William Devane Quotes (29 Quotes)

I'm trying to find a character that's my age and I can sustain week after week. I'd like to do a series.

Ultimately the Emmys are a popularity contest.

If you watch Cheers, in 12 years they didn't age a day.

Even though shows like NYPD Blue are soaps in my opinion, but they're individualized to an extent that you can still follow what's going on if you miss a week.

Clint Eastwood is aging beautifully. But someone like Burt Reynolds and others are practically destroying their faces in the amount of work they have.

And I have to credit David Jacobs with the opportunities he gave me. He was totally into sharing the creation of characters. David put together a show that told the story of people over many years' time and that was greatly enjoyable. Though nowadays that is frowned upon.

I didn't care about that because I'm not a diplomatic person to begin with. I just went along with things and did what I wanted to do because I knew they had to shoot their 12 pages a day. And when they realized that I didn't alter the text they really didn't mind what I did.

Donna Mills came on the show as a female antagonist, about a year before, so now they wanted to have a male antagonist. I was cast as a Senator to shake things up.

Networks don't want a show with a continuing story. There's no backend potential.

David was the kind of guy who was totally supportive of the actors and instructed the writing staff to trust the actor's instincts, since after all, it's the actors playing the character.

And I'm not interested in playing someone 47 anymore and getting face work and everything else. I've moved on to grandfather roles.

The business is built on slowing or even stopping the aging process.

A show like Knots or any other show that can be called a soap opera does terribly in syndication because if you're a viewer and you miss a week you don't know what's going on.

Doing a continuing show like that, with the huge growth potential for the character, the possibility of creating an enduring character, it was great.

When you go to a movie, it's about what's not being said. I tried to bring that to Greg Sumner. It was always about what's not being said.

Personally I'm a left-wing liberal Democrat but Greg Sumner, he's basically a conservative Republican. That's how I played him anyway.

What I would have liked to do on that show was play a secretary of state who has huge personal business interests throughout the world. That, to me, seems to be more in synch with reality.

Writers are not always right however, but then again, I've been on shows where the actors have complete control and change everything and it's terrible.

I try to watch only real things, which basically amounts to C-Span for me. I like real people in real situations. I learn from that.

At one time, whenever the hell it was, they wanted a character to come in and stir up the pot. They brought me in for 8-10 episodes and said we'll try it for that.

The West Wing seems to be feeding the myth about how presidential politics are.

There's a certain possessiveness of writers sometimes.

I knew with The West Wing that that wasn't going to be for very long, that I was just the red herring.

It would have been nice for Greg to eventually grow into a mature relationship with Laura. He was moving toward that already but then took a turn into the juvenile with Paige.

So the writers would have the dialogue be a certain way until it got to the floor. Once the scene hits the floor, the actors are in charge.

It worked well because Don Murray didn't want to be on Knots anymore.

And all of Laura's stuff, what they wrote originally wasn't as good and Constance wound up doing that herself. That was all her stuff, reading to the child, because she had children herself and that's what she would have done.

I would fix other people's lines if they asked me on occasion. The hard part of writing is the architecture of it, getting the story and structuring it. Not the tweaking of lines.

The same issue is happening on a show like Everybody Loves Raymond now, which is in its eighth year and struggling to come up with good stories. It'll be interesting to see how they do. The bottom line is, it starts with the writers and ends with the writers.