Daily Inspiration Quote by John Badham

Credit is power, and Badham is quietly calling out how arbitrarily that power gets distributed on a film set. He’s naming Phillip Harrison not as trivia, but as a correction to the public record: the production designer “did most of my films,” shaped the look of a whole run of work, and still may have slipped through the official ledger. That “though, I think he’s uncredited” lands like an aside, but it carries an industry-wide sting: the people who build the world often disappear behind the people who shoot it.

The quote’s intent is partly loyalty, partly guilt, and partly a director’s attempt to rebalance the story of authorship. Badham’s phrasing is casual, almost shrugging - “I think” - which is telling. He’s not delivering an indictment with a gavel; he’s revealing how normalized this erasure can be, even for someone in charge. The uncertainty doesn’t weaken the point, it sharpens it: if a director who repeatedly collaborated with Harrison can’t even be sure the credit landed correctly, what chance does the audience have of recognizing the craft?

Context matters here: Badham’s era is studio-driven, credit politics are union-governed, and titles are negotiated like territory. By invoking Blue Thunder, he gestures toward a visually specific, hardware-heavy film where production design isn’t decorative; it’s the infrastructure of plausibility. The subtext is a plea to see cinema as a collective art form, and a reminder that “a director’s style” is often a network of under-acknowledged hands.