Life & Wisdom Quote by Donald E. Westlake

Westlake’s joke lands because it smuggles a whole worldview into an offhand “say.” Movie studio executives, “as society”: the phrase is deliberately flimsy, like a lawyer’s hypothetical, and that’s the point. He’s not making an earnest sociological claim; he’s mocking the reflex to treat concentrated money and gatekeeping as if it were the public interest. By letting “society” be defined by executives, he exposes how often “society” gets used as a polite synonym for whoever controls the budget.

The punchline, “then I root for the independent producers,” turns that misdefinition into a moral test. If the studios are society, the independents become the underclass, the insurgents, the people making things despite the system rather than through it. Westlake doesn’t say the independents are purer artists; he says he roots for them. That’s a sports verb, not a sermon. It signals allegiance, not naivete, and it fits a crime writer who understood institutions as machines that grind and individuals as the ones who improvise.

Context matters: Westlake wrote in and around Hollywood adaptations, close enough to know the studio logic from the inside. The line has the dry cynicism of someone who’s seen “creative decisions” become spreadsheet decisions, and who knows how “society” gets invoked to justify risk-aversion, homogenization, and control. The wit is a scalpel: by granting the studios the absurd honor of representing everyone, he makes the correct response obvious - root against the house.