Aging & Wisdom Quote by David Ogden Stiers

An “overstuffed hour and a half” is Hollywood time as a kind of soft extortion: the meeting isn’t just long, it’s padded, performative, designed to signal importance more than to exchange anything useful. David Ogden Stiers, an actor who spent decades watching the industry’s moods swing between artistry and corporate triage, isn’t merely complaining about a wasted afternoon. He’s clocking a power ritual. In L.A., duration becomes a currency. The longer they keep you, the more they imply you’re being “considered,” even if nothing is actually being decided.

The sly bite comes in the nostalgia. “As close to old Hollywood as I remembered it” sounds almost affectionate until the kicker: “in the last 20 years.” That phrase collapses the romantic myth of old Hollywood into a recurring dysfunction he’s never fully escaped. Stiers isn’t invoking golden-age glamour; he’s invoking the old machinery of gatekeeping, where access is dangled and hierarchy is maintained through etiquette, anecdotes, and the slow drip of attention.

Context matters, too: by the late 20th century into the 2000s, Hollywood increasingly sold itself as lean, data-driven, “new.” Stiers punctures that branding with one sensory detail - time bloated past utility. The intent is to expose how the town modernizes its rhetoric while preserving its oldest habit: mistaking ceremony for substance, and calling it business.