Black Hollywood Quotes

#1. I ask everyone - white Hollywood and black Hollywood - to get outside of your comfort zone and make friends. That's where they're going to learn from each other, and that's where they're going to make better movies and make Hollywood a better place.

Russell Simmons

#2. The majority of Latin actresses in Hollywood were always playing either spitfires or maids. Now here is a woman who comes in and does leads opposite white people and black people and other Spanish people, and she's comfortable in her skin? Gasp! How dare she?

Rosie Perez

#3. When you're black in Hollywood, you know, your first role is going to be on a crime drama. That's - everybody knows that.

Terry Crews

#4. So for front-runners we have a black and a woman. It's like being made to choose between syphilis or having and old man crap on your face. I would do the country a favor and run myself but I couldn't deprive Hollywood of me for 4 years.

Zach Braff

#5. When I photographed Marilyn Monroe, I mixed up my cameras - one had black-and-white film, the other color. I took many pictures. Only two color ones came out all right. My favorite picture of Marilyn hangs always on the wall in my office. It was taken on the little patio of her Hollywood house.

Alfred Eisenstaedt

#6. Marilyn Monroe is pissing me off, Charlie Chaplin owes me twenty bucks, that fucker Shrek tried to fuck my girlfriend at Baskin Robbins.

David Louden

#7. It's very difficult to get any movies done about Black heroes - Haitian or American - in Hollywood. The argument in Hollywood is that there is no market for those movies, and that is not true.

Jimmy Jean-Louis

#8. They stood either side of him like haunting little genetic bookends. The one thing he'll leave behind, two kids who called another man for help with their homework.

David Louden

#9. Just like those other black holes from outer space, Hollywood is postmodern to this extent: it has no center, only a spreading dead zone of exhaustion, inertia, and brilliant decay.

Arthur Kroker

#10. It's great to be black in Hollywood. When a black actor does something, it seems new and different just by virtue of the fact that he's black.

Will Smith

#11. My favourite actors are all dead or dying. I just love Jimmy Stewart, Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn - I was named after her - and Cary Grant. I just love old black and white movies and the stars in them. It must have been a great time to be in Hollywood.

Katharine Isabelle

#12. You don't recognize the actor, because he's not from Hollywood's generic teen male pool; the director hat to go off-Broadway, off-off-Broadway, to the little back stages to find this guy, olive-dusted skin, straight black hair, face that looks like he's never cracked a smile on his life.

Shukyou

#13. Mother loathed the all-black B movies Hollywood made for the "colored" audience, where the stereotypes were broader and more offensive to her, and where the musical interludes did no justice to real talent, she said, but trivialized it.

Gayle Pemberton

#14. I think about never losing my voice, never giving in, never selling out, always keeping black, always sticking to the street. Staying neighborhood and not Hollywood.

Paul Mooney

#15. That's one of the problems with Hollywood. It'll say 'policeman,' and an unless it says 'black policeman,' a lot of times you won't even get the opportunity to read for it, which is kind of crazy, but that's the way it is.

Meshach Taylor

#16. With his fantastic mane of multicoloured hair, Phury should have been in Hollywood's league with the ladies, but he'd stuck with his vow of celibacy. There was room for one and only one love in his life, and it had been slowly killing him for years.

J.R. Ward

#17. I think that Hollywood is content with condescending to Black people, patronizing them, feeling sorry for us, and I think we're happy to take the pat on the head as a people and take whatever awards.

Harry Lennix

#18. I love being black in America, and especially being black in Hollywood.

Will Smith

#19. The execs don't care what color you are. They care about how much money you make. Hollywood is not really black or white. It's green.

Will Smith

#20. My experience I consider an accident in the Hollywood system. I don't believe it should be a reference for a black film maker, or an example for any young film maker, because it's purely luck.

Euzhan Palcy

#21. I'm all about the crossover. The role doesn't necessarily have to be white or Latina or black. It could be anything. But it's hard in Hollywood, because sometimes it's all about the box office. Or all about looks and things like that. It's not about the story that they have to tell.

