Wealth & Money Quote by Ben Hecht

Hecht skewers Hollywood with the breezy cruelty of someone who’s taken its checks and still refuses to grant it dignity. The line works because it flatters and insults in the same breath: “tremendous sums of money” is the bait, and the punchline is that the labor is barely labor at all, no heavier than “a game of pinochle.” That comparison isn’t accidental. Pinochle is social, repetitive, rule-bound, and ultimately low-stakes entertainment. By choosing it, Hecht frames studio writing not as art or vocation but as a parlor pastime that happens to pay obscenely well.

The specific intent is self-exposure as much as critique. “Double lure” admits complicity: he’s not above it, he’s attracted to it. But the attraction is depicted as almost embarrassing, like being seduced by a rigged carnival game that keeps spitting out cash. Subtextually, Hecht is puncturing Hollywood’s preferred mythologies - genius, glamour, cultural importance - with a writer’s greatest weapon: the demotion of status through metaphor.

Context sharpens the cynicism. Hecht came out of hard-boiled journalism and literary ambition into the studio system’s industrial storytelling, where speed and compliance often mattered more than depth. The quip registers a common émigré-writer experience: Hollywood as a place that buys your talent at a premium, then asks you to treat it like a gig. His wit doesn’t just complain about selling out; it anatomizes why selling out felt so easy. When the work plays like cards and pays like a fortune, moral seriousness starts to look like bad arithmetic.