John August

Awards

Nicholl screenwriting competition begins

Awards

I have mixed feelings about most screenwriting competitions. On the plus side, they’re an achievable win for beginning writers — but they don’t seem to have much impact on actually getting a career started.

The Nicholl Fellowship is an exception, with a strong track record and good follow-up. And it’s run by the Oscar folks themselves.

The deadline for this year’s competition is May 1, 2009.

From the press release:

> The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is now accepting entries for the 2009 Don and Gee Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting competition. As many as five $30,000 fellowships will be awarded through the program later this year.

> Application forms may be downloaded from the Academy’s Web site and mailed with the other required materials, or they may be completed and submitted online. Rules and details are available at [www.oscars.org/nicholl](http://www.oscars.org/nicholl).

> The Nicholl Fellowships competition is open to any individual who has not earned more than $5,000 from the sale or option of a screenplay or teleplay, or received a fellowship or prize of more than $5,000 that includes a “first look” clause, an option, or any other quid pro quo involving the writer’s work. To enter, writers must submit a completed application form, one copy of their original screenplay in English, and an entry fee of US$30. Entries must be postmarked or submitted online no later than May 1, 2009.

> Fellowships are awarded with the understanding that the recipients will each complete a feature-length screenplay during the fellowship year. The Academy acquires no rights to the works of Nicholl fellows and does not involve itself commercially in any way with their completed scripts.

> Last year’s competition drew more than 5,000 entries. Since the program’s inception in 1985, 108 fellowships have been awarded.

Show your work

Awards, Directors, Rant

For math and science exams, we were often required to “show our work” — not merely to prove we weren’t cheating, but to demonstrate we understood the underlying principles involved.

I’ve been thinking about this in relation to screenwriting. When it comes to making a film, the screenwriter’s craft is probably the most direct and transparent. What did you do? You wrote the script, the 120-or-so pages of Courier around which everything else revolves. Your work is front-and-center.

Cinematographers, production designers and editors can’t point to a product which is “theirs.” In the finished film, the light is lovely; the world is stunning; the pacing is tight. All wonderful accomplishments, but inextricably bound to the work of others. That wonderful light would go unnoticed if it didn’t highlight the sets, and the sets would be meaningless if the editor favored close-ups. And the contribution of directors, who marshall all these forces in addition to actors’ performances, is probably the most difficult to judge.

As a concise, pre-existing document, the screenplay is probably the only thing that can be judged independently of the finished film. Put another way, the screenwriter shows his work.

But the irony is, after the film is made, no one asks to see his work.

Indeed, we award “best screenplay” based on a viewing of the finished film. If the movie was good, we figure the screenplay was probably pretty good. We guess. Even though we don’t need to guess, because the screenplays for “award contender” movies are commonly available. But frankly, it would be a lot of work to read all those screenplays, so we don’t make that a requirement, even for the WGA Awards. The more honest award would be titled, “Best Film based on a Screenplay which was Probably Good, and Presumably Didn’t Get Messed Up by the Director or Others.”

Worse, we also presume that a bad movie came from a bad screenplay. At some point, I’ll fund a comprehensive study of film reviews from the past 10 years, tracking exactly how many times the film’s screenwriter’s name is mentioned. My gut tells me that the writer’s name is three-to-four times more likely to be mentioned in a negative review than a positive one. But I’d love to see data.

In the meantime, screenwriting will continue to be the most transparent and opaque part of moviemaking.

Official badasses

Awards, Follow Up

follow upMTV released its [final list](http://moviesblog.mtv.com/2009/02/09/watch-mtv-news-greatest-badass-panel-name-dirty-harry-the-winner/) of top-ten badasses, which included [contributions by me](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2009/top-10-movie-bad-asses) and a lot of other folks.

1. Dirty Harry – “Dirty Harry”
2. Ellen Ripley – “Alien/Aliens”
3. John McClane – “Die Hard”
4. Mad Max – “Mad Max”
5. Walker – “Point Blank”
6. Sarah Connor – “Terminator”
7. Pike Bishop – “The Wild Bunch”
8. Khan Noonien Singh – “Star Trek”
9. Boba Fett – “Star Wars”
10. John J. Rambo – “First Blood”

I picked 1.5 of those. I count Dirty Harry as a half, because I chose William Munny in Unforgiven, or “really, any Eastwood character.”

I went out of my way to pick characters others might not, so I’m not surprised I didn’t match up better to the final list. I never really understood the Boba Fett-ishization, and while I like John McClane, “badass” isn’t the primary descriptor I’d assign to him. I’m happy to see Sarah Connor included on the list, however. And it’s strange the degree to which Mad Max has disappeared from my film memory bank.

Oscar grouchiness

Awards

Patrick Goldstein’s article about Hollywood’s Oscar obsession is [worth a read](http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/the_big_picture/2008/10/the-bitter-trut.html):

> The Oscars have become a circular firing squad, touted and debated by a small coterie of Oscar publicists, bloggers, marketers, agents, producers and antsy studio executives–all talking to themselves. The public has grown bored with the whole charade. They’d rather be watching “American Idol,” which has far more verve and sense of immediacy. We no longer live in a quality culture, or more accurately, a culture that aspires to quality.

Goldstein wonders what would happen if a major force like Clint Eastwood decided to stop feeding the Oscar delirium. My hunch is that enough critics would applaud the move that he could still get the same awards.

**UPDATE:** I didn’t mean to [Afghan-air-raid](http://news.aol.com/political-machine/2008/10/07/fact-check-mccains-dishonorable-ad/) Goldstein’s quote, but by lopping of his paragraph where I did, the post implied something he didn’t really mean. My apologies.

Goldstein’s quote, continued:

> So when the Oscars are dominated by small movies that rarely had any mass audience impact, they feel marginalized. Over-50 moviegoers still pay attention to awards, but they go see good movies anyway. All they need to hear is some good buzz from their friends and critics and they’re already in line–the costly Oscar marketing hoopla is largely wasted on them.