"A great statement on human nature made by one of my favorite directors, Sidney Lumet. Early Jack Klugman, Jack Warden, and Martin Balsam are brilliant here, as well as the messenger/angel Henry Fonda. If you have any doubts about jury duty, please watch this. As for justice, there is just us . . ."

"Robert Zemeckis’ Used Cars. One of the most underrated and under-appreciated films of all time and my favorite comedy. Kurt Russell is genius in this film and I wish he would return to comedies because his delivery and timing are to die for. Excellent supporting cast including the wonderful Jack Warden who plays two characters — dueling brothers. And kudos to Zemeckis and [co-writer] Bob Gale for writing a biting, social satirical and very un-PC script. “Jesus Palomino!”"

"Once again, another movie that I don’t think people could watch these days because they have to sit too long and listen to people talk. This is a brilliant movie, and Paul Newman, out of everything he ever did, this was his greatest performance. When he got the Academy Award for The Color of Money, I think it was a make-up job [by the Academy]. Jack Warden was terrific in it, as well as James Mason. I hated [James Mason] in that movie more than any character I’ve ever hated as the defense attorney for the Catholic Church. He was really mean–cold, really. All the actors are terrific, too."

"I have a 1000… I have a top 100. I can tell you five movies that are important to me, but as I say, I could go on and on. Shampoo is important to me. Hal Ashby, one of the great directors of our time, died very young, and is sometimes overlooked; but he did The Last Detail, and Being There, and he is a great director. And Robert Towne wrote the script with Warren Beatty. It’s a brilliant script, a portrait of LA at a certain time and the United States when we were going through a spasm of political activity that was very discouraging — it ends with the election of Nixon and Agnew. It’s hilarious, it’s sexy; it deals with all the variety of complications of people’s behavior. Jack Warden is brilliant in it; hilarious in one of the greatest scenes ever shot: At the end of the movie when Beatty comes back to his house and he thinks that Jack Warden’s gonna have him killed ’cause he’s slept with both Warden’s wife and his daughter, Carrie Fisher. It’s a great, great film, but Warden is brilliant in that scene. The movie is full of great writing; it’s almost like a French farce, but very modern. Beatty is at his absolute best. Everybody in it is great. Julie Christie’s a knockout. So that’s an important movie that not enough people have seen."

"Being There is one of my favorite movies. It’s much more precise than a movie like The Last Detail. It’s a type of movie I hope one day to be able to attempt to make. It’s brilliant on every level. It is one of movies that I watch and go, “I probably will never be able to get close to this, but I should try.” The use of television in the movie is spectacular – how what’s happening on the television in the rooms that they’re in reflects or comments on the action. Nobody has ever done that better and people have tried since and always failed. Any time I see something on a TV in a TV show, I know that they’re thinking about how great they did it in Being There. It’s another movie with some of the best performances in comedy history – Jack Warden, Melvyn Douglas, and Shirley MacLaine, so I go back to that a lot."