Politics & Power Quote by Ben Hecht

Hollywood has always sold the fantasy of glamour while running, in the back room, on a ruthless intimacy. Ben Hecht’s line punctures that polite double-think with the casual brutality of someone who’s seen the machinery up close. The joke lands because it flips what “should” be scandalous: in an industry built on image control, private sex is treated like industry gossip, while politics gets policed as a public crime.

Hecht is writing with the insider’s cynicism of a screenwriter who watched reputations get manufactured, traded, and destroyed. The subtext is transactional: sex is currency, leverage, a casting-room rumor that can be absorbed into the mythology. Political opinions, by contrast, threaten the studio’s relationship to power. They invite consequences - boycotts, government scrutiny, advertiser panic, the kind of heat money can’t easily launder. So the culture quietly decides which “private” behavior is safe to know and which “public” belief is dangerous to hold.

The timing matters. Hecht worked through Hollywood’s studio era and the tightening vise of the Red Scare, when suspected left sympathies could end careers overnight. His own notoriety (including his outspoken activism for Zionist causes) made him acutely aware that ideology, unlike sexual misconduct or infidelity, doesn’t stay a juicy anecdote; it becomes a dossier. The line is funny because it’s true in an ugly way: Hollywood will forgive almost any bedroom story if it doesn’t disrupt the business model. What it won’t forgive is a thought that risks the box office.