James L. Brooks
James L. Brooks
James Lawrence "Jim" Brooksis an American director, producer and screenwriter. Growing up in North Bergen, New Jersey, Brooks endured a fractured family life and passed the time by reading and writing. After dropping out of New York University, he got a job as an usher at CBS, going on to write for the CBS News broadcasts. He moved to Los Angeles in 1965 to work on David L. Wolper's documentaries. After being laid off he met producer Allan Burns who...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Producer
Date of Birth9 May 1940
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
I laugh every day. There are days when my laughs are pretty hollow. Dust comes out of your mouth, and your bones make a funny sound. But I'm laughing.
I think television keeps on being a place where writers can go, and if they're successful, they can have their way, and they can have creative freedom.
I always think that the deal, once I do the script, sort of the experience I go through writing, which is everything you can imagine, but I always think it's the one thing I can do when I'm directing is say is that it's all about the actors, that I can say, 'We're all here to serve the actors.'
I always think a successful television series is the best job because it gives you community, it doesn't demand temporary insanity the way movies do, and you can be almost a normal person.
Great things that can happen when you're doing a movie.
Media reporting denied privacy to anybody doing what I do for a living. It was no longer possible to work on your picture in privacy.
I think you have a pact with an audience in every picture, and I think the pact is to try and be truthful and to be real.
Things get very distorted when you do a movie, weirdly so.
Kids in general make things fresh and alive and they have this great appreciation for, Holy mackerel, we're making a movie!
I've done it with Broadcast News-where there was no finish line, there was no agenda that I had to move all the characters to this point, that I was sort of open to what happens.
You have more and more people coming into the tent with the creative guys [on Hollywood films]. You have marketing and concept testers, advertising people. What you find gets the high numbers is easily appealing subjects: a baby, a big broad joke, a high concept. Everything is tested. The effect is to lessen the gamble, but in fact you destroy a writer's confidence and creativity once so many people are invited into the tent.
Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got to eat his sandwich every day, the dog jumped on him every day, his wife was giving him a hard time and he showed up every day.
The thing that usually gets me through the writing is that my feelings of wretched inadequacy are irregularly punctuated by brief flashes of omnipotence.
When you produce and direct your own film you havethe somewhat consoling feeling that the producer will kill for you.