Bill Duke

Thank you #LenaWaithe for this great conversation... youtu.be/F89mN-ga2mE?si… @THR @Variety @accesshollywood @latimesent @nytimes @washingtonpost

Legendary Japanese filmmaker AKIRA KUROSAWA with some great advice for writers everywhere.

MARLON BRANDO explains the reason for rejecting his Best Actor Oscar for The Godfather (1972).

In 2018, Stanford professor Matt Abrahams gave a masterclass on why most people fail to communicate well.

Interviewer: “This might be a record… five movies together, top to bottom.” Ryan: “Each time we’ve worked together, he’s been the best person for the job. I got in early, Warren Buffett style.” Michael: “He was the first person to believe in me and see me as a movie star. He gave me confidence at a time when I wasn’t sure where my path was headed.”

In 2007, 35-year-old Elon Musk explained how he chooses multi-billion dollar idea to work on. He revealed: • Why money is a bad goal • Why competition doesn’t matter • How great companies actually scale 12 lessons from young Musk that still feel ahead of 2026:

Steve Jobs gave a 15-minute speech at Stanford in 2005 that still changes lives today: "Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories." Story 1: Connecting the dots "I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months. I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made." Steve shares what happened next: "Because I had dropped out, I decided to take a calligraphy class. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the space between letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh, it all came back to me. It was the first computer with beautiful typography." He reflects: "You can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something: your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path." Story 2: Love and loss "At 30, I got fired from Apple, the company I started. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone. It was devastating. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley." Steve explains what saved him: "But something slowly began to dawn on me, I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over." He shares what came next: "Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again. During the next five years, I started NeXT, started Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple." His advice: "Your work is going to fill a large part of your life. The only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle." Story 3: Death "When I was 17, I read a quote: 'If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right.' Since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: 'If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?' And whenever the answer has been 'No' for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something." Steve shares why death is such a powerful tool: "Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Almost everything, all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure, these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart." He concludes: "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." His final words: "Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."

How Ryan Coogler’s Proximity Media became Hollywood’s most innovative—and bankable—company  For Coogler and partners Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian, ‘Sinners’ was just the beginning. Inside the making of a new entertainment power player. fastcompany.com/91502954/proxi… | @FastCompany

Spring 1992. Steve Jobs stands in front of a room of MBA students at MIT, pitching a computer that almost nobody bought. The company was called NeXT. It sold about 50,000 machines in its entire existence. By every measure, it was a failure. The software inside it became the foundation of every Apple product ever made, and the platform on which the World Wide Web was invented. He's 37. He's been fired from Apple, the company he co-founded. He spends 70 minutes talking. He tells a room full of future consultants that consulting is a waste of talent. "Without owning something over an extended period of time, where one has to see one's recommendations through all action stages and accumulate scar tissue for the mistakes, one learns a fraction of what one can." He compares consulting to looking at a picture of a banana. "You might have a lot of pictures on your wall. You can say, I've worked in bananas, I've worked in peaches, I've worked in grapes. But you never really taste it." He says, "I think everybody lost" about being pushed out of Apple. "I think I lost. And I wanted to spend my life there. I think Apple lost. I think customers lost." Then: "Having said all that, so what? You go on. It's not as bad as a lot of things. Not as bad as losing your arm." He says hardware can never be a lasting competitive advantage. "Hardware churns every 18 months. You can make something one and a half or two times as good as your competitor, and it only lasts six months." But software, he says, is a different game. "You can make something five or even ten times as good as your competitors in software. And it's very, very hard to copy. I watched Microsoft take eight or nine years to catch up with the Mac." Then he makes a claim that almost nobody in the room would have believed: "Object-oriented technology is the biggest technical breakthrough I have seen since the early 80s with graphical user interfaces. And I think it's bigger actually." He was describing NeXTSTEP, the software his "failed" company had built. Object-oriented programming, in plain terms, means building software from reusable building blocks rather than writing everything from scratch. Jobs said developers could build apps on NeXTSTEP in about a third to a quarter of the time it took on other systems. Almost nobody cared. By industry standards, NeXT was a flop. But four years after this talk, Apple was nearly bankrupt. They bought NeXT for $427 million. Jobs came back. NeXTSTEP became Mac OS X in 2001. The same code became iOS when the iPhone launched in 2007. Every Mac, every iPhone, every iPad, every Apple Watch runs on what Jobs was selling while Sun was trying to put him out of business. One more thing. In 1990, at a physics lab in Switzerland, Tim Berners-Lee needed a computer to build a prototype for something he called the World Wide Web. He chose a NeXT. He built the first web browser and the first web server. The internet, as you know it, was born on a machine that couldn't find a market. When asked what he learned from being fired from Apple, Jobs pauses. Then he says, "I now take a longer-term view on people. When I see something not being done right, my first reaction isn't to go fix it. It's to say, we're building a team here, and we're going to do great stuff for the next decade, not just the next year." He was 37, running a company most people thought was dead, standing in a room full of MBA students. Apple is now worth $3.7 trillion. Every dollar of it runs on the thing he built when nobody was watching.

40 years ago, Whitney released “Greatest Love of All”

Steven Spielberg on the Importance of Studying Classic Films & how he made his children watch B&W movies, despite their reluctance.

Do not use your energy to worry. Use your energy to believe, to create, to learn, to think and to grow. —Professor Richard Feynman

Christopher Nolan on THE ODYSSEY: “As a filmmaker, you’re looking for gaps in cinematic culture, things that haven’t been done before. And what I saw is that all of this great mythological cinematic work that I had grown up with.”

Robert Duvall knew The Godfather was special before filming had even wrapped. “About a third of the way through, I thought, ‘We’re really doing something that will live on.’ Coppola worked under studio pressure. We thought he’d get fired but stayed true to his vision.”

How James Brown Started Soul Music.

Apple CEO Tim Cook on retirement rumors. "I can't imagine life without Apple."

The Red Sea parting in The Ten Commandments (1956) took six months and $1 million to film. DeMille’s team flooded a massive tank with 360,000 gallons of water and reversed the footage. Nearly seven decades later, it still looks astonishing.

@rauchg At what email is it best to communicate with you on? Kindly indicate, would like to request meeting.

A younger Ryan Coogler on becoming a filmmaker 📽️🎬🎥

“Greatest Love Of All” by Whitney Houston was released 40 years ago today.

Nvidia CEO received his best career advice from a gardener on long term thinking and doing