Wealth & Money Quote by Adam Duritz

Duritz’s line lands like backstage advice passed down between soundcheck and the encore: not paranoid, just seasoned. He’s talking about movies, but he’s really talking about the moment art becomes a high-stakes financial instrument. Once budgets balloon, the product stops belonging to a handful of creators and starts serving a spreadsheet. That’s when “someone somewhere” appears - not a moustache-twirling villain, just an anonymous cluster of agents, executives, lawyers, financiers, distributors. The vagueness is the point. In a system this large, accountability dissolves, and exploitation becomes a feature you can’t quite point at until it’s already happened.

The profanity does cultural work, too. “Screw you” cuts through the polite euphemisms of the industry (“notes,” “brand alignment,” “market realities”) and calls it what it feels like on the receiving end: the slow, legalistic erosion of control and credit. It’s a musician’s phrasing - blunt, tour-bus true - applied to Hollywood’s more elaborate machinery.

The subtext is a warning about asymmetry. Big money doesn’t just raise expectations; it redistributes power toward the people who can stall a release, bury a percentage point in a contract, or reframe your idea as “uncommercial.” Duritz isn’t romanticizing the starving-artist myth. He’s naming the trade: scale buys reach, but it also invites predation, because when the pie gets huge, everyone comes for a slice - and the easiest slice is usually the creator who thought the deal was about making something great.