Diablo Cody
Brooke Busey-Maurio (born June 14, 1978), better known by the pen name Diablo Cody, is an American writer, director, and producer. She first became known for her candid memoir, "" (2005), and the blog that preceded it. Later, Cody achieved critical acclaim for her debut feature film script, "Juno" (2007), winning awards such as the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, the BAFTA Award for Best Original Screenplay, the Independent Spirit Award for Best First Screenplay, and the Writers Guild of America Award for Best Original Screenplay.
David Lynch
At the Pennsylvania Academy Lynch made his first short film, which was titled "Six Men Getting Sick (Six Times)" (1967). He had first come up with the idea when he developed a wish to see his paintings move, and he subsequently began discussing the idea of creating an animation with an artist named Bruce Samuelson. When this project never came about, Lynch decided to work on a film alone, and so purchased the cheapest 16mm camera that he could find in order to do so. Taking one of the abandoned upper rooms of the Academy as a working space, he spent $150 – which at the time he felt to be a lot of money – to produce "Six Men Getting Sick". Describing the work as "57 seconds of growth and fire, and three seconds of vomit", Lynch played the film on a loop at the Academy's annual end-of-year exhibit, where it shared joint first prize with a painting by Noel Mahaffey. This led to a commission from one of his fellow students, the wealthy H. Barton Wasserman, who offered him $1000 to create a film installation in his home. Spending $478.28 of that on purchasing the second-hand Bolex camera "of [his] dreams", Lynch produced a new animated short, but upon getting the film developed, realized that the result was simply a blurred, frameless print. As he would later relate, "So I called up Bart [Wasserman] and said, 'Bart, the film is a disaster. The camera was broken and what I've done hasn't turned out.' And he said, 'Don't worry, David, take the rest of the money and make something else for me. Just give me a print.' End of story."
Using this leftover money, Lynch decided to experiment on making a work that was a mix of animation with live action, producing a four-minute short called "The Alphabet" (1968). The film starred Lynch's wife Peggy as a character known as The Girl, who chants the alphabet to a series of images of horses before dying at the end by hemorrhaging blood all over her bed sheets. Adding a sound effect, Lynch used a broken Uher tape recorder to record the sound of his baby daughter Jennifer crying, creating a distorted sound that Lynch felt to be particularly effective. Later describing what had inspired him, Lynch stated that "Peggy's niece was having a bad dream one night and was saying the alphabet in her sleep in a tormented way. So that's sort of what started "The Alphabet" going. The rest of it was just subconscious."