THE HUMILIATION OF OLD AGE

STORY:
‘You will make the film we dreamed of for so long,’ he said, ‘but in the end you will realize that you have failed. That film was one of the roads that led me to this night.
The others: the humiliation of old age, the conviction of having already lived each day. My words, which are now your present, will one day be but the vaguest memory of a dream.

Equipped as ever with that fiendish sense of humor he added: ‘Now this, Mr. Hitchcock, this is the film you will never make. The world will overtake you. History, sudden catastrophes and global struggles will play themselves out in ways still stranger and more spectacular than your films.

— ‘Tell me another thing,’ I said. ‘Who wins the Cold War?’

He waved away the question, as though it were trivial. Becoming more animated he sat forward in his chair and told me: ‘half the movie theaters in the country have closed down.

Television has killed cinema, broken it down into bite-sized chunks and swallowed it, like...like...

— ‘Like birds devouring their own parent.’ I said.‘I knew I could trust myself to come up with a good simile,’ he chortled. ‘It is the destiny of every medium to be devoured by its offspring.’

TITLE:
TELEVISION IS LIKE THE AMERICAN TOASTER, YOU PUSH THE BUTTON AND THE SAME THING POPS UP EVERY TIME.
ALFRED HITCHCOCK