I heard [deceased Warner Bros. Studio founder Jack Warner’s] voice when I saw Revolutionary Road this week. “Good movie and all that,” Jack was saying, “but why take these two great looking kids from Titanic and cast them as a miserable quarreling married couple in 1955? Why aren’t they remaking Tracy-Hepburn romantic comedies?”
“Stars are different now, Jack,” I tried to explain. “Guys like you can’t tell them what to do like in the old days.”
“Stars are their own masters, Jack,” I cautioned. “They want to stretch.”
“Stretch, kvetch,” Jack groaned. “I don’t want to see Angelina Jolie looking for lost children. She should be doing Bette Davis pictures. I want to see Sean Penn blow people away, not blow people.”
—Variety’s EIC Peter Bart, on how today’s actors would have fared stuck in the studio system of Hollywood’s Golden Age
[Note: I would totally go see Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in an old fashioned Tracy-Hepburn-style romantic comedy or Cary Grant-esque screwball comedy.]