A biography for Dick Wolfhasn’t been written yet.
“The environment doesn't change that radically. You are still going to go home at night and NBC is going to be there, ABC and CBS will still be there.”
“I was raised not to be rude, but I also try to get the best work out of people.”
“As soon as you become complacent your show gets canceled.”
“People do have viewing patterns, and you disrupt those at your own peril. That's something that everybody learned after 1988. The numbers have gone down every year since that strike. Big time.”
“The heart and soul of network programming is series programming, the weekly repetition of characters you like having in your house.”
“Drama or comedy programming is still the surest way for advertisers to reach a mass audience. Once that changes, all bets are off.”
“When it went on the air, the sales department hated it. It was the highest advertising pullout show in the history of NBC. At the early focus groups, people were saying, 'Who are these people? Why should we watch them?”
“TIVO executives stand up and say, 'Well, we're not getting rid of commercials, but we are letting them fast forward, because people like commercials, and if they see one that they like they stop and watch it.' I mean, please.”
“The story drove the book. That had a very seminal effect on the way I saw writing and storytelling. If you can set a character in a story that is compelling and has a backbone, you draw people in.”
“You have this disturbing reality that there are a lot of people who would rather say, 'I'm on strike' than 'I'm unemployed.' And those are the people who vote for strikes.”
“The agendas on the management side of the table now are not in sync like they used to be because you have vastly different entities supplying programming to networks.”
“I hardly see myself as a futurist.”
“It was like in Samoa when they'd put up a movie screen on the beach and show movies and the locals would run behind the sheet to see where the people went. It was pretty grim.”