Time & Perspective Quote by Lee Hazlewood

Hazlewood turns the glamour myth of show business inside out by focusing on its least cinematic ingredient: dead time. The complaint isn’t really about trailers or “two dozen lines.” It’s about the mismatch between an artist’s self-image (maker, mover, voice) and the industrial reality of being a replaceable part in someone else’s machine. His phrasing is blunt, almost bored, and that’s the point: he refuses to dress up the indignity with gratitude.

The rhythm of the quote mimics the experience he’s describing: you live, they call, you speak, they stretch it into hours. Short bursts of action swallowed by long, featureless waiting. “Then they do that for three hours” collapses the absurdity of production time into a single, exasperated sentence, as if he can’t be bothered to dignify it with detail. Hazlewood, a musician who built his reputation on control of tone and timing, is basically saying the set steals the only thing he values: momentum. In music, silence is chosen; on a film set, silence is enforced.

There’s also a class edge hiding in the word “trailer.” It signals status hierarchies, containment, and a weird form of captivity disguised as comfort. You’re “living” there, not working there. The final line, “I don’t like waiting,” lands like a shrug, but it’s a manifesto: he’d rather be the guy running the room than the guy parked outside it.