There’s an interesting interview with Nick Nolte at http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/01/nick_nolte_doesnt_care_about_t.html

But two questions are put to him that are kind of relevant to these pages:

What do you make of the [Hollywood] industry nowadays?

Hollywood’s idea of a film, an A-list film, is basically a $100 million [return]. Whereas probably all films eventually make money, in the long term, once you exhaust all the outlets and DVD and cable and satellite. It’s not like the music industry where people are able to share files and exploit it. They say that’s gonna happen. I don’t know when that technology will be available, but if it does, then the film industry’s gonna be in the same situation as the music industry is in. I think the porn industry is in that kind of condition. People are shooting their own porn and doing it for free! Homemade stuff. I haven’t watched it personally. I’m a little too old for it.

So you have no interest in winning an Oscar?

No, you really don’t want them. You don’t want to make awards the reason you’re doing things. You’re gonna lose anyway, and it’s much more about losing than winning. And success is not a thing that you grow by. It’s failure, really, that you grow by, although nobody likes to experience it. If you really are successful you become tremendously bloated and out of perspective. You’ll see that with Mel [Gibson] and his behavior with billions of dollars. I like Mel a lot, and I’m sure it was extremely difficult to handle that, to the point that he couldn’t. It took his own actions to straighten himself out, but it’s a horrifying way to have to go about it.

Add to this Nolte’s recollections of the late Hunter S. Thompsaon. I could say exactly the same thing about Jim Holliday:

“I knew Hunter in a way that Hunter would call late at night after he had called many, many other people. And then you would have to integrate into the conversation as if you knew what he was talking about, and you had no idea, so it was best you just made up something. At first, you’re just dumbfounded because you’re trying to figure out what he’s talking about, so you just start in with something and he would integrate it. We got along very well on the phone.”