Art & Creativity Quote by Richard Corliss

Hollywood as “born schizophrenic” is a deliberately bracing diagnosis, less about pathology than about permanent contradiction. Richard Corliss, a critic who spent decades watching the industry sell its own mythology back to the public, frames Hollywood as a place split against itself from inception: a physical company town of backlots, labor contracts, unions, accountants, and gatekeepers; and a portable fantasy factory that lives in people’s heads, shaping desire, beauty, heroism, even what “normal” looks like. The line works because it refuses the comforting idea that Hollywood “lost its way.” Corliss implies the tension is the engine, not a malfunction.

Calling it both “an industry and an art form” sneaks in an argument about legitimacy. Hollywood is perpetually litigated: by artists who want it to be cathedral, by executives who need it to be refinery, by audiences who treat it as religion and product at once. Corliss’s pairing is balanced but not neutral; the cadence suggests an uneasy truce, not harmony. “Town” versus “state of mind” also winks at Hollywood’s imperial reach: you don’t have to live in Los Angeles to live under Hollywood’s weather system.

The “75 years” marker situates the remark in the late-20th-century moment when studio power, New Hollywood auteurism, blockbuster corporatization, and awards-season prestige were all overlapping. Corliss is naming the core fact critics circle endlessly: Hollywood’s greatest triumphs often come from the same machinery that makes it feel shallow. The split is the brand.