Alternative Film Guide

May 1, 2008, is the deadline to submit entries for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ 23rd annual Don and Gee Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting competition.
As per the Academy’s press release, the competition "is open to screenwriters who have not earned more than $5,000 writing for film or television. Entry scripts must be [...]

I caught Jellyfish (Meduzot in Hebrew), which opens in New York tomorrow and in Los Angeles on April 25, at the 2007 AFI FEST.
What I liked best about this quirky look at several Tel Aviv denizens was the humorous, naturalistic touch of husband-and-wife team of writers-turned-filmmakers Etgar Keret and Shira Geffen (above).
Without any fanfare, [...]

In April, the Writers Guild Foundation will salute David Chase, creator of the The Sopranos, and Budd Schulberg, Academy Award and WGA Award winner for On the Waterfront, and the son of Paramount honcho B.P. Schulberg.
The On the Waterfront screening will also feature a q&a with Schulberg, who will turning 94 this Thursday, March 27.
What [...]

The New York Post is one of the vilest rags around, but Michael Riedel’s March 12 column on Edward Albee, who’s turning 80 today, is well worth checking out.
A couple of Albee quotes, remembering his lover of 35 years, artist Jonathan Thomas, who died of cancer in 2005.
"I learned something important about dying, about a [...]

Screenwriter Malvin Wald, who received an Academy Award nomination for The Naked City (right), Jules Dassin’s 1948 mix of neo-realism and film noir, died Thursday at a hospital in the Los Angeles suburb of Sherman Oaks. He was 90.
The Brooklyn native (born in 1917) wrote several feature-film screenplays and adaptations, most notably helping to transfer [...]

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is currently accepting submissions for the 2008 Don and Gee Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting competition. Up to five US$30,000 fellowships will be awarded through the program later this year.
As per the Academy’s press release, "application forms may be downloaded from the Academy’s Web site and mailed with [...]

Earlier today, nearly 120 nominees and special award winners for the 2008 Academy Awards gathered at The Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Oscar Nominees Luncheon.
At the luncheon, Academy President Sid Ganis handed each nominee an official certificate of nomination.
If the WGA strike ends by [...]

Rebecca Winters Keegan in Time:
"Despite rumors and media reports of a deal struck over the weekend, WGA presidents Patric Verrone and Michael Winship e-mailed their members Sunday, saying, ‘We are still in talks and do not yet have a contract… Picketing will resume on Monday.’ The Alliance of Motion Picture Television Producers (AMPTP) also waved [...]

More than 100 Academy Award nominees will get together at noon on Monday, February 4, at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences annual Nominees Luncheon. (See Oscar Luncheon 2008 - Photos. See more Oscar luncheon 2008 photos.)
From the leading actor and actress categories, George Clooney, [...]

The University of Southern California Libraries have awarded the 2007 Scripter Award, given to the year’s best page-to-screen adaptation, to Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, a violent thriller based on a novel by Pulitzer Prize-winner Cormac McCarthy. The Scripter goes to both the author of the original story and the adapters.
The [...]

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that seven new screenwriters have won the 22nd Don and Gee Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting. Each writer or writing team will receive a $30,000 prize, the first installment of which will be distributed at a gala dinner at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills [...]

Orson Welles‘ screenwriting Oscar for Citizen Kane, considered by some the greatest story ever told on film, is set to be auctioned by its current owner, the Los Angeles-based charity Dax Foundation, next December.
Produced and directed by Welles, the 1941 classic also received nominations for best picture and best director, but lost in both [...]

Front row (from left): Herbert Biberman, attorneys Martin Popper and Robert W. Kenny, Albert Maltz, Lester Cole. Middle row: Dalton Trumbo, John Howard Lawson, Alvah Bessie, Samuel Ornitz. Back row: Ring Lardner Jr., Edward Dmytryk, Adrian Scott.
Ed Rampell, author of Progressive Hollywood: A People’s Film History of the United States, remembers the Hollywood Ten at [...]

Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich, written by 1992 Nicholl fellow Susannah Grant.
 
Ten scripts have been selected as finalists for the 22nd annual Don and Gee Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting, presented by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The finalists, selected from 5,050 scripts submitted for this year’s competition., will be judged by the [...]

Louis Black revisits Robert Thom in The Austin Chronicle:
"The camera heads up the stairs, past artwork to shelves of clothes neatly laid out, mostly sweaters except for a row of riding boots on the bottom. It continues across the room to display a case full of equestrian medals and statues and then along a wall [...]

Neither the stars nor the director showed up for the "Great To Be Nominated" Bugsy screening held this past Monday at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences‘ Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. Screenwriter James Toback, however, was there, and so was cinematographer Allen Daviau.
Next in line in the "Great To Be Nominated" [...]

Bernard Gordon, a blacklisted screenwriter during the McCarthy era and a leader of the protest against the honorary Oscar awarded director (and informant) Elia Kazan, died Friday, May 11, at his home in the Hollywood Hills after a long battle with bone cancer. He was 88.
Gordon was born on Oct. 29, 1918, in New Britain, [...]

Satirical novelist Kurt Vonnegut Jr, author of the bestselling anti-war novel Slaughterhouse-Five, died Wednesday, April 11. According to his wife, photographer Jill Krementz, Vonnegut had suffered brain injuries after a fall at his Manhattan home weeks ago.
The Indianapolis-born (on Nov. 11, 1922) author, a “fourth-generation German-American religious skeptic Freethinker,” wrote about 25 novels, in addition [...]

© Allan Ellenberger Collection
 
June Mathis. The name means nothing to most of today’s filmgoers and to the vast majority of self-proclaimed film historians. Yet, nearly nine decades ago June Mathis was, next to Mary Pickford, one of the two most powerful women in Hollywood. “She fairly lives and breathes motion pictures,” reported the New York [...]

In 1936, five years after her screen debut, 19-year-old Danielle Darrieux began worrying about when-oh-when she’d receive an Honorary Oscar for her body of work. Several decades and more than 100 film roles later, she finally came to the realization that life could be merveilleuse even without an Oscar.
At the 1936 Academy Award ceremony, D. [...]

The populist Little Miss Sunshine and the absurd The Departed were given, respectively, best original screenplay (Michael Arndt) and best adapted screenplay trophies (William Monahan) at the Writers Guild of America (WGA) awards ceremony last night.
Amy Berg’s screenplay for Deliver Us from Evil, about a pedophilic priest, received the WGA Award for best documentary screenplay.
Earlier [...]

Via The Guardian:
"On most Fridays for years I have had breakfast with a group of friends in Notting Hill. Occasionally we would persuade a couple of younger women to join us. Mostly, though, it was only older men — actors, writers, theatre and film directors — people I’d known since I first began to work [...]

The Writers Guild of America (WGA) has announced its ten feature-film nominees.
Among them are, in the original screenplay category, Guillermo Arriaga for Babel, Michael Arndt for Little Miss Sunshine, and Peter Morgan — who has topped most U.S. critics’ lists — for The Queen.
In the adapted screenplay category, among the nominees are William Monahan [...]

59th Writers Guild of America (WGA) Awards - 2006
The 59th WGA Award television and radio nominations were announced on December 13, 2006. The WGA Award motion picture nominations were announced on January 11, 2007.
The 59th WGA Award winners were announced at joint ceremonies at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles and at [...]

"The nugget of the idea behind [Das Leben der Anderen / The Lives of] Others came to the writer[-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck] in 1997 when he was a desperate first-year student at Munich Film School. The deadline was looming to deliver his 12th proposal to his film professor, who demanded that his pupils hand [...]