Robert Thompson Quotes (159 Quotes)

It becomes very clear that the oil industry wants to develop 100 percent of the North Slope - the land and the ocean.

retro, nostalgia, second-time-around industry, which is huge in this country.

Since these competitions can also lend themselves to television broadcasts, there is no reason to believe that we may not see more organized competitions in the future, ... If television can figure out how to make playing cards interesting, it should certainly be able to do so with video games.

As soon as distilled spirits were discovered and their effect on one's consciousness known, they became an important part of the tradition.

This is a pretty big deal. Last year, we had New Year's Eve without Dick Clark and now New Year's Day without college football games. What's become of the holiday

The music is secondary. The real pull is watching people grab for the brass ring. They're climbing the ladder. This is the great American story.

I think we have yet to realize how much we are going to miss that. I don't think it's a total coincidence that it's happening at the same time there's an increasingly divisive nature in the country. What the consensus medium of television used to do, and radio before that, was to provide this enormous center that everybody had to go to now and then. ... Now, there is a lack of cultural consensus that even extends to what we consider the body of facts we used to debate.

This is one of Ellen DeGeneres' specialties. When you do an Emmy awards after a crisis like this, you need to fulfill the purpose of the awards show and yet not seem too self-important. She seems to be very good at it.

There's no reason to believe if you had a whole bunch of really grisly stories -- and I'm sure there are grisly stories out there -- people wouldn't watch them,

Where else would you do this If you do this in a serious venue, it would sound smarmy, produced and self-conscious. The best way to get out of (trouble) and get a few laughs is to have a late-night comic helping you through.

I think the American culture right now is in a state where we have an unlimited appetite for irony. The great thing about a weird pageant is, if you don't win, is that really a bad thing

You can redefine the place of Mars in pop culture. It's close enough to interact with.

If you listen to old radio mysteries or read early 20th-century science fiction, the place the invaders came from was Mars.

He's been doing this for years. This guy is a completely different category.

Star Search' was an old-fashioned 'Ted Mack Amateur Hour' kind of a talent show. This is three dramas in one the drama of the judges, the drama of the old becoming a rock star and grabbing the brass ring, the drama of the whole vote in, and all the rest of it.

The uniformed cop just ignored him and kept on walking. You could hear the pleading in Smith's voice, asking the officer what he was going to do, saying, 'Look, you can't just ignore this,' and the cop just kept on walking. It was compelling television.

The star approval in OK makes it less sleazy on one level and therefore less interesting.

Winona Ryder is no Fatty Arbuckle. I don't think this will do her career a lot of harm.

I have recently heard that word uttered in a second-grade class and in a Presbyterian church - by the teacher and preacher, respectively, ... 'Sucks,' 'bites' and words like that are currently being absorbed into the vernacular. Thus, their taboo origins are being dissolved.

The only difference is that television is such a predominant medium. ... Radio used to have sitcoms and doctor shows and cop shows and game shows and all the different genres, and television wrestled that primary entertainment away from it. But I think in

I think what NBC has figured out is what the model of doing big events is going to be.

If you go and perform in a KISS tribute band, there's nothing wrong with it. If you name your kids after Gene Simmons, that's odd.

In print media, the only one that's a growth industry is the celebrity magazines.

There are a lot of people not doing well in their alternative rock acts, who are turning around and looking at their friends in Grateful Dead bands, Elvis tributes, who are getting gigs. There was a demand for the original groups.

Twenty years ago when Live AID or Farm Aid played, that was a big deal. That was something very different. Now these things seem to be the response to big very bad disastrous events.

From the outside you look at these contestants and think 'get a life,' but within certain subcultures and we're all in one that looks strange to the outside if you're a part of that rabid fan community, this is one of the ways you express it and rise to the top of that subculture.

VOD is perfect for established hits, and for reruns of shows that didn't have enough viewers to keep them on the air. 'Freaks and Geeks' had a lot of people watching, but not enough to keep it on the air. With VOD, you don't have to worry about getting a 15 share. If a show already had its network run and the production expenses are paid, anything after that is gravy.

They like gimmicks and gizmos, ... They see these things as the constant promise in America that a new idea can change their lives. These people are frequently disappointed when they buy that can of spray to cover up their bald spot.

When you've got a nation fighting a war and ... the one place in the mainstream media that seems to be doing the most about the wounded of that war is a comic strip, I think that speaks volumes.

The idea of taking this very modern 21st century story of tender love between two cowboys and putting it into the time period of an old Western opens up the floodgates for telling jokes. Comedians can't resist because we all know what a cowboy movie is and this challenges it.

For all the enormous social and cultural upheaval and change and revolution which we've all come to know as cliched definitions of the '60s, prime-time television in this country managed to almost completely ignore it,

Cool is certainly a charter member for the slang hall of fame. Cool just sits back and keeps getting used generation after generation and lets the whole history of the language roll off its back.

Every local and national reporter out there, whether they were covering the devastation or the looting or the health scare or the politics, was undergoing a screen test,

This guy has become famous for being really, really brilliant and really, really smart about something, but most people have no idea what it is he does.

This is to 'Star Search' what modern quantum physics is to Newtonian notions of physics. It's so brilliantly put together. For one thing, it's two different shows. There's the show before they pick the final 12, which is essentially a delicious reality show with lots of mocking of people, laughing at the people who are really bad and all that kind of stuff. And then it transforms after the final 12 into a really good, old-fashioned, family-friendly talent show.

The idea is, 'Let's move these units off the shelf for Christmas and let's get as many people under the tent as possible. You'll bring people in with temptation to see these shows but eventually I think a new aesthetic will be need to be devised, a kind of new show that falls between the high production of 'Lost' and radio.

New Year's Day was the perfect time for football because you could roll out of bed and you could start watching football, even before you manage to mix your aspirin and water. The second (of January) is just not the same. Some people are going to have to get up. The dynamic gets broken. The whole calculus changes.

Casting for roles is much more ruthless for females than for males. Men tend to have an easier time of it.

There is certainly some award-show fatigue. I lost count a few years ago of all of them.

There's a whole kind of hip element to it -- now I need this. Right smack in the middle of the 21st century, sophistication is marrying itself to a very old-fashioned notion of a table where you play games, long before television, video games and home computers. The deck of cards now has become cool again.

There's a place for what Geraldo does in the universe of journalistic commentary. I'm just not sure they've always found the right place for him to be . . . including this new show.

What is so great about the variety show is that in many cases, it is completely uncorrupted. It hasn't been worn out through syndication,

And you can't avoid them. You see them at the checkout line in the grocery store, you see them as you're filling up gas in your car. So, even if you have no prior interest, you're still finding out that Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston broke up. It is completely unavoidable.

People expected to go in to see a movie, and it was like a guerrilla attack. No one was expecting it, especially in Manhattan.

This was a sacred day a very delicate kind of thing. There was that little period where there was a no-fly zone on this subject matter, with a few exceptions. Probably now, enough time has passed and we're getting new perspective on this.

There's a lot of people that are going to become homeless cause they can't afford to live anywhere.

There's going to be plenty of market demand for all the corn and soybean meal that efficient producers in North and South America can produce. I predict that by 2050 there will be real questions raised about the morality of burning food for fuel.

It's pathetic. It's pathetic that someone in a time especially right after Katrina, seeing people suffer, would take advantage of the system.

You're seeing law enforcement falling apart and a modern, industrialized city brought to a complete breakdown, and these stories about the looting and the sniper fire are very much playing into this.

Will Grace' alone should make the argument that gay characters are by no means the kiss of death for a show. There's no sign that these kinds of characters are bad for ratings.