Wilder later reflected, "In this Donner Pass expedition known as Hollywood, many fall by the wayside. People eat people. Very few make it. Lately I've been going to more funerals than openings of pictures. Sometimes you have a funeral and an opening on the same day, and you don't feel very good when you see a comedy after you've put somebody to rest or watched the Neptune Society blow his ashes into the Pacific Ocean ... Sometimes I feel the way you feel when you find yourself at a dinner party with an uncongenial group of people and you say, 'I've got a great story, but I'm not going to tell it to them tonight. I'm not interested in entertaining them.' A lot of energy goes into it, and sometimes it doesn't seem as if it's worth the trouble. I've been doing it now for over 50 years."