Time & Perspective Quote by George Kennedy

Kennedy’s point lands because it punctures the movie myth at the exact spot audiences are trained not to look: labor. We’re conditioned to treat film like a seamless object that simply arrives in theaters, frictionless and inevitable. His framing - “most people imagine” versus “to get to that” - sets up a quiet confrontation between consumption and production, between the illusion onscreen and the machinery behind it.

The intent isn’t to scold viewers for ignorance so much as to reassign credit. As an actor, Kennedy could easily romanticize performance and leave it there. Instead, he widens the frame to “hundreds or thousands of people,” a phrase that does two jobs at once: it humanizes the enterprise (specific bodies, specific jobs) and it dwarfs the star system that sells movies as the product of a few famous faces. That’s the subtext: the industry’s glamour narrative is a kind of misdirection, convenient for marketing and ego, but false in practice.

The repetition of “two hour” is telling. It underlines the brutal compression at the heart of cinema: months of full-time work collapsed into an evening’s entertainment, then judged in a tweet-length reaction. Read in context of classic Hollywood-era production lines and later blockbuster-scale crews, it’s also a defense of craft under pressure. Kennedy is arguing for respect - not in abstract terms, but in time, headcount, and the unglamorous arithmetic of making art at industrial scale.