AICN’s Quint was in the audience at the Santa Barbara Film Festival’s directors panel - with Brad Bird, Jason Reitman, Julian Schnabel, Judd Apatow, Craig Gillespie and Adam Shankman in attendance - and came back with a bag of great quotes (read his entire post here).

Some highlights worth reprinting:

1. OMG! “Brad Bird hates cripples!”

This, of course, was said in jest. Quint reports:

(Brad Bird) said … there’s nothing like seeing a movie in a 1500 seater and because of laws stating that every 300 seats of a theater has to be handicapped accessible theater owners have stopped building those huge houses and just have theaters that seat 300 or under so they don’t have to invest in ramps and elevators. (Jason) Reitman jumped in saying that he can’t believe how explosive this is… Brad Bird hates cripples! Bird turned red, but laughed saying that he certainly doesn’t. Reitman then said, “Those damned handicapped people are screwing up our theatrical experience!”
Everybody had a laugh, but Bird was quick to say that it should be both handicap accessible and huge auditoriums.

2. Is it possible that Peter Bart doesn’t know the difference between “satire” and “parody”?

(Peter) Bart then turned to Judd Apatow and said he loved WALK HARD, but … “Did we learn a lesson with Walk Hard that satire doesn’t work?” Apatow grabbed the mic and growled, “What the fuck are you talking about!?! 4.1 million opening weekend is a lot of money!”…. He then just stopped and stared Bart in the eye and said, “Why are you humiliating me, Peter? I came here to get my ass kissed hard! Two out of three is fine!”

“Walk Hard” of course is a parody, not a satire. Apatow and Kasdan’s previous effort, “The TV Set” is a satire.

3. Introduce a new word to your vocabulary: “Schnabelicious”

(Julian) Schnabel pleaded to those on the panel that have influence of the youth of today to stop the usage of the word “awesome.” That spawned a conversation of what was wrong with the word and what could replace it. Bird’s suggestion was “Schnabelicious.”

I think Bird’s suggestion is awesome!

4. Brad Bird’s marxist analysis of animation, realism and demography.

The question of why animation was always aimed at children (citing the great adult use of it in PERSEPOLIS recently) came up and Brad Bird answered that there’s a line determining how realistic the movement in animation can be. Once you go for a good realistic movement then the budget grows at an alarming rate and in order to make your money back from that you have to aim it at the most profitable (ie family) demographic.

5. Judd Apatow reveals the gruesome truth behind the studios hidden agenda regarding writers and residuals.

A WGA member in the audience asked about the strike and specifically what the directors on the panel thought of the deal the DGA struck with the Producers. Apatow said, as a producer, that “the studios, for want of a better word, want to rape the writers.” He then said that TV writers, who are lucky to get to write 2 episodes of a show every season, get a percentage of reruns that equals to about $18000. What the studios are trying to do is move reruns to online completely and the deal they offered was zero money unless it ran for a certain amount of time, then they’d get a flat fee of $1200, which is taking $16,800 from their pockets, if not the full $18000 if they decide to pull the episode out of rotation a day before they hit that wall.
He said that bottom line the studios are just trying to use this as a way to take money away from the writers, not just deny them future revenues. His words were: “studios are just trying to shuffle the money back from the writers to their pockets.”

This is some powerful and stirring commentary, coming from Hollywood’s golden boy.

Read on, in Quint’s report, to learn whom did Julian Schnabel call a nazi, what’s his response to the Sean Young hackle, whad did Apatow do when asked by Bill Clinton to see “Knocked Up”, and other schnabelicious sound-bites.