Jason Reitman, Sheldon Turner, and author Walter Kirn won USC's 2010 Scripter Award for the socially conscious comedy drama Up in the Air this past Saturday. The Scripter Award goes both to the screenwriter(s) of an adapted screenplay from a literary work and to the author of the source material.
Directed by Reitman, and starring George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, and Anna Kendrick, Up in the Air tells the story of a corporate-downsizing expert who spends most of his time either at airports or among the clouds. Competing against Up in the Air were Crazy Heart, District 9, An Education, and Precious. The last two Scripter Award winners, Slumdog Millionaire (2009) and No Country for Old Men (2008), went on to win Oscars for best adapted screenplay.
Another award winner was Eric Roth, who received the Literary Achievement Award for his body of work, which includes Oscar-winning box-office hit Forrest Gump; Oscar nominees The Insider, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and Munich; and bombs such as The Concorde … Airport '79 and Kevin Costner's The Postman.
In addition to acknowledging about two dozen collaborators on the writing of the Up in the Air screenplay, former USC student Reitman remarked in his acceptance speech that his father Ivan Reitman used the university's library as a stand-in for the New York Public Library while shooting Ghostbusters in 1984.
Photo: George Clooney, Jason Reitman while filming Up in the Air (Dale Robinette / Paramount)