Realizing that you're losing President Barack Obama is like being peacefully asleep and suddenly being jerked awake with a gasp. And you're just sitting there, too shaken to go back to sleep and too tired to move. It's a paralyzing fear.

“In any type of writing program, they say to write about what you know,” John Singleton told Walter Mosley during a conversation following a 25th-anniversary screening of his classic film debut, Boyz n the Hood, in New York in June.