Set-Up & Payoff
The Elusive Oscar Trophy
If winter and spring are the set-up of the screenwriting season, middle summer is the pay-off. All the work and tending in the cold brings fruit. Seeing how how things have already started out in reaping 2009, it appears as though the climax will be another shuddering standstill.
The Nichol Fellowship in screenwriting is the most prestigious in the world. There is no doubt. It’s put on by the Oscar Foundation. This year they selected 321 from more than 6,000 entries. That’s little better than 5% of entries making it to the quarterfinal rounds. There are all sorts of umbrage to be taken from the relativity of winning/losing these contests. Look at a list of winners: very few of those scripts were made. It’s not a guaranteed job or anything. Even if you win or advance, there is still a hell of a lot of work to be done in getting there. No one’s bed is made in the contest.
The email came out yesterday, July 28th. Already the screenwriting blogs and message boards have blown up with people trying to make sense of it. Why so few selected? They bandy back and forth about that. I’m relatively uninterested in making sense of any of why my screenplay wasn’t included in those 321 Quarter Finalists though. I’m seething, as deep and rhetorically as I usually do: I’m seething quietly, not talking about.
In the moments at stop lights and while at work doing mundane tasks I’m wondering when I’ll get the decoder ring. One of these days someone will ask me why I waste my time, and I won’t have a very good answer for them.
I’ll have spent hundreds of dollars, and for what? Some days it feels like I’m writing my own disappointing conclusion. Still, I’ll be up tomorrow morning too early, in too hot and stuffy a room that’s too small. And I’ll hammer it out. I’ll hammer more of the words they don’t seem to want. I’ve known no other course.
Posted: July 29th, 2009 under Blog.
Tags: disappointment, erick, mertz, nichol fellowship, oscar, screenwriting