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Who really said it

Millions Are To Be Grabbed Out Here, and Your Only Competition Is Idiots

Attributed to Herman J. Mankiewicz 1897–1953 · American screenwriter, co-author of Citizen Kane
Attributed In copyright

Mankiewicz sent it as a telegram to Ben Hecht, luring him from Broadway to Paramount, and the full text runs: “Will you accept three hundred per week to work for Paramount Pictures. All expenses paid. The three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.” The catch is the evidence. Quote Investigator finds the only primary record in Hecht’s own 1954 memoir ↗, A Child of the Century — and Mankiewicz had died in March 1953, a year before it was published. The wire itself is not known to survive. As QI puts it, “the accuracy of the colorful text appears to depend on the veracity of Hecht”, who was a magnificent storyteller by trade. Even the date is unsettled: Hecht says spring 1925, while later scholarship and Wikipedia both say 1926.

Last verified 3 Oct 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“Millions Are To Be Grabbed Out Here, and Your Only Competition Is Idiots” Herman J. Mankiewicz (attributed) — “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around.” Telegram to Ben Hecht, as printed in Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century (1954), p. 466. Sources date it 1925 or 1926; the telegram is not known to survive. Via quotle.info · Verbatim: “Will you accept three hundred per week to work for Paramount Pictures. All expenses paid. The three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don't let this get around.”

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by The estate of Ben Hecht and the original publisher, Simon and Schuster). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Herman J. Mankiewicz — American screenwriter, co-author of Citizen Kane. Theme: "Millions Are To Be Grabbed Out Here, and Your Only Competition Is Idiots". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

The source

Earliest documented
A Child of the Century, by Ben Hecht
Published
1954 (Simon and Schuster, New York) — the year after Mankiewicz’s death
Locator
Quote page 466, per Quote Investigator, which verified it with scans
Form
A Western Union telegram from Mankiewicz to Hecht, printed from memory decades later by its recipient
Date
Disputed — “this spring day in 1925” per Hecht; 1926 per Gorbach (2019) and Wikipedia

The telegram he delivered on this spring day in 1925 came from the unknown Scythian wastes of Hollywood, Calif. It read, “Will you accept three hundred per week to work for Paramount Pictures. All expenses paid. The three hundred is peanuts. Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.” — “Herman Mankiewicz.” Quote page 466

Hecht’s own framing, as transcribed by Quote Investigator from the 1954 book ↗. Note that the famous sentence is the fourth of five, and the funniest line may be the last one: having described a gold rush, Mankiewicz asks Hecht to keep it quiet. The boldface marks the portion that travelled.

Quote Investigator: Millions Are To Be Grabbed Out Here, and Your Only Competition Is Idiots

How we verified this

  • Quote Investigator’s investigation ↗ gives the full telegram and names its primary evidence: A Child of the Century by Ben Hecht, 1954, Simon and Schuster, New York, quote page 466, marked “Verified with scans”. QI’s conclusion is quoted in full on this page rather than paraphrased, because the hedge is the finding.
  • QI also documents the line escaping into print almost immediately. A review of Hecht’s memoir — Van Allen Bradley, “Turbulent Autobiography: Ben Hecht’s Book Is Gay, Bitter, Vulgar”, The Sunday Press (Binghamton, New York), 27 June 1954, page 10-B, column 2 — reprinted the two sentences and attributed them vaguely to “a film magnate”, not to Mankiewicz by name.
  • The second retelling QI cites is Mark Jacobson, “New York You Oughta Be in Pictures”, New York Magazine, 29 December 1975, quote page 36, which prints the wire in capitals and dates it 1925 — following Hecht.
  • Wikiquote’s Mankiewicz page ↗ carries the telegram but dates it 1926, citing Julien Gorbach, The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist (Purdue University Press, 2019), page 92. That citation is reported here as Wikiquote gives it; the Gorbach book was not consulted directly.
  • Wikipedia’s article on Hecht ↗ also puts the telegram in 1926, and its article on Mankiewicz ↗ has him working as assistant theater editor at The New York Times from 1923 to 1926 and moving to Hollywood around 1926, on a Paramount salary of $400 a week. Those dates and Hecht’s “spring 1925” cannot both be right; this page therefore reports the conflict instead of resolving it.
In copyright

In copyright in the United States. The telegram was a private message, never published at the time, and the only text of it reaches us through Ben Hecht’s A Child of the Century, copyright 1954 — well after the 1931 public-domain cutoff. Mankiewicz died in 1953, but a private wire is not made public domain by its sender’s death, and no one has produced the original. Quoted here briefly for comment and criticism.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What to watch for

Nobody else is credited with this one — it is Mankiewicz’s in every retelling. The problems are of a different kind: a single witness, a contested year, and a wording that is usually cut down to its best half.

Ben Hecht, the recipient and the only witness Documented but unverified

Everything known about this telegram comes from the man it was sent to, writing roughly three decades later, after the sender was dead. QI says so plainly ↗: “the accuracy of the colorful text appears to depend on the veracity of Hecht”, and it does not know whether the wire survives in any collection. Hecht was a screenwriter and a memoirist with a well-earned reputation for improving a story.

