Success Quote by Jerry Della Femina

Della Femina’s line lands like a confession dressed up as a shrug: the whole culture industry, even the supposedly hard-nosed business of advertising, is secretly auditioning. “It goes back” suggests a primal origin story, as if Hollywood isn’t a place so much as a default setting for American ambition. The joke is that he’s not really joking. He’s naming the childish, half-embarrassing hunger underneath grown-up success: to be seen, validated, immortalized.

The phrasing does a lot of work. “All of us” flattens hierarchy; everyone from copywriter to CEO is implicated. “Wanting to be in Hollywood” isn’t literally about geography, it’s about proximity to cultural legitimacy. Money can buy distribution, influence, and airtime, but it can’t buy the kind of applause that feels like love. That’s why the punchline is an Oscar, not a bonus or a bigger account. The Oscar is the most polished token of public meaning-making: a symbol that says your work mattered to the story America tells about itself.

Context matters, too. Coming from a businessman associated with the Mad Men-era ethos, it reads as insider candor about advertising’s inferiority complex. Ads are omnipresent yet disposable; they shape desire while being denied the dignity of “art.” His subtext is that commerce keeps borrowing the aura of entertainment because it craves what entertainment monopolizes: prestige. The line is sharp because it frames a status scramble as a shared illness, a genteel kind of dying, where the ultimate prize is being mistaken for someone worth watching.