Time & Perspective Quote by Bill Condon

Bill Condon’s line lands like a small corrective, but it carries the weight of an industry-wide self-mythology. “First of all” is the tell: he’s not reminiscing, he’s rebutting. The target is a familiar Hollywood shorthand - the “Mexican maid” as period flavor, a lazy authenticity stamp that props up nostalgia while smuggling in a racialized service class as background texture. Condon’s point isn’t merely factual (“no one had” them); it’s about how memory gets retrofitted by film and television, then fed back into new productions as if it were history.

The specificity matters. He doesn’t say “Latina” or “immigrant” or “domestic worker” - he repeats the stock label the industry uses, exposing how quickly an entire demographic becomes a costume. The phrase “the movie business at that time” also narrows the argument to a particular bubble: Hollywood portraying Hollywood. When even that insular world gets its own household dynamics wrong, you start to see how “period detail” often functions less as research and more as inherited cliché.

Underneath is a critique of representational economics. A maid character is convenient: she delivers exposition, signals wealth, and offers a frictionless way to include a person of color without granting them interiority. Condon’s insistence pushes against that default setting. He’s reminding us that accuracy isn’t just about props and cars; it’s about who gets imagined as naturally present in the margins, and why certain bodies keep being cast there even when the history doesn’t back it up.