Richard Masur Quotes
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People who just wanted to make it work and knew it was going to be a real challenge. We were on the beach the first day and Donald [Sutherland] and I are playing best friends our whole lives. We met each other for 10 seconds the night before and we're sitting on a beach lining up a shot that we shoot a few minutes later, never having had a conversation with each other and then end up going skinny dipping in the Pacific Ocean buck-ass naked, not knowing who the other person is.
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Spelling is very easy to practice yourself whereas signing is not. So I would sit on the subway riding around New York and I would spell whatever I would see. When I watched a movie I would spell words as they came up.
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I'm one of the handful of survivors of the guys I came up with.
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I'm grateful I got the opportunity to do it because I know this now. If anybody ever asked me to do a daytime show again I would go no, no. I can't do that. Not because it's beneath me. It's above me. It's beyond my resources.
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I mean God knows I've done tons of schlock during the course of my career and stuff that's been very low budget and really pressed for time, but I've never had an experience like this. I kept saying to people, "How do you do this?" I said to Susan [Lucci], "How do you do it?" I don't recall exactly what she answered me but it was something like "Close my eyes and think of England. You just do it."
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You have to give access to people with disabilities but there is no requirement to hire them. What I mean by affirmative obligation is that producers must take the necessary steps to include opportunities for people with disabilities and a vast majority of them do.
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But people who think they can project themselves into deafness are mistaken because you can't. And I'm not talking about imagining what a deaf person's whole life is like I even mean just realizing what it is like for an instant.
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After three days of shooting with Donald [ Sutherland], I was the only one he worked with for the first three days of the movie [The Winter Of Our Discontent] because of the crazy schedule. We [shot] a lot of this stuff, some of it incredibly intense and emotional. We had never had a conversation during that whole time. We didn't have time.
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I know deaf people. I have discussed the issues with them I've also thought about them a lot so I have some insights that go a little further than people who haven't had contact with the deaf community.
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I moved out to L.A. in July and Hot L Baltimore started in September or October. So I had done a few things. I'd done a Mary [Tyler Moore]. I'd done a Waltons. I hadn't done a Rhoda yet I don't think.
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I did a film many years ago called The Man Without A Face.Gaby [Hoffmann] was in with Mel Gibson. That was his directing debut. He did a great job.
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I was doing a play in New York, which we had done in New Haven, Connecticut. It was an American premiere of a play called The Changing Room written by a wonderful man named David Story. It was about a rugby team in the North of England. It got just screaming rave reviews. At that time, virtually every major critic went up to the Long Wharf Theater to see a new play like that.
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Most profoundly deaf people have speech that is very difficult to understand.
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If people don't actively knock the scenery over and they get the words out in something approximating the right order, you're moving on.
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I still to this day maintain that in that million-and-a-half feet of film [Heaven's Gate] that we shot, we thought we were making a great American film. I honestly believe that Michael [Cimino] was under a tremendous amount of pressure, and Michael's response to pressure from what I saw was to double down and to get more aggressive and to get more kind of arrogant, but I don't think it was real. I think it was the response to pressure.
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I used to be the youngest person on the set [of Bored To Death]. Now I'm very often the oldest person on the set. I feel lucky about that, to be honest. Lena [Dunham], by the way is a doll to me. So much fun to work with and really open.
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I would never ever, ever, ever, ever do it again [All My Children]. It was the scariest thing I've ever done. I have such respect for people who do it, who can do it. What happened was they caught me at a good moment. I could use the money and this came along and it was with Susan and I thought, "Susan Lucci. I have to do this.
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Maybe if I'd gone in younger, I wouldn't have had that feeling, but I've seen an enormous amount of changes since the early-'70s in how this stuff is shot. I did the first TV movie ever shot in 18 days; before this film the normal length of shooting a TV movie was between 21 and 26 days. We shot a full-up, two-hour TV movie in 18 days with Donald Sutherland playing the lead, who had never worked on television before.
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I've worked with a ginormous number of people over the years. What happens when you've been around for a while, when you run into people whose work you've seen and liked and they have seen and liked your work, there's a sense of you kind of know each other even though you don't.
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I consider anybody who has been able to make a living in this business [movie business] without having to do something else for a living for any period of time let alone 43 years would be a miracle.
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I have to say I was very lucky in this [movie] business. I was in the right place at the right time when I first got started.
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For example, the first time McDonald's put a deaf person in a commercial they saw a jump in sales. I think that happens with other kinds of disabilities and products and that is something that is being realized more and more.
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There is no relation to sound for deaf people. It is a totally different mental process.
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You have to give people the opportunity to prove themselves.