A CLICHE IS A CLICHE IS A CLICHE : The Famed Literati Take a Bite Out of the Big Orange

The entertainment industry and Hollywood have long been populated with colorful, witty, occasionally clever characters capable of summing up so much with a thimbleful of words. Who could forget Samuel Goldwyn’s famous comment on movie making, “If I want to send a message, I’ll call Western Union,” or Herman Melville’s equally famous description of the fall TV ratings sweeps as the “dark November of my soul”?

Yes, show business has long attracted the finest artists of the epigram and one-liner, and I’ve collected some of them over years.

One of my favorites is the opening line of Alighieri Dante’s “Divine Situation Comedy,” a classic show business story of spent talent, too much high living and an empty casting couch: “In summer hiatus of my 40th year, I found myself alone at Ma Maison.”

That line, introducing the unarguably greatest epic ever written about show business, captures so much of the inner spirit of Hollywood, the angst of the insider-turned-outsider who, at midlife, begins to question his raison d’etre.

I know that former CBS President William Shakespeare was a great admirer of Dante and (legend has it) lifted from him often. But Shakespeare had a gift for the quip himself.

Recently, CBS brought Shakespeare out of retirement to try some of his magic as executive producer of the star-crossed “CBS Morning News”.

According to people who were there, the first day Shakespeare walked in the office he said: “ ‘Today’ and ‘Today’ and ‘Today’, its ratings creep their petty pace from day to day to the last syllable of prerecorded tape. Out, out, brief Phyllis! She is but a poor player, strutting and fretting her two hours on the screen and then heard no more. This show’s but sound and fury signifying nothing.”

One fellow we’ve not heard from lately is programming consultant Alexander Pope, best known for a couple of lines he put together on the changing fortunes of TV executives and the secret of producer Aaron Spelling’s staying power.

Too err is Silverman, to regroup Tinker,

But neither drinks from Candy’s slipper.

Spelling has been long been a favorite subject of Hollywood’s wittier raconteurs. There was, for example, Lady Brett Ashley’s famous understatement when she was turned down for the part of Alexis Carrington in “Dynasty”: “Oh, Aaron, we could have made such a damn fine show together.”

How about this comment from John Milton, once head of prime-time shows for NBC? Describing how he’d been turned down for a summer replacement series from famed soap opera producer Gloria Monty, Milton nodded to the considerable the program prowess of Spelling: “Better to rule the afternoon than to sit opposite ‘Dynasty’ in rerun.”

Of course, TV and advertising have long been closer than peanut butter and jelly, and there have been a few noteworthy Madison Avenue types who’ve moved to these Pacific shores. One of the better known transplants was advertising copywriter Thomas Sterns Eliot. Asked why he gave up his lucrative life in the East, Eliot said: “The women there come and go, shooting spots for cherry Jell-O.”

After a stint in the development department at NBC, Eliot was questioning his decision: “April is the cruelest month, breeding pilots out of the blown dries’ scripts.”

Lots of talented people try to make it big in Hollywood, and a few do. When guerrilla video guru Stephen Daedalus finally decided to go for his taste of the Big Enchilada, some pals in SoHo had a selling out party for him. His last words to the New York intelligentsia are still quoted reverently: “I go forth to shoot with the portapack of my soul the unscripted movie-of-the-week of my race.”

Daedalus, some of you may recall, landed a plum producing gig with Paramount--where Juliet Capulet was doing time as production chief. After watching the public ignore Daedalus’ big-budget flop, “Molly in Bloom,” Capulet quipped: “A gross of any kind would be a feat.”

That, as nearly everyone knows, was the year of the flop in Tinsel Town. The whole industry, it seemed, turned introspective and made far too many films about itself. Remember Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Century City Tales” or William B. Yeats’ “Slouching Toward Burbank”?

Of the latter, noted film critic Allen Ginsberg penned: “I saw the best lines of his fabrication destroyed by blandness.”

Of course the biggest flop of the year was Michael Cimino’s “Heaven’s Gate.” More people lost their jobs over that one than went to see it. One of the great career falls as a result of the debacle was United Artists chief financial officer Ernest Hemingway. Commenting on the movie, Hemingway, ever the taut, precise stylist, simply sighed: “The thousand times that he shot it meant nothing, for he was shooting it again.”