Love Quote by Peter Bart

Romance is expensive, and Peter Bart knows Hollywood has always been a place where feelings get budgets. His line needles a familiar truth: directors and editors don’t just assemble images, they bond with them. “Fall in love with every frame” isn’t praise; it’s a diagnosis of creative attachment that makes trimming painful, and compromises politically fraught. In the old studio ecology, that love was kept on a leash by executives who could say no, or at least say “cut.”

Bart’s twist is the shift in power he’s pointing at: “even neophytes are given final cut.” Final cut used to be a rare privilege reserved for proven auteurs or powerful stars. When newcomers get it, the industry isn’t democratized so much as destabilized. The subtext is blunt: in an era of prestige TV, streaming deals, and brand-driven franchise filmmaking, the gatekeepers have loosened their grip, sometimes out of fear (keeping talent happy), sometimes out of strategy (betting on “vision”), and sometimes because the old standards of authority have eroded.

That’s where the “serious economic implications” lands. Bart is warning that sentimentality now scales. When a creator can’t kill their darlings and no one can force the issue, runtimes bloat, reshoots multiply, post-production drags, and marketing plans get held hostage to a cut that’s more personal than pragmatic. The quote is less about aesthetics than governance: who gets to decide what the audience sees, and who pays when love wins that argument.