CELEBRATE the WRITERS BEHIND ACADEMY AWARD MOVIES

By Nick Rolon

                                                                                                         

 Let’s roll out the red carpet for writers. Tonight, the 91^st Academy Awards will be held at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, California (8pm EST), broadcast live on ABC. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences will honor the best films of 2018 with Oscars awarded in 24 categories. For the first time in over three decades, the ceremony will have no host. Yes, we will see many actors and actresses, directors, and producers walk the stage to receive their Oscar but behind each Academy Award movie is outstanding writing. There would be no Academy Award winning movies without great writers.

Screenwriters bring the script to life using original works or adaptations from books. The writers capture the movement, actions, expressions, and dialogue of the characters on screen. Of the eight Best Picture nominations, seven have been nominated for Best Writing in adapted or original screen play.

Since the inaugural Academy Awards in 1928, more than sixty Best Picture winners derive from literature whether it be a novel, biography, play, or short story. Thirty-seven Best Picture winners originated from books including Kramer vs. Kramer, The Sound Of Music, One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and The Godfather. Twelve Years a Slave, an autobiography published in 1853 and written by Solomon Northrup, who was kidnapped and put to work on plantations in Louisiana for 12 years, won the Best Picture Oscar in 2014.

The first Oscar awards for writing were given in 1940 (Original Story) to Lewis R. Foster for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and (Screenplay) to Sidney Howard  for Gone With The Wind. Frances Marion was the first female writer to win an Academy Award in 1931. Ben Affleck is the youngest writer, at the age of 25 for Good Will Hunting, he co-wrote the screenplay with Matt Damon. In 2009, Geoffrey Fletcher was the first African American to win a Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay) award for the movie Precious and in 2017, Jordan Peele was the first African American to win for Best Writing (Original Screenplay) for Get Out.

The written words behind these great movies have inspired us during our most challenging historical and personal times including the Great Depression (The Grapes of Wrath), the Civil Rights Movement (Selma), Space Exploration (First Man). They gave us triumph in sports (Rocky), and hope (It’s a Wonderful Life). The movies have provided us with a moment to escape and be entertained. The written words brought to life by the actors/actresses inspire us with understanding, comfort, determination, and good will.

Tonight, make a bowl of popcorn, relax watching the 91^st annual Academy Awards, and give thanks to the writers who made it all possible.

 Below is a list of the 2018 Best Picture Nominees and the respective Screenwriters:  

Best Picture Nominee	Screenwriter(s)	Notes
Black Panther	Ryan Coogler/Joe Robert Cole	Adapted from the comic books by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby Nominated for Best Writing- Adapted Screenplay
Bohemian Rhapsody	Anthony McCarten	Movie name from the song made popular by the British rock band Queen in 1975
The Favourite	Deborah Davis/Tony McNamara	The written script began over 20 years ago and finally becoming an Oscar nominated film in 2018. Nominated for Best Writing- Original Screenplay
Green Book	Peter Farrelly, Nick Vallelonga, and Brian Currie	Inspired by a true story with the written script based on interviews and letters by family members Nominated for Best Writing- Original Screenplay
Roma	Alfonso Cuaron	Alfonso chose to withhold the script from many of the actors so that none of the cast members would know where the film was headed. Nominated for Best Writing-Original Screenplay
A Star is Born	Bradley Cooper, Eric Roth, Will Fetters	A remake from the original movie and script in 1937 Nominated for Best Writing -Adapted Screenplay
Blackkklansman	Spike Lee, Kevin Wilmott, David Rabinowitz, Charlie  Wachtel	Spike Lee also directed the movie based on the 2014 memoir of Ron Stallworth. Nominated for Best Writing- Adapted Screenplay
Vice	Adam McKay	Adam McKay also directed the movie which follows the path of former Vice President, Dick Cheney. Nominated for Best Writing- Original Screenplay

   

                           

INSPIRATION

Here is a rerun of a post from 2013 by one of our much-loved and now departed members. We miss you, Alex. Your presence is always felt.

