James L. Brooks
James L. Brooks
James Lawrence "Jim" Brooksis an American director, producer and screenwriter. Growing up in North Bergen, New Jersey, Brooks endured a fractured family life and passed the time by reading and writing. After dropping out of New York University, he got a job as an usher at CBS, going on to write for the CBS News broadcasts. He moved to Los Angeles in 1965 to work on David L. Wolper's documentaries. After being laid off he met producer Allan Burns who...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionTV Producer
Date of Birth9 May 1940
CityBrooklyn, NY
CountryUnited States of America
Dagwood Bumstead was a great unrecognized hero of American literature. He showed up every day, he got knocked down every day, he never got to eat his sandwich every day, the dog jumped on him every day, his wife was giving him a hard time and he showed up every day.
I've done it with Broadcast News-where there was no finish line, there was no agenda that I had to move all the characters to this point, that I was sort of open to what happens.
Great things that can happen when you're doing a movie.
Things get very distorted when you do a movie, weirdly so.
I think you have a pact with an audience in every picture, and I think the pact is to try and be truthful and to be real.
Media reporting denied privacy to anybody doing what I do for a living. It was no longer possible to work on your picture in privacy.
Working on any show that works is the best job you can possibly have in any area of the business. You've got so much going for you, a good community, everybody's hanging together, and you get to do it every week.
I laugh every day. There are days when my laughs are pretty hollow. Dust comes out of your mouth, and your bones make a funny sound. But I'm laughing.
When you work alongside somebody day in and day out, the relationships tend to be wonderful: they're lifelong.
If you ever catch a great boss, it's just such a rare thing, and it's amazing.
I love it if comedy reflects real life because to me it's more reassuring that we'll get through.
I came to 20th Century Fox to do movies, and then they started a network, and they asked me to do a show as part of their starting what became the Fox network.
That's the great thing about a series: you're driving to work, and you have an idea for a story for your characters, and you can go into work, and it's gonna be a television show. I mean that's what's great about the job.
I always fight hard to push a movie to the point where it pulls me.