"If you're not accurate, you'll cause untold trouble"
About this Quote
Accuracy, in Selznick's world, isn't a virtue; it's a liability shield. A Hollywood producer famous for both perfectionism and control, he’s not warning about minor mistakes. He’s warning about the cascading damage that happens when a single wrong detail gets replicated through an enormous machine: rewrites, reshoots, publicity, budgets, and egos all multiplying the initial error until it becomes "untold trouble" - trouble you can’t neatly trace back to one decision, and therefore can’t easily fix.
The line carries the managerial paranoia of the studio era, when films were industrial projects disguised as art. Selznick sat at the chokepoint between creative ambition and logistical reality; he knew that imprecision isn’t just aesthetically sloppy, it’s politically dangerous. In a hierarchy where blame travels downward, being "not accurate" risks your credibility, your job, your relationship with stars, even your authority to give notes. The phrase "untold" is doing work: it implies problems too numerous to enumerate and too sensitive to narrate. Hollywood trouble is often reputational trouble.
There’s also an implicit moral claim about storytelling itself. Accuracy here is less about documentary truth than about internal consistency - keeping the world of a film coherent enough that audiences don’t fall out of the dream. Selznick’s intent is to enforce discipline, but the subtext is clearer: in an industry built on illusion, precision is the only thing keeping the illusion from collapsing under its own weight.
The line carries the managerial paranoia of the studio era, when films were industrial projects disguised as art. Selznick sat at the chokepoint between creative ambition and logistical reality; he knew that imprecision isn’t just aesthetically sloppy, it’s politically dangerous. In a hierarchy where blame travels downward, being "not accurate" risks your credibility, your job, your relationship with stars, even your authority to give notes. The phrase "untold" is doing work: it implies problems too numerous to enumerate and too sensitive to narrate. Hollywood trouble is often reputational trouble.
There’s also an implicit moral claim about storytelling itself. Accuracy here is less about documentary truth than about internal consistency - keeping the world of a film coherent enough that audiences don’t fall out of the dream. Selznick’s intent is to enforce discipline, but the subtext is clearer: in an industry built on illusion, precision is the only thing keeping the illusion from collapsing under its own weight.
Quote Details
| Topic | Work Ethic |
|---|
More Quotes by David
Add to List