By Alex Raley

We look for inspiration when we write.  We look for inspiration when we write. Often it comes out of the blue or from the pleasant and interesting things going on around us. A couple months ago, I found myself with my head against the wall waiting for the 911 folks to arrive and wondered why I had put myself in that situation. In the hospital and on my way to recovery, I began to think of all the experiences a hospital brings: some debilitating, some embarrassing, and some just downright nasty. With the right attitude they can be funny. I began to think poetry as soon as I settled down in hospital routine (meals to the minute, vital signs as soon as you fall asleep, the day’s date with nurse and nurse tech names, shift changes with new names, morning doctor visits. I imaged everything poetically, including the 911 activity. When not interrupted by hospital routine, I was constructing poems, poems much too bawdy for a blog but poems that will eventually see the light of day. Does that seem odd?

 Do not let experiences pass by you. Even the most unusual or gruesome can be an inspiration to write. I had never thought of gruesome as an inspiration, but I cannot tell you how my mind raced once I wandered into the groove. Now that I am at home I need to hit the computer and put those bawdy poems to paper.

HERE AGAIN for the FIRST TIME

By Kasie Whitener

Poetry readings need to take place in a coffee house. There’s a consistency in coffee houses that enables the work, that breaks open the caged hipster in us all, that unbinds our artistic sensibilities and makes us willing to listen. Willing to be changed.

Everything about the place is familiar though I’ve only been here once. There’s something almost cliché about a coffee house in an old Colonial on a college campus. Dark corners and nooks where students huddle together over textbooks and lidded cups. There’s an age and creak to the stairs. An unfulfilled ambition in the artwork on the walls.

I’m here by invitation to a weekly meet-up in Columbia but it could be any campus in the world, any coffee house, anywhere, any time. Nostalgia overwhelms me; I want a cigarette and a spiral notebook and a pencil. There are unwritten things inside me pressing to the surface.

As the singer/songwriter strums his tunes, I feel the simplicity of them invade me. And I am once again, opening like a moonflower, to the possibility of change. He sings about coming home. About losing something that seemed small at the time but since then has been indicative of a much bigger loss. About an airline pilot’s constant flight.

The word distance takes on new meaning.

Across the room, I catch my poet friend’s eye and he smiles, cheeks rosy from the cold, satisfaction beaming from him.

Mindgravy is a weekly poetry reading and open microphone event at Cool Beans brought to the Columbia arts community by Al Black, an Indiana native with a Southern writer’s heart. He’s compelling in verse and presence and the room at Cool Beans in its familiarity is a welcoming place to find yourself quietly waiting to be changed.

Partitioning the room are heavy sliding doors that stick and groan and resist the push and pull of people slipping in and out in various attempts of subtlety and respect. I leaned to the man next to me, a regular, and said, “Are the doors always a distraction?”

“Every week,” he said, with an amused smile, “Part of the charm.”

Al read a new poem, one he first asked the man on my left permission to share. It was about a series of visits with the man and how Al had watched his friend work through the process of his father slowly dying.

“Daddy is comfortable,” the man would tell Al and Al put it in the poem as the refrain of grief and acceptance.

Then the same man stood to finish the night with a flute to his lips and played the most tender dirge I’ve ever heard. Quiet and shimmering with so many tears already shed and dried and gone but not forgotten. I felt grateful. I thanked him.

What a gift to feel the camaraderie and friendship, the empathy and passion, the love in the room at Mindgravy. Thanks, Al, for inviting me. I look forward to returning.

The Latest Addition

Meet a New SCWA Columbia II Blogger

EL OCHIIS

El is a recent transplant to Columbia, SC, having relocated from New York/New Jersey to attend classes towards a second, advanced degree at USC.   

She earned a BA Degree in English, studied art in Paris and Athens, traveled abroad, married, divorced, then took a hiatus from creative writing and graduate school, to rear two offspring. Putting her writing on hold, she focused on earning a paycheck to pay the mortgage and keep the lights on. As a result she spent a considerable amount of time as a freelance and contract writer for New York advertising, marketing and public relations firms, however she vowed to get back to writing stories. 

After returning to storytelling, El has won various accolades for her writing, including First Prize in Adventure for a Screenplay in a New a York Screenwriting Contest; Quarter Finalist in an Annual Screenwriting and Fiction Contest for a short story; and a poem about a famous street in NYC, in song format, won Honorable Mention at the Grand Ole Opry in Songwriting (no, she does not know how a song about NYC won in a country music competition).

El's first blog post on this page follows.

