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FEDERICO FELLINI |
1920-1993; Italian film director |
| 1 Cinema is an old whore, like circus and variety, who knows how to give many
kinds of pleasure. Besides, you can’t teach old fleas new dogs. |
• Atlantic Monthly, December 1965 |
| 2 I always direct the same film: I can’t distinguish one of them from another. |
• January 1977 |
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PEG/PEGGY FENWICK |
American screenwriter |
| All you have to do is turn that dial and you have all the company you want.
Right there on the screen. Drama, comedy, life's parade at your fingertips. |
• spoken by a television salesman to Cary Scott (Jane Wyman) in All That Heaven Allows, 1955 |
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GERHARDT FIEBER |
Chief animator at Nazi-backed Deutsche Zeichenfilm |
| We studied the Disney films for their dynamics—how they moved and ran. Therefore,
thanks to the Americans, we were able to do in a few months what it had taken them 20 years to perfect. |
• cit. The Sunday Times, 2 May 1999 |
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ALBERT FINNEY |
1936- ; British actor |
| It seems to me a long way to go just to sit in a non-drinking, non-smoking
environment on the off chance your name is called. ... It's as if you are
entered into a race you don't particularly want to run in. All the hoops you
have to jump through on these occasions: it's not my favourite occupation.
Walking around in the spotlight having to be me is not something I'm
particularly comfortable with or desire. I'd sooner pretend to be someone else. |
• On attendance at the Academy Awards ceremony, quoted from American newspapers in The
Times, 24 March 2001, the day before his fifth 'best actor' Oscar nomination. |
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RONALD FIRBANK |
1886-1926; British novelist |
| ‘She reads at such a pace,’ she complained, ‘and when I asked where she had
learned to read so quickly she replied, "on the screens in cinemas".’ |
• The Flower Beneath the Foot, 1923 |
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JOHN FITHIAN |
1963-; President, National Association of Theatre Owners (US)
2000- |
Obviously the VCR did not doom the film industry, just as the earlier and even greater
peril of television did not doom the film industry.
The cinema industry never believed that either of these technological tidal waves
would doom our part of the industry. We simply saw them as new ways to bring more films to more
people, and thus to enhance the overall popularity of and demand for films—following, however,
the critical distribution pattern of sequential release that has made the film industry so
profitable and popular all over the world. |
• Quoted on BBC News website page 'Digital film: Industry answers', 9 February 2006.
History tells a different story:
cf Jack Valenti 3,4;
Robert Camplin,
Kenneth Maidment |
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F SCOTT FITZGERALD |
1896-1940; American writer |
| 1 Culture follows money. |
• letter to Edmund Wilson, May 1921 |
| 2 You can take Hollywood for granted like I did, or you can dismiss it with the contempt
we reserve for what we don’t understand. It can be understood too, but only dimly and in flashes. Not half
a dozen men have ever been able to keep the whole equation of pictures in their heads. |
• The Last Tycoon, unfinished at his death |
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ROBERT J FLAHERTY |
1884-1951; American documentary film-maker |
| People never get tired of seeing a horse gallop across the plains. |
• cit Rosenheimer: ‘They make documentaries...’ in Film News, vol.7 no.6, April 1946 |
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BRYAN FORBES |
John Theobald Clarke
1926- ; British film producer/writer/director |
| 1 You can’t make films as a product, in a detached, unemotional way. If you treat
them like the manufacturing of boots and shoes, that’s why you end up with Hush Puppies. |
• April 1977 |
| 2 Our industry is a mixture of greed and incompetence—with greed uppermost. |
• A Marriage of Convenience (Richard Attenborough film for BBC), 1986 |
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ANNA FORD |
1943- ; broadcaster |
| 1 Let’s face it, there are no plain women on television. |
• quoted in The Observer, 23 September 1979 |
| 2 There are more than 16 million people in this country over the age of 55 and how many
presenters do you know on television over 60? I don’t think the BBC is intent on making programmes for
them. They’re catered for on Radio 4, but not on screen. |
• quoted in The Sun, 28 August 2007 |
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Sir DENIS FORMAN |
1917- ; director, British Film Institute 1949-1955, managing director then chairman (1974-1984)
Granada Television, deputy chairman Granada Group 1984-1990 |
| A considerable amount of television is good, very little is great.