Rutina Wesley

#22. I was looking for projects, as you always are, and I read this scene ... and I'm in the Hollywood Hills. So I thought, 'This is interesting.' You have this setup that seems to be based in some reality and you can only wonder where Black's going to go with this.

Val Kilmer

#23. When they were making black films in the '60s and the '70s, everyone knew their place, if you get my drift. You understand? Everyone knew the rules, and everyone knew their place. Everyone knew what to say. They had the written rules in Hollywood film, and the unwritten rules.

Paul Mooney

#24. In Hollywood through the 50s, there were black, English, and Middle European housekeepers and maids.

Bill Condon

#25. What I find astounding is that we've had a president who is black in office for the past eight years, who gets most of his funding from the liberal elite in Hollywood. Yet, there are not very many roles for people of color. How can that be? And why is it just now being addressed?

Stacey Dash

#26. How was it they had cut to Hollywood Boulevard for a fluff piece and ended up with Gangs of New-Fucking-York?! Bonnie looked to her co-Anchor. He was wearing a good mouth for cooling soup.

David Louden

#27. Comedies in Hollywood is usually the path of least resistance when it comes to being black in Hollywood and putting movies together. They would rather make us laugh than cry, in some respect.

Ice Cube

#28. I really wish Hollywood would stop labeling movies, especially movies with predominantly black casts. Then, it makes others feel like, "Oh, well, that's not for me." At the end of the day, everybody understands love, loss, pain and heartbreak. That's not a color.

Taraji P. Henson

#29. A lot of young black people in America, and even in Africa and Brazil, would say that they are telling their story, but most of the films are like application forms with the formulaic ideas of Hollywood.

Haile Gerima

#30. The impact of the black audience is expressing itself. They look to films to be more expressive of their needs, their lives. Hollywood has gotten that message - finally.

Sidney Poitier

#31. One way or another we're taking your bank. All you have to do is decide the level of persuasion we need to apply.

David Louden

#32. U.S. foreign policy is Manichaean. It's like a Hollywood movie. You have to know who has the white hat and who has the black hat and then go against the black hat.

Carlos Fuentes

#33. Ladies, stress shows on your face. Happiness is the true beauty weapon.
As quoted in The Black Book of Hollywood Beauty Secrets ( Kym Douglas / Cindy Pearlman, 2006)

Susan Sarandon

#34. What does it mean to be too black for Hollywood? It's self-explanatory. Hollywood has certain kinds of blacks that they like.

Paul Mooney

#35. The black community in Hollywood is very small and close-knit. Everyone has a common goal: to make a two-hour movie in 30 days.

Gabrielle Union

#36. The boulevard was awash with the curious and the shocked as wave after wave of tourist crashed into the unmoving masses of families who had just witnessed a brawl between The Incredible Hulk and SpongeBob Squarepants over territory, boundaries and the age old issue of ownership.

David Louden

#37. To me the industry has always said that the lovers and haters and principal characters will always be white in Hollywood, and black people will always be appendages of those kinds of dramas, or they will be comedic outlets. It will never change.

Haile Gerima

#38. Hollywood Expressed his inner Godzilla again V to Z

J.R. Ward

#39. I enjoy that the most powerful person in Hollywood is indeed a Black woman in Oprah Winfrey. I'm hoping to just transcend beyond that.

Joseph McGinty Nichol

#40. The bravery of Stanley Kramer's 'Guess Who's Coming to Dinner' amounted to two Hollywood legends - Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy - telling the world that a black son-in-law is something they can live with, and so should you, especially if he looks like Sidney Poitier and has degrees.

Wesley Morris

#41. Sometimes you have to change the mold. If people keep following the same Hollywood mold, you're going to get the same thing. And as a Black actress, there's not a whole lot out there for us, unless we're creating it.

Kym Whitley

#42. You know what? I never really factor Hollywood into anything. I'm a black actor, so I can't really control what Hollywood thinks. I gotta go do my thing, and my jokes have got to be funny. Whatever I do has got to be great.

Jamie Foxx

#43. One aspect of my mum's personality that has influenced me is her love of Hollywood and the golden era of black-and-white films.

Rebecca Hall