WRITING IS DANGEROUS

By El Ochiis

Whenever, as a young person who was always protesting some egregious injustice against citizens, I was detained and asked if I’d ever been arrested, I would use satire in the form of Dante’s levels through hell, from his Inferno or I would respond: “Which time?” Moments after an officer would get a glint in his eyes, thinking he’d caught a harden criminal, I’d add: “Fighting for the right to vote in Alabama; Protesting against redlining in Bedford Stuyvesant – civil disobedience is a very serious offense?”  When viewed as a dissident, for simply exercising natural rights, disarming government sponsored opposition by using “metaphors or allegories “ from great writing, was the only defense I had – a way to telling them that my only crime seemed to have been the ability to think, a skill I hadn’t found in a majority’s job description.

I had utilized Dante’s witticism when I was politely removed from a scene at the Fontana di Trevi in Rome.  A man had grabbed my rear end and I had promptly cold-cocked him with a bottle of cheap, French wine. 

“You a hit him with a bottle a wine, not even a Italian wine,” scolded Polizia di Stato, Gregorio La Trosciscana, smiling, after he had escorted me to the passenger side of his little European patrol car and began navigating his way through the narrow streets.

I wasn’t at all offended at being interned in a patrol vehicle, I had run out of money and needed a ride to a chapel, about an hour away, to meet Umberto, an artist friend who was working on the restoration of artwork.

“You a ever been in a trouble in a Europe before?” 

“Yes, I received a Level Eight, Bolgia #2, but I thought it should have been Level Nine, Bolgia #13,” I answered, locking eyes with Gregorio, then, looking away, covering my mouth to hide a sly grin.

“Lasciate ogni speranza, o voi che entrate qui,” chimed Gregorio after he had hopped out of the car and held the driver’s side door open for me as if he’d just chauffeured me to a fine restaurant. Fear gripped me, had I gone too far?  Was he actually going to throw me in jail? “You don’t a know it in Italiano, no?”  Gregorio had strutted up the steps of an old building with Italian writing, holding open, yet another door. 

 “Know, know what?” I asked, biting my nails and climbing the steps with guarded trepidation. “Abandon all hope, you who enter here?”  “Wow, a cop who, not only can read, but quote from Dante’s Inferno, impressive.”  Gregorio smiled, loosening the bland, government issued tie around his neck, as he retrieved a chair, then motioned for me to sit. “Where are we, by the way?” I asked, staring up at an ornate ceiling. 

“This is where my grandfather was detained by Polizia, my grandfather was, how do you say, protester, see that room, he had a old printer press – he was jailed for writing a dangerous words, under Mussolini.”

“Wow, what a great man, you must have been proud of him?” 

 “When you no have food to eat, you no so proud.” Gregorio leaned in close to my face: “I want to go to a university so bad, but my family no money, I take care family, I a read everything, I learn a English – but I no write – Dante, he say the root of fraud – linguistic sin – linguistic sin is greater than murder, I think I agree, no?”

“But writing can dismantle power; writing can change lives, especially lives of those without a voice.” “Why do you think they jailed your grandfather?”  

“I know so, so I read; I think, but I don’t write thoughts.”

“But, think about it, if the woman who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin didn’t, slaves might never have been freed in America – it was rumored that her writing caused the spark that ignited the American Civil War; Charles Dickens not only gave the world a window into the underclass and the poverty stricken in London but, attacked the judicial system for its discrimination against the poor; you know how Americans got federal food safety laws?”  

Gregorio shook his head front side to side, then took a pencil and paper and began jotting down everything I said.  “Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle”– it described the deplorable working conditions, the diseased, rotten and contaminated meat, shocking the American public.” Chinua Achebe told us what the impact of colonization was on African culture in Things Fall Apart.” I was nearly out of breath. “Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience stated that the best government is the one that governs the least; Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man argued that political revolution is a justifiable action when the government fails to perform its duty of protecting the natural rights of its citizen.”  

Gregorio bought me dinner before dropping me off at the Chapel, giving me thumbs up as he meandered his way, once again, through the ever-crowded city of Rome.

Often times when I sit down to write or teach writing, I think about that impassioned conversation I had had with Gregorio and watching Umberto hang atop a ladder in chapels surrounded by the works of artistic giants. Words are like an arrow leaving a bow; once shot, you can’t take it back.  So, as writers, we should, not only write well, but we should write with purpose. Our goal should be to try and do what Baldwin said writing ought to do: “Write in order to change the world, knowing perfectly well that you probably can’t, but also knowing that literature is indispensable to the world. In some way, your aspirations and concern for a single man in fact do begin to change the world.” Writing is hard; life is hell, but, good writing, now that’s dangerously divine.