Daily Inspiration Quote by William Goldman

Goldman’s line is a perfectly sharpened paradox, the kind Hollywood runs on: contempt for the obvious, dependence on it anyway. “Worthless” isn’t a moral judgment so much as a craft complaint. In the day-to-day mechanics of filmmaking, stars rarely solve the real problems: a scene that won’t land, a third act that sags, a director who can’t find the movie’s pulse. A famous face can’t rewrite a broken script or manufacture coherence. They’re “worthless” to the part of the process that actually makes a film good.

Then Goldman flips the knife: “absolutely essential.” Not to art, to survival. Stars are the industry’s risk-management technology, the human collateral that unlocks financing, distribution, press, and opening-weekend oxygen. They convert an unpredictable, expensive creative gamble into something that can be sold in a sentence. The subtext is institutional cynicism: Hollywood knows quality is hard to forecast, so it leans on celebrity as a proxy for certainty, even when everyone inside the machine recognizes it’s a flimsy one.

The quote also telegraphs Goldman’s larger worldview (the same one behind his famous “nobody knows anything”): decision-making in film is rationalized after the fact. Stars become both scapegoat and savior. If the movie fails, they were miscast; if it succeeds, their “presence” was destiny. Goldman’s wit is that he refuses the comforting lie of either/or. In Hollywood, the person least responsible for the film’s actual construction is often the one most responsible for its existence.