Daily Inspiration Quote by Michael Ritchie

"Los Angeles has always been on the table with us" is the kind of Hollywood sentence that pretends to be casual while doing a lot of quiet work. Michael Ritchie, a director who made a career out of watching American institutions chew people up with a smile, phrases the thought like a budget meeting: not a dream, not a destiny, just an option being kept warm.

The key move is the corporate metaphor. "On the table" suggests negotiation, leverage, a plan that can be advanced or withdrawn depending on circumstances. It’s emotionally evasive by design. Nobody says Los Angeles is home, or alluring, or corrosive. It’s simply there, available, like a contract clause. That’s a very LA way of talking about LA: the city as an instrument rather than a place with moral weather.

The "with us" matters too. It implies a partnership or family unit, a collective decision-making body, the kind of soft plural that gives the speaker cover. If the move happens, it wasn’t one person chasing the mirage; it was "us" being practical. That’s how you domesticate ambition: you rebrand it as logistics.

Ritchie’s era sharpens the subtext. Coming up through the studio system’s hangover years and the New Hollywood churn, he’d seen careers hinge on proximity and access. Keeping Los Angeles "on the table" reads as both opportunity and contingency plan: a recognition that in this industry, geography is strategy, and the line between choice and necessity is always being renegotiated.