Daily Inspiration Quote by Sharon Gless

Nostalgia, here, isn’t just a mood; it’s a diagnosis. Sharon Gless is sketching the old studio system as a kind of company town: hierarchical, paternalistic, and oddly communal in its own self-serving way. “There really was a head of a studio” is less praise for benevolent leadership than a reminder that power used to be visible, embodied, and locally enforced. You knew who steered the ship, who handed out work, who decided whose face belonged on a poster.

The telling word is “loved.” Gless isn’t romanticizing artistry so much as describing loyalty as infrastructure. People “worked for their studios” the way you work for a brand, a sports team, a family business. The “loaned out” detail reveals the transactional intimacy of that era: actors as assets, circulated between productions, with the studio taking its cut and the performer trading autonomy for steady employment and a kind of institutional protection. “Everybody sort of got a piece” carries the moral ambiguity: it’s community as revenue-sharing, belonging as business model.

Then the pivot lands: “Well now there’s a handful now.” The sentence trails off like someone realizing the ground has shifted mid-thought. She’s pointing at consolidation and winner-take-most economics - fewer gatekeepers, bigger stakes, less room for the middle. The subtext isn’t “the old days were better”; it’s that the new system feels thinner: less craft guild, more pipeline, where allegiance is temporary and power is concentrated somewhere you can’t even name.