... A great deal of British television is not as good as it should be. |
• 1973 |
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MILOS FORMAN |
1932- ; Czech-born film director |
| It sounds ridiculous but it's not. I'm convinced the Beatles are partly
responsible for the fall of Communism. |
• The Beatles Revolution, ABC Television documentary, November 2000
See also  Yuri Pelyoshonok |
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Professor G CAREY FOSTER FRS |
1835-1918; Professor of Physics, University College, London 1865-90, Principal 1900-1904 |
| It seemed as if the only thing left to be done was to increase the intensity of the
effects, so that a whole room should be able to listen to the sounds produced. |
• 1876, following demonstration of telephony by Alexander Graham Bell to Society of Arts, London |
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MARK FOWLER |
Chairman, US Federal Communication Commission 1981-1987 |
| 1You are not my flock, I am not your shepherd. |
• 23 September 1981, reflecting deregulation policy of US
broadcasting in the early 1980s; Variety, 13 January 1992 |
| 2 It's time to move away from thinking of broadcasters as trustees and time to
treat them the way that everyone else in this society does, that is, as a
business. Television is just another appliance. It's a toaster with pictures.
Let the people decide through the marketplace
mechanisms what they wish to see and hear. Why is there this national obsession
to tamper with this box of transistors and tubes when we don't do the same for
Time magazine? |
• Interview in Reason magazine, 1 November 1981 |
| 3 The perception of broadcasters as community trustees
should be replaced by a view of broadcasters as marketplace participants. |
• Source unknown |
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WILLIAM HENRY FOX TALBOT |
1800-1877; British pioneer of photography |
| The idea occurred to me ... how charming it would be if it were possible to cause these
natural images to imprint themselves durably, and remain fixed upon the paper! |
• after using the camera obscura for sketching, 1833 |
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Sir ROBERT FRASER |
1904-?; Director General, Independent Television Authority 1954-1970 |
| 1 Come Thursday night, the BBC monopoly
is over, and an era of broadcasting that has lasted for nearly 30 years is behind us. Only
a very silly person on the ITV side of the fence would be jaunty about this. ... I have
never had any patience with the people who said the new programmes would be bad
themselves, and also make the BBC bad, because the two programmes would put too great a
strain on the nation’s talent. In the nature of things, a monopoly leaves an immense
amount of talent unused. It is television on one cylinder. Now you can begin to hear the others firing. |
• Daily Mail, Tuesday 20 September 1955 |
| 2 Television programmes should not
reflect an unrelated succession of advertising decisions, but the coherent policy and
outlook of a group of people conscious that what they have in their hands is a social
responsibility, a life-changing force for the direction of which they are responsible. |
• Financial Times, 21 September 1955, the day before the start of ITV |
| 3 Television should be kept in its proper place—beside us, before us, but never
between us and the larger life. |
• Look, 18 February 1958 |
| 4 If you decide to have a system of
people’s television, then people’s television you must expect it to be, and it
will reflect their likes and dislikes, their tastes and aversions, what they can
comprehend and what is beyond them. |
• 1960 |
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FRED W FRIENDLY |
Ferdinand Wachenheimer
1915-1998; American broadcasting producer, President CBS News
1964-1966 |
| 1 A medium capable of doing this could
provide reporters with a new weapon in journalism. We hoped we would never abuse it. |
• of the first See It Now programme with Edward R Murrow, 18 November 1951, in which
both New York’s Brooklyn Bridge and San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge were shown in split-screen,
the first time both US coasts were seen live simultaneously |
| 2 Television is bigger than any story it reports. It’s the greatest teaching
tool since the printing press. It will determine nothing less than what kind of people we are. |
• quoted in The Times obituary, 6 March 1998 |
| 3 Because television can make so much
money doing its worst, it often cannot afford to do its best. |
• 1966, on resigning as President of CBS News when the
network, under advertiser pressure, preferred to show a fifth re-run of an episode of I
Love Lucy rather than live coverage of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
investigation of US involvement in Vietnam |
| 4 Television makes so much at its worst that it can’t afford to do its best. |
• quoted in US News and World Report, 12 June 1967, after his appointment
as Professor of Broadcast Journalism, Columbia University, New York |
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MAX FRISCH |
1911-1991; Swiss author and playwright |
| Technology ... the knack of so arranging the world that we don’t have to experience it. |
• cit. D J Boorstin: The Image |
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WILLIAM FRIESE-GREENE |
1855-1921; British photographer and cinema pioneer |
| Movement is life. Moving pictures will satisfy something deep inside all the people in the world. |
• 1889, the year of his master patent for cinematography
 William Friese-Greene's house |
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Sir DAVID FROST |
1939-; British television presenter and executive |
| Television is an invention that permits you to be entertained in your living room
by people you wouldn't have in your home. |
• source unknown |
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PETER FUNT |
Host of 'Candid Camera' on US television |
| It breaks my heart to find myself within the cesspool of reality TV shows. |
• quoted in New York Times, 8 January 2003 |
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GEORGE FYFE |
|
| The housewife will naturally
order all her goods by the aid of the new method. When she telephones the butcher, she
will be able to see what sort of chops he has to offer that morning. ... ‘Shop by
television’ will be the new motto at the big stores. At the cinema theatres, big
events will be shown as they are happening all over the world, with additional thrills in
between. |
• The Radio Times, June 1924—ie: before Baird’s first demonstration |
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