“1925” versus “1926” Date drift

Hecht dates it to “this spring day in 1925” and New York Magazine followed him in 1975. But Wikiquote dates it 1926 on Gorbach’s authority ↗, Wikipedia’s Hecht article says 1926 ↗, and Hecht’s first screen credit, Underworld, is 1927. Treat any single year you see attached to this telegram as unsettled.

The one-sentence version Context stripped

What gets quoted is “millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots” — usually without “Don’t let this get around”, which is the joke, and without the salary offer that makes it a job pitch rather than an aphorism. Transcriptions also wobble: Wikiquote’s has “three hundred dollars per week to work for Paramount?” where Hecht has “three hundred per week to work for Paramount Pictures.”

QI’s verdict ↗: the telegram is documented only in Hecht’s 1954 memoir, so its accuracy rests on Hecht. Nothing contradicts it, and nothing independently confirms it — which is why this page says attributed and not verified.

Context

Why it mattered

In the mid-1920s the serious writers were in New York and the money was in California, and the two facts were felt as an insult. Mankiewicz — a Berlin correspondent turned theatre editor turned New Yorker critic — had gone west and was cheerfully reporting back that the industry was rich and the competition was weak. The telegram is the whole Broadway-versus-Hollywood attitude of the decade compressed into five sentences, which is exactly why historians keep reaching for it.

It also worked. Hecht went, wrote Underworld, and won the first Academy Award for Best Original Story in 1929 for it. He spent the rest of his life being well paid for films he publicly despised — the same memoir that preserves this telegram calls the movies “an eruption of trash that has lamed the American mind”. Mankiewicz, for his part, got to the top of Paramount’s scenario department and then to Citizen Kane, and died at 55.

Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.

Read the full story

The date problem is worth sitting with, because it is the kind of thing that gets quietly smoothed over. Hecht’s memoir says the messenger arrived on a spring day in 1925. Wikipedia’s account of Mankiewicz has him as assistant theater editor at The New York Times from 1923 to 1926, writing The New Yorker’s theatre column during 1925 and early 1926, and moving to Hollywood around 1926 after Walter Wanger offered him a contract. A telegram sent from “the unknown Scythian wastes of Hollywood” in spring 1925 does not fit that chronology. This page does not pick a winner, because no source consulted here reconciles them; it just declines to print one year as a fact.

The other honest gap: Quote Investigator says it does not know whether the physical telegram is held in any memorabilia collection. If it is, this page is wrong to hedge and should be corrected. Until then, a line that every Hollywood history quotes rests on one man’s recollection of a piece of paper nobody can produce.

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

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Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

Quote Origin: Millions Are To Be Grabbed Out Here…quoteinvestigator.com

The full telegram, the three documented appearances, and the hedge about Hecht’s reliability.
A Child of the Century, by Ben Hechtarchive.org

A copy of the memoir that is the sole source. Note this is a New American Library printing, so its pagination differs from the Simon and Schuster first edition QI cites.
Herman J. Mankiewicz — quotationsen.wikiquote.org

Carries the telegram dated 1926, citing Gorbach’s 2019 biography of Hecht, page 92.
Herman J. Mankiewiczen.wikipedia.org

The sender: New York Times theatre desk to Paramount scenario chief to Citizen Kane.
Ben Hechten.wikipedia.org

The recipient and the only witness. Dates the telegram 1926 and quotes its text.
Underworld (1927)en.wikipedia.org

What Hecht wrote once he took the offer, and won the first Original Story Oscar for.

The author

About Herman J. Mankiewicz

Herman J. Mankiewicz

1897–1953 · American screenwriter, co-author of Citizen Kane

Herman Jacob Mankiewicz (7 November 1897 – 5 March 1953) was an American journalist turned screenwriter. He was assistant theater editor at The New York Times from 1923 to 1926 and The New Yorker’s first regular theatre critic, before going to Hollywood and ending 1927 as head of Paramount’s scenario department. He co-wrote Citizen Kane (1941) with Orson Welles and shared the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay for it; his other credits include Dinner at Eight and The Pride of the Yankees, and he contributed to The Wizard of Oz. He died in Los Angeles at 55 of uremic poisoning brought on by liver failure.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

The earliest documented appearance (Chicago)

Ben Hecht, A Child of the Century (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1954), 466, printing a telegram from Herman Mankiewicz. Cited in Quote Investigator, “Quote Origin: Millions Are To Be Grabbed Out Here, and Your Only Competition Is Idiots,” 25 September 2014, which verified the page with scans. For the 1926 dating see Wikiquote’s citation of Julien Gorbach, The Notorious Ben Hecht (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2019), 92.

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Millions Are To Be Grabbed Out Here, and Your Only Competition Is Idiots’?” Last verified 3 Oct 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/millions-are-to-be-grabbed-out-here-and-your-only/

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