A Quote by Malik Yoba

If you go back and look at the pilot of 'Seinfeld,' no one would have thought that show would be what it became, and television isn't given that kind of chance anymore.
It's always interesting for me to watch the pilot of an established show because you see how the writers and actors weren't really sure what the show was and what the dynamics were. If you look at the pilot for 'Seinfeld,' for example, it's practically unrecognizable.
Seinfeld [show] had been so huge for me. It was one of those things where I discovered Seinfeld really early and was making sure everyone I knew was watching it. I would tape it on VHS and show it to people that hadn't seen the show yet.
The pilot of 'Seinfeld' was made and dropped. 'Seinfeld' was not supposed to go to series.
Given a chance, I would love to host a television show as I have good communication skills and am fluent in Hindi, English and Urdu.
You can say that all you want, but even in the little time that I've been in this industry, I've learned that it isn't exactly what you expect, so you've got to have a level head. I thought people would dig it. I thought people would enjoy it. It's AMC. I thought people would be fans. But, I did not think we would be the best new show on television.
When I was 17, my mum thought it would be a good idea to compete in a modeling television show. It was hard for me to book jobs in Australia at this time, being that my look was so different. Even though I didn't win, I was given a modeling contract with New York Models, so I flew to New York as soon as the show was finished.
The only way I would go back to hosting would be if it were something entirely new. It would prevent me from wanting to host a standard-fare kind of talk show.
'The Cosby Show' - no one thought there's doctors and lawyers who are married and live in brownstones! Back then no one would have thought we would have an African-American president. They would have laughed in your face.
To me, in retrospect, it was amazing that 'Seinfeld' was a show that had such mass appeal. At first it was a disaster in the ratings, but then it became a cultural phenomenon. I don't know if that's possible anymore, but I don't try for that.
We were 15 minutes into it and nothing was happening; I thought, well, that's not going to work. Then all of a sudden everything clicked. I don't know how long it took us, but I would just show up at Alison's [McGhee] office. She would type and we'd just kick it back and forth. Writing is so scary for me, such a lonely endeavor, and it became a wonderful thing to show up and have somebody else go through it with me. It was actually a wonderful experience.
We simply thought that we would be considerably poorer in Europe if we didn't have the sacred buildings of earlier epochs. It's still possible to experience the Gothic period, not to mention the Romantic. Only nothing remains of the industrial age. So we thought that our photos would give the viewer the chance to go back to a time that is gone forever.
The fact 'Twin Peaks' had a life at all took most of us in the cast by surprise. We thought it would be too unusual for network television. The original intention was that it would be a two-hour movie. If the network didn't want to pick it up as a series, it could just show that. But ABC took a chance.
When I was a little boy, I thought when I grew up I would talk Yiddish. I thought little kids talked English, but when they became adults, they would talk Yiddish like the adults did. There would be no reason to talk English anymore, because we would have made it.
I wanted to be a visual artist, but I realized I was more affected by what I read than by what I saw. I would go to a show at a museum and look at a painting and say, 'Oh I wish I owned that,' and that would be the end of my relationship with a painting. With a short story I would read or with an author I would discover I could be haunted. It would affect my mood and affect the way that I saw the world. I thought, wow, it would be amazing to be able to do that.
The quest for love became all consuming to the point where I would give up shooting the cover of 'Glamour' magazine to go be with someone I was crazy about. I look back on that now and I would never let my own child do that, but I don't regret it.
I did a terrible television pilot that was so badly written and dumb that it became a turning point for me and I decided that I would never accept a job just because I needed the money.
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