"This biography, written with a novelist’s stylization, was an incendiary moment in western culture. Ironically, it became the weapon that would win the cultural wars for dispossessed black, urban America. It’s impossible to think of what street culture of white Hollywood would look like without it. Slim is the most influential writer in English since Shakespeare."

"Well, the first movie I ever saw was Wizard of Oz, and that was when I kind of realized that movies — almost in a way — existed, that this other world of movies could be my playground too, and that was definitely probably the movie that fascinated me and entranced me with, hence, Hollywood. Not to be cheesy about it."

"Early on, surprisingly enough, Italian cinema broke the Hollywood barrier by making simple, down-to-earth stories. Most of the films were made without live sound but dubbed later by experts. It meant that noisy, unblimped cameras would give flexibility to image-making. Stories like Bicycle Thieves, Rome Open City, and Paisan all fell into that category."

"There were a number of key films that taught me that great and startling cinema could come from outside Europe and away from Hollywood. I found Touki bouki (with its anarchic, vigorous style, brilliant colors and sounds, and charismatic heroine) completely surprising when I first saw it—and, more generally, it stands for the eye-opening cinema of Senegal."

"It's like Easy Rider/Raging Bull meets Being There. Hollywood in the ’70s and ’80s is explored through the eyes of a strange idiot savant named Vikar, a man who loves movies so much he has Elizabeth Taylor and Monty Clift tattooed on the back of his head. This is a journey into the movies as religious quest."