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	JACK VALENTI	1921- ; president, Motion Picture Association of America; former White House presidential aide
	1 The motion picture industry is the only US enterprise that negotiates on its own with foreign governments.	• 1968, source unknown
	2 Movie theatres and movie producers are not exempt from the stern rules of the competitive arena. Trying to halt new technology is a meagre alternative. Adjusting to change is not. ... The only sensible response is to adapt.	• address at ShoWest 81 convention, Reno, Nevada, February 1981 Compare with the two following quotations.
	3 American films and television dominate the screens of the world and that just didn't happen. It happened because of the quality and caliber and the imagination and the way people construct fragile imaginings that we call the American film.     But now we are facing a very new and a very troubling assault on our fiscal security, on our very economic life and we are facing it from a thing called the videocassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank tape. And it is like a great tidal wave just off the shore. This videocassette recorder and the blank tape threaten profoundly the life-sustaining protection, I guess you would call it, on which copyright owners depend, on which film people depend, on which television people depend and it is called copyright.	• Evidence to a Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties, and the Administration of Justice of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress. Hearing on home recording of copyrighted works, 12 April 1982
	4 I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.	• Evidence to a Subcommittee on Courts, Civil Liberties, and the Administration of Justice of the Committee on the Judiciary, House of Representatives, Ninety-seventh Congress. Hearing on home recording of copyrighted works, 12 April 1982
	5 If filmgoing doesn’t pick up in Britain, the big Hollywood companies may pull out of distributing all but their surefire hits there—and sell the rest directly to TV or the cassette market. Already it costs £100,000 on average to publicise and launch a feature film in Britain. Except for a Ghostbusters or Beverly Hills Cop the British box office simply doesn’t offer a good enough chance any longer of even getting that sum back plus a profit. Unless British audiences return in numbers to the cinema, American films in Britain are going to get fewer too.	• quoted by Alexander Walker, Evening Standard, 25 July 1985, the year after the all-time low UK admission figure
	6 The culture of a country is the connective tissue to its past. It is what transports a nation to its present. ... It is what will convey that nation intact and alive into its tomorrow. ... No amount of television programming or movies or computer software, or any form of relationship can shrink or profane the mystical seed bed from which springs a national culture. ... There is no force under heaven which can tear a nation’s allegiance from its culture.	• Keynote address, Dialogue on Global Media conference, Copenhagen, 10 October 1996
	HARRIET VAN HORNE	1920-1998; American columnist
	There are days when any electrical appliance in the house, including the vacuum cleaner, seems to offer more entertainment possibilities than the TV set.	• source unknown
	W W VAUGHAN	William Wyamar Vaughan 1865-1938; headmaster of Rugby School 1921-1931
	Instead of solitary thought, people would listen in to what was said to millions of people, which could not be the best things.	• on the effect of radio, The Daily Telegraph, 23 October 1926
	DZIGA VERTOV	Denis Abramovich Kaufman 1896-1954; Russian film director
	1 The organism of cinematography is poisoned by the frightful venom of habit. We demand being given an opportunity to experiment with the dying organism, with an objective of finding an antitoxin.	• manifesto of 23 January 1920, Council of Three to the Cinematographers
	2 I am eye. I am a mechanical eye.        I, a machine, am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see.	• Kinoglas (Cinema eye), 1924
	3 I free myself from today and forever from human immobility, I am in constant movement, I approach and draw away from objects, I crawl under them, I move alongside the mouth of a running horse, I cut into a crowd at full speed, I run in front of running soldiers, I turn on my back, I rise with an airplane, I fall and soar together with falling and rising bodies. ...	• Kinoks-Revolution, LEF magazine (3), 1922 [translated by Val Telberg]
	4 Freed from the obligation of shooting 16-17 shots [frames] per second, freed from the frame of time and space, I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe, wherever I may plot them.	• Kinoks-Revolution, LEF magazine (3), 1922 [translated by Val Telberg]
	5 My road is towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I decipher in a new way the world unknown to you.	• Kinoks-Revolution, LEF magazine (3), 1922 [translated by Val Telberg]
	GORE VIDAL	1925- ; American writer
	Television is now so desperately hungry for material that they're scraping the top of the barrel.	• source unknown
	I never miss a chance to have sex or appear on television.	• source unknown
	KING VIDOR	1894-1982; American film director
	He got a reputation as a great actor just by thinking hard to remember his next line.	• of Gary Cooper
	KURT VONNEGUT Jr	1922- ; American writer
	In the early days of television, when there were only half a dozen channels at most, significant, well-written dramas on a cathode-ray tube could still make us feel like members of an attentive congregation, alone at home as we might be. There was a high probability then, with so few shows to choose from, that friends and neighbors were watching the same show we were watching, still finding TV a whizbang miracle.     We might even call up a friend that very night and ask a question to which we already knew the answer: 'Did you see that? Wow!'     No more.	• Timequake, 1997 see also Randy Newman 3
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Page updated 14 April 2008
Compilation and notes © David Fisher