Daily Inspiration Quote by John Huston

Hollywood, in Huston's telling, isn't a factory of dreams so much as a trap designed to monetize them. Calling it a "cage" flips the industry's favorite self-myth on its head: the dream factory becomes the dream penitentiary. The ellipsis does a lot of work here, mimicking a pause of recognition, like a man choosing the harshest word only after trying to soften it. Then comes the twist: not a cage to keep artists in, but "a cage to catch our dreams". The subject isn't just filmmakers; it's all of us. The audience brings the raw material - longing, aspiration, romance, reinvention - and Hollywood simply learns how to contain it, package it, and sell it back.

Huston knew this from the inside. He was an A-list studio craftsman who also kept testing the system's limits, making films obsessed with doomed quests and mirages of success (The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Maltese Falcon). His characters chase something shining and end up with sand, smoke, or betrayal. That worldview reads less like bitterness than like literacy: he understands the mechanics of enchantment, and he understands the bill that arrives afterward.

The subtext is about control. A cage is architecture with intent; it implies someone built it, someone profits from it, and someone decides what gets to fly and what gets clipped. Huston isn't denying the power of movies - he's warning that Hollywood's power is inseparable from its ability to domesticate desire.