given amount of capital in the broadcast mode of distributing television signals and receiving them there is an automatic discouragement of any other system of distribution such as cablevision.	• 1972
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Page updated 2 April 1911
Compilation and notes © David Fisher