Success Quote by George A. Romero

Romero turns the movie-business myth of meritocracy into a bodily function, and that’s the point: in Hollywood, your value isn’t moral, artistic, or even personal - it’s transactional, fickle, and often absurd. The line lives on a razor of gallows humor. Fail, and you’re not merely rejected; you’re reduced to a “statistic,” an anonymized data point that makes the industry feel objective while dodging responsibility for how it chews people up. Succeed, and the reward isn’t creative freedom so much as a grotesquely inflated paycheck for doing nothing of consequence. “Fly out to Hollywood and fart” is Romero’s perfect desecration of prestige: the dream factory paying top dollar for empty air.

The subtext carries Romero’s whole career-long stance as an outsider who forced the system to notice him. He helped invent the modern zombie film with DIY grit, then watched the industry alternately fetishize and marginalize independent voices. His joke exposes the silent bargain offered to artists: either you’re invisible, or you’re valuable only insofar as you can be monetized, packaged, and summoned like talent-on-demand.

It also reads as a defense mechanism. By mocking the prize, Romero inoculates himself against the humiliation of rejection and the seductions of validation. The million bucks isn’t liberation; it’s hush money with a private jet. In one sentence, Hollywood becomes both judge and punchline, and Romero refuses to play it straight.