Beauty and the Beast became the first animated feature ever nominated for best picture.

Everyone is looking for the sure thing. They are looking to hedge their bet. They think the way to do that is to go with a proven quantity, a remake of something you have already seen. That is their mindset.

Quality survives.

If I were less than honest as a critic, I think people would spot that right away, and it would destroy my credibility.

Los Angeles has the greatest concentration of surviving movie palaces in the United States, yet most residents have never been inside one of them.

Movie theaters still exist in spite of all of the alternatives that are available, video and video-on-demand and DVD and streaming video and all of these things.

Dumbo… makes me cry. Every single time and in the exact same spot. I just have a special affection for Dumbo.

Audiences deserve better.

Shakespeare wrote great plays that we’re still watching all these years later. Charlie Chaplin made great comedies and they are still as funny today as they ever were.

I think the people who are making Christmas-themed movies today feel that people are more cynical about Christmas. There’s more of an edge.

I had the great good fortune to interview Peggy Lee. Her memories of working with Walt Disney and his team were warm and upbeat.

I think people in Hollywood are afraid of sentiment because they think audiences will reject it.

I’m a lifelong Disney nut.

Polar Express is not an attempt to do animation. It is a technology-based film.

While it was occasionally done here or there, nobody else had a figurehead like Walt doing it. Jack Warner wasn’t on TV. Walt was the boss, but he had a real public profile and he used it to his advantage. And he became a household face.

Timing in life is everything.

A Christmas Carol is such a fool-proof story you can’t louse it up.

NBC anchor Brian Williams is a standup comic in disguise.

When Tim Allen made The Santa Clause, I thought that was a delightful film. It took a modern sensibility but layered onto it a kind of sentiment.

Television is what made It’s a Wonderful Life the classic it is today.

I teach at USC. I have a big class of 360 kids, only about a fifth of whom are film majors. I don’t just show the Hollywood blockbusters. I show independent films, foreign films, documentaries.

Beauty and the Beast became the first animated feature ever nominated for best picture.

Hollywood executives believe that money is both the be-all and end-all to the moviemaking process.

The last person to stand still and repeat himself was Walt Disney. He refused to repeat himself. So to think that he’d be making the same kind of film in the year 2001 that he made in 1941 is absurd.