Parenting & Family Quote by Joseph Bologna

Bologna is smuggling a critique of modern entertainment’s demographic micromanagement into a simple childhood memory. He’s not romanticizing the past so much as calling out a present where movies arrive pre-sliced by “target audience,” as if taste were a consumer profile instead of a gut reaction. The repetition of “It was either... or not” works like a comedian’s drumbeat: binary, blunt, almost stubborn. It’s the rhythm of someone who’s tired of being told that a story needs to justify itself with relevance to a bracketed age group rather than with the oldest metric in show business: does it play?

The subtext is also a small act of defiance against age as a narrative genre. “A movie about old people or young people” isn’t just casting; it’s a whole marketing logic that can flatten characters into “relatable” avatars. Bologna implies that when you start with the audience segment, you often end with a safer, narrower movie. His childhood framing matters here: kids are famously indifferent to prestige categories and social signaling. They respond to velocity, surprise, laughs, fear. Bologna is arguing for that instinct as an artistic compass, not a juvenile limitation.

Contextually, it lands as an actor’s lament from someone who came up in a more mid-century studio ecosystem, before streaming-era recommendation engines and hyper-targeted campaigns made “for you” a business model. He’s pushing for a democratic standard: entertainment that earns attention across ages, not content engineered to keep any one cohort politely engaged.