"Let's have some new cliches"
About this Quote
The line is a producer's memo disguised as a punchline: the impossible demand for freshness on schedule. Goldwyn, the Hollywood mogul famous for mangling language into accidental poetry, isn’t just asking for better writing. He’s revealing the factory logic of the studio era, where creativity was expected to behave like inventory: deliver something "original", but make it legible, familiar, and market-ready.
"New cliches" lands because it exposes a contradiction everyone in mass culture recognizes and almost everyone participates in. Audiences crave surprise, then punish it; they want the comfort of recognition, then complain they’re being spoon-fed. Goldwyn collapses that entire feedback loop into three words. A cliche is, by definition, a phrase worn smooth by repetition. Asking for a new one is like ordering "fresh leftovers". The humor is in the oxymoron, but the subtext is managerial pressure: originality is not a virtue here, it’s a product feature.
Context matters. Goldwyn operated at the moment Hollywood perfected its assembly line: screenwriters in rooms, scripts in drafts, notes in waves, and star images to protect. His malapropisms became folklore because they unintentionally told the truth about the system. Even now, the quote reads like a note from a streamer executive: give us something we’ve never seen before, and make it exactly like the last hit. The cynicism isn’t that art is impossible; it’s that novelty itself gets commodified, then immediately standardized.
"New cliches" lands because it exposes a contradiction everyone in mass culture recognizes and almost everyone participates in. Audiences crave surprise, then punish it; they want the comfort of recognition, then complain they’re being spoon-fed. Goldwyn collapses that entire feedback loop into three words. A cliche is, by definition, a phrase worn smooth by repetition. Asking for a new one is like ordering "fresh leftovers". The humor is in the oxymoron, but the subtext is managerial pressure: originality is not a virtue here, it’s a product feature.
Context matters. Goldwyn operated at the moment Hollywood perfected its assembly line: screenwriters in rooms, scripts in drafts, notes in waves, and star images to protect. His malapropisms became folklore because they unintentionally told the truth about the system. Even now, the quote reads like a note from a streamer executive: give us something we’ve never seen before, and make it exactly like the last hit. The cynicism isn’t that art is impossible; it’s that novelty itself gets commodified, then immediately standardized.
Quote Details
| Topic | Witty One-Liners |
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