Dumbed Quotes

Often when you get a really good script, and you receive the new pages, you see that the entire thing has been dumbed down. Films in the `30s and `40s, that were huge blockbusters, were very sophisticated in their language, and the ideas they brought. There were no questions about whether the audience would get it or not. Today there is a certain fear, or horror, that the audience won`t understand. They underestimate the audience very often. And that is because, when you look at the box-office to see that total braindead films make lots of money, then that`s what the cash machine is telling you to do. In other words: More braindead, more money!

If God is watching us, as some believers suggest, as though we were a television show and God had a lot of free time, the deity would surely be bemused by how dumbed-down devotion has sometimes become in this so-called modern era. How might an omnipotent being with the long view of history respond to those who visit the traveling exhibit of a grilled-cheese sandwich, sold on eBay, that is said to bear the image of the Virgin Mary? It certainly argues against intelligent design, or at least intelligent design in humans.

Movie SF is, by definition, dumbed down - there have only been three or four SF movies in the history of film that aspire to the complexity of literary SF.