James Kaplan Quotes

Then Frank said, 'Have you ever heard that when five o'clock comes, it's martini time? We could be right in the middle of a scene, but it's over for me, because it's martini time. Did you ever hear that?

In December, Angela Lansbury had been signed to play Raymond's mother, the arch-villainess Eleanor Shaw Iselin. Apparently, Sinatra originally wanted Lucille Ball for the role, a fascinating casting notion, as Tom Santopietro points out: "As Ball aged, she grew into an increasingly hardened performer, losing all traces of the vulnerability that so informed her brilliant multiyear run on television's I Love Lucy. The resulting quality of toughness would have suited the role of [Eleanor] very well, although it is anyone's guess whether or not Ball would have felt comfortable delving into the dark recesses of [her] warped character.

You can't explain what it is about the sound of Sinatra's voice," Feinstein says. "I mean, you can try, and you can get very poetic in describing it. But there is something there that is transcendent, that simply exists in his instrument. He developed it, he honed it, he understood it himself, he knew what he could do, and he used it to his best advantage. That was something that people responded to.

to be all the way across the country. "Dad was on the air in the middle of a radio show broadcast live from Hollywood

She stopped me cold when she said, 'What color is the wind?'

Francis, I'd play the Godfather for you," he told the startled director. "I wouldn't do it for those guys at Paramount, but I'd do it for you.

In the car going home, I said, "We should have stayed." Bogie said, "No, we shouldn't. You must always remember we have a life of our own that has nothing to do with Frank. He chose to live the way he's living - alone. It's too bad if he's lonely, but that's his choice. We have our own road to travel, never forget that - we can't live his life.

Why don't you steal the pattern out of Kenton's '23 Degrees North, 82 Degrees West'?" the trombonist, an alumnus of Stan Kenton's big band, said.

He swung so hard, you could've turned him upside down and shaken every piece of change out of his pocket, and he would have never missed a beat.

By all accounts, John Frankenheimer was singularly obsessed with The Manchurian Candidate, a film that, according to Daniel O'Brien, the director regarded "as his first truly personal project, feeling that the story made an all too valid point regarding the political manipulation and conditioning of American society.

I'm a Fool" may not be a great song, but Sinatra's shattering performance of it transcends the material. His emotion is so naked that we're at once embarrassed and compelled: we literally feel for him.

Sinatra once said that the only two people he was ever afraid of were his mother and Tommy Dorsey - a flip comment but also a sincere and deeply significant one.