"She’s brilliant beyond brilliant. I was reading this at this black hair salon while I was getting my braids done so I felt like the best of all of America. Ephron has a way with language and jokes. She’s very much a writer who uses her personal life to fuel her work. It’s really funny. Women who are older, people ignore their contributions, but people always craved her writing and her take on the world, and it’s a testament to her skills as a writer, and how she could get you into her world and make you want to be a part of it and keep reading."

"I had reservations about choosing this film because the women in it are somewhat victimized, but I hugely admire Melville’s work, and this is a new discovery. Le doulos is particularly terse and gloomy in black and white, stripped of any fat whatsoever. There’s a complicated plot that’s almost impossible (for me) to follow, but it all boils down to the question of who can be trusted. The men all pretty much dress alike and come to seem interchangeable. The violence is abrupt and shocking, and the story is full of reversals. Most of all, I love the ending, where Belmondo’s character forces us to reinterpret everything we’ve just seen in a new light."

"The original was called Pollyanna, and then they did a remake of the film, called Polly, and it had Phylicia Rashad in it. It was probably one of the first musical films I had ever seen that was fully… Pretty much almost fully cast of Black men and women and children. And I think it was one of the reasons I was like, “Oh, I can do musicals. I can be in them. This is cool.” And I love the music. I still remember the songs, and it’s been a while since I’ve watched it. I have the VHS of it. I don’t even know if they do it on DVD. I don’t know if you can even get it on iTunes. But I loved it."

"Because that’s what I’ve got on my mind, at the top of the list is an Oscar Micheaux film. Oscar Micheaux was just a legendary figure, especially among African-Americans. And fortunately, because we’ve been able to recover his silent films, he now has a place in general film history. Within Our Gates, like many of his films, really deliberately and explicitly takes up questions of racial politics in America. The film is about a woman named Sylvia Landry (Evelyn Preer) who is a teacher and she goes up north to try to raise money for this small black school, the Piney Woods School, which was an actual full black school that still exists. We experience what she does in terms of the feeling of isolation that many people who moved from the south to the north felt. She’s escaping a really traumatic family history of violence in the south. The film represents lynching and the attempted rape of black women. Micheaux was just really out there in terms of showing the ugliest aspects of racism in America. He had very clear ideas about the way forward and how education uplifts the right living. These are the things that he felt were keys to black success. He’s a filmmaker whose films still spark really powerful debates today. Amazingly, this film had been lost for decades, and it was found in an archive in Spain. It had been there for decades. It was a title that just wasn’t recognizable to scholars who know Micheaux’s work. In the 1990s, the film was repatriated to the United States and restored. The inner titles had to be translated back from Spanish into English. In addition, it’s just the visual and the narrative power of film itself. It’s a real lesson for us to work hard to try to recover these lost works."

"Confessions Of A Sex Kitten was so major. Eartha Kitt is a huge possibility idol for me. The thing about women like Eartha Kitt, Lena Horne, and Diahann Carroll — these black artists in the ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s — they were making a way out of no way. Eartha’s book, the first paragraph of it I was bawling. It’s just so deep! Her love life I can so relate to as a trans woman. She dated a lot of white men, who dated her privately. They would neverdate her openly or marry her. That’s something I can certainly relate to as a trans woman. She is brilliant and amazing and sexy and smart and political! She was blacklisted for like 10 years. Eartha Kitt is everything, may she rest in peace."