By Scott Essman.
“Very often screenwriters are like shadows passing through the history of cinema.”
Jean-Claude Carriere
The Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting is an international screenwriting competition established to identify and encourage talented new screenwriters. The Academy has 17 different branches, but screenwriting is the only branch with a dedicated fellowship.
“Over the years, The Academy Nicholl Fellowship has become the screenwriting prize,” Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs tells us, “opening doors for emerging writers and providing a meaningful stipend that allows them the time and space to write. Each winner will receive a $35,000 prize, with the understanding that he or she will complete a new feature film screenplay during their fellowship year. The Academy seeks to cultivate the next generation of filmmakers who represent the future of our industry.”
Since 2013, the Nicholl Fellowship committee has selected excerpts from the winning screenplays to be read aloud by a group of Hollywood actors at the Academy’s prestigious Samuel Goldwyn Theater. Screenwriter-director Rodrigo Garcia, who attended the Nicholl ceremony and presided over live readings, reflects on the nature of contemporary cinema. “The screenplay is still the number one building block. You go to see these movies that can have all the visual effects in the world, and when the script doesn’t work, the movies don’t work. It doesn’t matter whether it is digital this or that if the story isn’t good and compelling. You can run as fast as you can with all the money, with all the visual effects, with all the billboards, but if the story is not good, it’s going to suck. I need to feel a personal connection with the story and the themes.”
Rodrigo Garcia at the Academy Nicholl Fellowships Screenwriting Awards Live Read
The five 2014-2015 fellows — who were selected from 10 global finalists by the 16 members of the Nicholl Fellowships committee — include a wide range of screenwriters.
Melissa Iqbal
Melissa Iqbal
Melissa Iqbal, from London, United Kingdom, submitted The Death Engine, chosen as a winner from among 7511 entries which were scrutinized by a team of 200 readers (145 of them Oscar nominees) drawn from every branch of the Academy. “I graduated in March from the National Film & Television School. The script that I chose is my grad script from school. I listened to my friend who said, ‘Enter!’… I wasn’t going to, because it is one of the more expensive screenwriting competitions to enter!”
The Death Engine is a sci-fi love story. Iqbal spent weeks notetaking and constructing an outline, before writing ten pages a day until the script was complete. “I re-drafted about five times. It was definitely challenging: I had to work on it and refine it, and that was quite a process. It’s set in a world where people can live forever, and when you live too long, a disease called The Melancholia sets in, which is a sort of depression that affects our main character, who has been living for a very long time. And within this world, death is taboo, so what she does is she calls The Death Engine, which is a company that will sell you your perfect death for the right price. Basically, her agent falls in love with her and wants to re-invigorate her desire to live, rather than kill her.”
In the future, Iqbal sees herself engaging in fantasy and medieval material, though she says “I’m quite happy in sci-fi at the moment.”
Scott Miles and Alisha Brophy
Scott Miles
Alisha Brody
Scott Miles from Austin, Texas, and his writing partner Alisha Brophy from Silver Lake, Los Angeles, were chosen for their script United States of Fuckin’ Awesome, where Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and Ben Franklin misplace the Declaration of Independence after a night of debauchery.
Both Scott and Alisha worked for six months, at nights and weekends, to finish their 99 page script. Of their unique partnership, Alisha says, “Scott writes really funny jokes, and then I laugh at them, and it’s the perfect team.”
“There’s a little more to it than that,” Scott says. “We pretty much write everything together at the same time. We outline together and then write pages together. We don’t do the trading back and forth. Since I’m in Texas and she’s in Los Angeles, we do everything over Skype. And we just go scene by scene, page by page together.”
Scott and Miles make use of computer software called Writer Duet, which allows two writers to work on the same script at the same time. “You get that real time feedback,” Miles explains, “especially with comedy, to know if the joke worked or not.”
Sallie West
Sallie West
Sallie West of Charleston, South Carolina, wrote the screenplay Moonflower. An experienced writer, this was her first attempt at writing a screenplay, and she greatly appreciated the award. “It was the best night of my life. I met an incredibly talented group of people, and it has just been overwhelmingly fun. I researched the form [and] applied what I had done in my job for 25 years as a writer to the screenplay.”
Writing in fits and starts, it took Sallie a year and a half to finish her script. West describes 24-hour writing binges followed by not writing for long periods. “It’s just crazy because you get lost in the story,”.
Sam Baron
Sam Baron
Sam Baron, from Cambridge, United Kingdom, was honored for his script The Science of Love and Laughter, a very personal story which is based on events from Sam’s own life. “They always say, ‘Write what you know. I’d started a whole bunch of other screenplays prior to this, half drafts of this and failed drafts of that, but this was the first one where I felt such a strong personal connection to it. I think that was the most important thing for me in writing this project: I had that core idea and personal connection to the story that I really wanted to get right.”
After two years spent on the script, sometimes writing on his bus rides home from working full-time as a production assistant, and many drafts, Baron finally felt like he had arrived in a useful place with the material. “I knew where the finish line was in terms of the emotional response and where it needed to be in terms of the script. I had to keep doing it and doing it again until it was there. It was probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever done, at least in a creative sense. I didn’t want the script to be out there in the world unless it was as good as I wanted it to be. There was a period of several months where I put it in a drawer and I said, ‘To hell with that one! That’s just not working, and it’s too deep, and it’s too complex.’ But when you have such a personal connection to a story, you can’t leave it in a drawer forever; you inevitably come back to it.”
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 2015 Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting has opened its website to new submissions, with a regular deadline of April 10th 2015, and a late deadline of May 1st 2015.
http://www.oscars.org/nicholl
