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Creativity Quote by Ray Manzarek

"I need three million dollars to make a low-budget, intellectual, artistic, exciting, erotic movie with a great soundtrack"

About this Quote

Three million dollars sounds like a punchline until you remember who’s talking: Ray Manzarek, the Doors’ keyboardist, a man whose whole career was built on making “art” feel dangerous and making danger feel stylish. The line is a compact manifesto and a sly hustle at once. “Low-budget” is doing double duty: it’s both a badge of underground credibility and a pre-emptive excuse that flatters the investor. You’re not funding bloat; you’re funding purity.

Then he stacks the adjectives like a baroque sales pitch - “intellectual, artistic, exciting, erotic” - each one aimed at a different patron fantasy. It’s not just sex, it’s erotica with a library card. Not just thrills, but thrills with taste. The subtext is the eternal counterculture contradiction: wanting to stay outside the system while needing the system’s money to rent cameras, pay crews, clear rights.

The final clause is the tell: “with a great soundtrack.” That’s Manzarek admitting where he has real leverage. Film is the aspiration, music is the proof. It also dates the quote to a moment when rock musicians were increasingly trying to extend their aura into cinema, when “artistic” meant cross-media and “exciting” meant transgressive without being disposable.

It works because it’s both earnest and self-aware. Manzarek isn’t pretending commerce doesn’t exist; he’s trying to rebrand the pitch meeting as a cultural insurgency, priced at exactly three million.

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TopicMovie
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APA Style (7th ed.)
Manzarek, Ray. (2026, January 17). I need three million dollars to make a low-budget, intellectual, artistic, exciting, erotic movie with a great soundtrack. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-need-three-million-dollars-to-make-a-low-budget-73283/

Chicago Style
Manzarek, Ray. "I need three million dollars to make a low-budget, intellectual, artistic, exciting, erotic movie with a great soundtrack." FixQuotes. January 17, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-need-three-million-dollars-to-make-a-low-budget-73283/.

MLA Style (9th ed.)
"I need three million dollars to make a low-budget, intellectual, artistic, exciting, erotic movie with a great soundtrack." FixQuotes, 17 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/i-need-three-million-dollars-to-make-a-low-budget-73283/. Accessed 5 Feb. 2026.

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About the Author

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Ray Manzarek (February 12, 1939 - May 20, 2013) was a Musician from USA.

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