My parents are the hardest-working people I ever knew: they always worked every day, all day; they had to come up with the solutions to make things work. And I think that work ethic, maybe stubbornness, single-mindedness, definitely played a role for me. I'm definitely thankful for my roots.
I think people should try to teach young children that these qualities - stubbornness and a capacity to listen - might look like they are opposites, but they are not.
Stubbornness and ignorance and determination are a very fine line from each other. I'm a very stubborn person, but not so stubborn that I can't learn new things and meet new people, but I have a one-track mind.
What's disheartening for me and to all of us in GLAAD is when it comes to major studio films, LGBT people are basically invisible. And when we do show up, it's largely a part of comedies as carictatures to service a joke that's at the expense of the character.
We're used to a story in modern terms as an information delivery device. Certainly on television and even with the studio films, there's really only one note that you get, and that's clarity. And people will sacrifice everything for clarity. They'll sacrifice the joke. They'll sacrifice the moment, or the romance.
I'm excited that 'The Good Guy' is getting distribution because indie movies they're not - people ran out of money and they're not making these movies anymore. It's all superhero movies or real obvious tent pole studio films.
I'm intrigued by films that have a singular vision behind them. A lot of studio movies have ten writers by the time they're done. You have a movie testing 200 times, making adjustments according to various people's opinions. It's difficult to have an undistilled vision.
For the most part, studio movies have huge budgets. They don't do anything under 30 to 40 million. When you have that much money at stake, you have so many people breathing down your neck.
I feel like I'm in a weird state, and I wake up in Hollywood, and I've got a couple of studio movies underneath my belt, and I take these meetings with people. Sometimes it's this great, weird sense of oddness that comes at you, because I've never really stopped thinking the way that I started thinking.
Women were real box office stars in the '40s, more so than men. People loved to see women's films. I think it was better then, except for the studio system.
During the Hollywood studio system, they looked for people who were unusual. The stars had peculiarities.
I know my audience, and they're not people that the studios know anything about.
At home, my parents were quite old, so the surrounding was of elder people. There was no noise. Reading books was encouraged; TV was not encouraged, so I was the geeky, studious type of girl.
What people are going to be surprised about is that Tia and I are really different. We're nothing like the characters on 'Sister, Sister.' We're kind of swapped. I was the crazy, mischievous one on the show - Tia was the studious, more serious one.
The very concept of history implies the scholar and the reader. Without a generation of civilized people to study history, to preserve its records, to absorb its lessons and relate them to its own problems, history, too, would lose its meaning.
I'm somewhat horrified because I don't think the young people today even know what history is. Some of them don't' even study History at school anymore or Geography and they don't know where one place is from another.
When people embrace character, there's latzie. It's the stuffing of a scene that's not written. It's not in the stage direction and it's not in the words. When people embrace character, it informs their living, breathing moments in a scene so well.
How can people in other countries who are trying to grasp our plan of democracy avoid stumbling over our logic when we deny the first steps in democracy to our women?
Perhaps the main stumbling block to a better, and more fruitful, theological relationship with Judaism and the Jewish people has been the tendency of many Christian theologians to see the Christ event as the end of history.
In every stump speech I give, I speak about the fact that people who dream and achieve enormous success do not make us poorer - they make us better off.
