Marshall Herskovitz quotes:

Our founding fathers could not have foreseen that freedom of the press might eventually be threatened just as much by media consolidation as by government.

The pilot system in television is utterly broken. It's a huge waste of money.

Hey, if I had my choice for social engineering, I'd declare an automatic R-rating for any movie that depicts television commercials. There's a truly dangerous influence on our children.

The notion that moving toward renewable energy will kill jobs is an absurdity on its face. The notion that we have to live smaller lifestyles; not have the American way of life or give up the American Dream is just ridiculous. It is the opposite of the case; a new energy paradigm will create opportunity.

Hollywood is the perfect conduit for the urgent message about climate change. We raise awareness all the time. We routinely take a film that nobody knows about and get 80 percent of the public to know about it in just 30 days. That's called marketing. We need to harvest Hollywood for climate change awareness.

The world is filled with terrible things that can influence children, and movies have depicted them since time immemorial. Should every terrible thing warrant an R-rating?

If there is a public perception at all, they see the producer as a big old guy who smokes a cigar and has lots of money and lots of power. That's not what a producer is and, if it ever was what a producer was, it certainly hasn't been for a long time.

In my personal belief, the big problem with climate change is getting people to understand the magnitude and scale that we're dealing with. If you buy a vehicle that gets 35 miles to the gallon, that means nothing; it's not enough. We need to make changes across society and in every piece of the energy pie.

Remember: the ratings system is a voluntary infringement of First Amendment rights, an uneasy bargain between the needs of parents, the needs of artists, and the needs of large media corporations to make profits. Any time we chip away at the First Amendment, we should at least do it with some reverence.

Even the most brilliant accomplishments on the Internet are essentially cold. Google has changed the world, but you don't snuggle up to it. YouTube is a giant carnival, filled with freaks and mountebanks, a place to gawk and laugh and get bored. Certainly not a place to feel anything.

The producer is at the center of entertainment. The producer is being forgotten, and producers must seize the center of activity.

For reasons we don't have to get into, climate change has become an incredibly polarized issue in the United States. I think that is sad. My own personal view is that we're in a planetary emergency such has not been seen in 600,000 years.

Producers are now employees, not creators.

The further I've gotten into the Internet, the more I've become convinced that we've explored only a tiny corner of what it can mean and what we can feel there.

Even those who don't believe in climate change believe we should develop renewable energy. Americans get it: it's time. This is not controversial. It's actually right in the wheelhouse of American business.