- HFPA
From the archives: Michael Douglas
For forty years the HFPA has recorded interviews with famous and celebrated actors, actresses and filmmakers. The world’s largest collection of its kind — over 10,000 interviews — is now in the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences Library. The audios are fascinating. Below is an excerpt: in 1989, promoting the Danny De Vito-directed War of the Roses, Michael Douglas reflected on the never ending conflict between women and men. “I think it’s very appropriate that this movie War Of The Roses ends the 1980’s. The decade has been about yuppie hard work and material values. If you spend that much time working, and very little time on a relationship, what do you expect? That is why we have so many divorces. Marriage is wonderful, when it works, but too many people were sold a bill of goods about its dreamlike qualities. I totally support the feminist Movement, but I think women created a monster. I’ve seen working women spread themselves very thin, and when they’re not happy they blame their husbands. Now in the 1990’s we begin to come full circle. There’s got to be a balance, a rekindling of love. A friend of mine told me recently, “They’re smarter than we are, and they don’t play fair.” After twenty years of the Feminist Movement, I hope we’ll end up kinder to each other. I hope women will be nicer to guys and their husbands. We tend to be more polite to strangers than we are to the person closest to us. One of the best lines in the film is, “A civilized divorce is a contradiction in terms.””