"Back in high school, my best friend gave me a tattered paperback of Boy Wonder by the late/great James Robert Baker. We’d been into making movies, writing stories, and living imaginatively since kindergarten, and this gonzo, out-of-print novel about a young-madman-turned-Hollywood-super-producer had it all. Boy Wonder is the perfect summer read, a fount of crazed inspiration, laugh-out-loud funny, and to this day, one of the most seminal reading experiences I’ve had."

"Former President Carter has been an idol of mine my whole life. I chose the ‘White House Diary,’ because he is so detailed, nuanced and candid about his time in office that it actually reads like you accidentally stumbled upon your teenaged son’s incredibly and shockingly advanced diary while he is at school—except your teenage is son is former President Jimmy Carter and he was 86 years old when he wrote this book. You are going to be so proud of him"

"Former President Carter has been an idol of mine my whole life. I chose the “White House Diary,” because he is so detailed, nuanced and candid about his time in office that it actually reads like you accidentally stumbled upon your teenaged son’s incredibly and shockingly advanced diary while he is at school—except your teenage is son is former President Jimmy Carter and he was 86 years old when he wrote this book. You are going to be so proud of him."

"Hey, storytellers: if you’re adapting a classic, this is film school 101. Never before or since (though I love Black Swan for trying) has anyone achieved what Powell and Pressburger did here, in terms of character and theme. Add the beautiful work of Jack Cardiff and you achieve something of which I, personally, can only hope to replicate a glimmer as a visual storyteller in comics and animation: Technicolor atmosphere that conveys immediate emotion and also has a lasting impact."

"This was the first in a series of books that feature a mouse, a vain cat, and a wombat. Everything the wombat says is nonsense (“Oh wonderful, fish—my favorite fruit.”), and it made me howl with laughter as a kid. I was brought up in East Africa, and was at school with all the international kids. We’d all been given our copies of A.A.Milne and Dr. Seuss, but people know those books. The Muddleheaded Wombat deserves a place among them."

"Natalie Portman plays a young teenage pop artist, Celeste, who starts making music after surviving a school shooting. Then it becomes a film about what the pop industry can do to people, what not to do within it, and about messiah complexes. It’s a really over-the-top, sinister film – it becomes almost alien. But it also reminds you to keep your ego in check, pull your baseball cap down, don’t get lost in the madness, and just keep working."

"In film school, I took a critical-studies course on Bresson. He's a filmmaker I'm certain I would never have experienced if I hadn't been forced to. And I really fell in love. This is my favorite of his films. There's a distance in his filmmaking, an artifice in his staging, that makes it feel mythic. This story felt so familiar to me, like it echoed my own teenage experience of being a girl, the terror of sex, puberty, love, industrialization, cultural apathy."

"I wrote a grad school research paper on Cassavetes. I was so intoxicated by his approach and filmmaking philosophy that I got lost in in my research and turned the paper in six months late. Fortunately, I still passed my class. There are so many amazing moments in this film, but I don’t think I’ll ever forget watching the spaghetti scene for the first time. It’s disorienting, human, and absolutely riveting. Cassavetes reminds us that people are impulsive, generous, complicated, self-conscious beings."