Hollywood is a great place if you’re an orange. Fred Allen
Because then you have a peel?
Oranges thrive in the sunny climate of Southern California?
The city we normally think of as Hollywood was originally all orange groves.
Right. Nice climate, boring culture. (Remember, Allen made the remark in the first half of the 20th century, when the big cities of the East (and maybe Chicago too) were still considered the “interesting” places to live. California was frequently just seen as a veneer of movie-star glamour overlaid on a fundamentally boring factory town for mass entertainment.)
Variation:
California is a fine place to live - if you happen to be an orange. Fred Allen
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLJ,GGLJ:2006-06,GGLJ:en&q="California+is+a+fine+place+to+live--if+you+happen+to+be+an+orange."
Fred Allen was not a friend of Hollywood. I scrolled down the list of quotes provided by justqwerty and sure enough, there it was:
You can take all the sincerity in Hollywood, place it in the navel of a fruit fly and still have room enough for three caraway seeds and a producer’s heart.
I’m pretty sure it means hollywood is a great place if you’re an orange because it will squeeze you dry.
Allen also famously said, “An associate producer is the only guy in Hollywood who will associate with a producer.”