"There is a lot of strength and intelligence in Hollywood"
About this Quote
Coming from Fay Wray, the line reads as both defense and diagnosis of the film capital. She earned the right to say it. An actress who spanned silent pictures and the talkies, who clung to the Empire State Building in the public imagination after King Kong, Wray lived the industrys extremes. She knew the surface image of glamour and scandal, and she knew the engine room where problems are solved with nerves, stamina, and wit.
Strength, in her world, was not abstract. It was the endurance to perform under punishing lights, to repeat perilous setups, to keep working when the studio system could typecast and discard. It was the ability to adapt to technological and cultural shifts: the move from silence to sound, the imposition of the Production Code, the later rise of independent production and television. It was also the collective muscle of craftspeople who built sets overnight, wrangled crowds, and coaxed stop-motion creatures to life frame by frame.
Intelligence showed itself in writing rooms and editing bays, on soundstages and balance sheets. Wray saw it up close through collaborators and through her marriage to screenwriter Robert Riskin, whose scripts for films like It Happened One Night and Mr. Deeds Go to Town distilled sharp social observation into accessible stories. She worked with innovators such as Merian C. Cooper and effects pioneer Willis OBrien, men who had to invent methods as they went. Intelligence in Hollywood often looks like improvisation under pressure, the ability to turn constraints into style and budgets into narrative clarity.
Her statement resists the easy caricature of Hollywood as shallow spectacle. It acknowledges an industry capable of exploitation and folly while insisting on the presence of grit and craft. From agents and executives to costume cutters and focus pullers, the place runs on a daily negotiation between imagination and limitation. Wray recognized that the movies are miracles engineered by people who are tougher and shrewder than their myths suggest.
Strength, in her world, was not abstract. It was the endurance to perform under punishing lights, to repeat perilous setups, to keep working when the studio system could typecast and discard. It was the ability to adapt to technological and cultural shifts: the move from silence to sound, the imposition of the Production Code, the later rise of independent production and television. It was also the collective muscle of craftspeople who built sets overnight, wrangled crowds, and coaxed stop-motion creatures to life frame by frame.
Intelligence showed itself in writing rooms and editing bays, on soundstages and balance sheets. Wray saw it up close through collaborators and through her marriage to screenwriter Robert Riskin, whose scripts for films like It Happened One Night and Mr. Deeds Go to Town distilled sharp social observation into accessible stories. She worked with innovators such as Merian C. Cooper and effects pioneer Willis OBrien, men who had to invent methods as they went. Intelligence in Hollywood often looks like improvisation under pressure, the ability to turn constraints into style and budgets into narrative clarity.
Her statement resists the easy caricature of Hollywood as shallow spectacle. It acknowledges an industry capable of exploitation and folly while insisting on the presence of grit and craft. From agents and executives to costume cutters and focus pullers, the place runs on a daily negotiation between imagination and limitation. Wray recognized that the movies are miracles engineered by people who are tougher and shrewder than their myths suggest.
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