Filmmaking dynasties don’t get much more prestigious than
Samuel Goldwyn’s. Samuel Goldwyn Jr. still runs the company
his father built, grandson Tony Goldwyn directs and acts, and
together they run the annual Samuel Goldwyn Writing Awards.
This year’s Samuel Goldwyn Award is being given today at 4
p.m. in the Alumni Center’s James West Auditorium. Expected
to attend are agents, producers and actors, not to mention the
Goldwyns. Even Tony Goldwyn, who acted in “Ghost” and
directed “A Walk on the Moon,” is a judge in this
year’s awards.
“It is a family affair,” Goldwyn Jr. said. “We
all think writing is the guts of the movie.”
While most awards, such as the Oscars, make a big deal about
actors or directors, the Goldwyn Awards specifically highlight the
architect of films, namely the screenwriter.
“If you look at the movies that work, it’s the
script,” Goldwyn Jr. said. “The story’s the
thing. You’ll never get away from it. … Bad direction can
hurt a good script, but even that sometimes can’t destroy a
good story.”
The awards are for all University of California students, but
this year only UCLA students became finalists, the first year that
has happened.
“UCLA was a film school where I had seen a lot of the
movies and liked a lot of the movies by its graduates,” said
finalist Chuck Bigelow, a UCLA screenwriting graduate student.
“It’s no accident that the finalists are from UCLA. I
think it’s the best screenwriting school in the
world.”
Bigelow refers to UCLA alumni such as Paul Schrader (“Taxi
Driver”), Ed Solomon (“Men in Black”), and
Francis Ford Coppola (“The Godfather”). In fact,
Coppola won the Goldwyn Award when he was a student in 1962, and it
helped him launch his career, especially in getting the writing gig
for “Patton,” which won him his first Oscar.
Goldwyn Jr. says that 82 percent of the winners are making their
living through some form of writing. Those are pretty good numbers
in the competitive profession.
“There are thousands of scripts written every year,”
Bigelow said. “Because of the vast oversupply of movie
scripts, only a tiny fraction ever gets attention and only a
fraction of that gets made into movies.”
Winning the Goldwyn Award gives a writer an edge in the
industry. Among other things, Goldwyn Jr. typically buys the ad
space for entire back pages of Variety and The Hollywood Reporter
to congratulate the finalists by name.
“You immediately get an agent and people reading your
script,” said Allison Anders, the 1986 Goldwyn Award winner,
UCLA alumna, and now a Goldwyn judge.
Anders at the time was juggling raising two children by herself
and applied to the award as a way to make ends meet. This
year’s award-winner gets $10,000 and the honorable mentions
get at least $1000. Yet Anders cautions against thinking the award
is the end-all be-all for getting a career.
“I would go into these meetings and (producers) would say,
“˜We love your script. Love it, love it. We’re not going
to make that kind of movie here,'” Anders said.
“Or they’d say, “˜Gosh, I hope to see this film
made because I’d love to see this on the screen.’ But
not with their money.”
“(That’s) not to say this is your passport to fame,
success and riches, but this is to say some people who spent their
lives writing have the opinion that you should think about doing it
yourself,” Goldwyn Jr. added.
The finalists themselves don’t seem to be too cutthroat.
In fact, their attitude toward writing is similar to that of
Anders, which is writers should write about things that excite
them.
“If it turns out what you’ve written wins something,
well, OK,” Bigelow said. “You’re better off
writing what you feel deeply about.”
This attitude may be a credit to the kind of writers
UCLA’s School of Theater, Film and Television attracts. It
also may reflect the quality of teaching, as both Bigelow and
Anders cite the school’s screenwriting professor Hal Ackerman
as a key figure in developing their screenplays.
Since 1955, the awards have given upcoming screenwriters a face.
The Goldwyn name is not only a touchstone of old Hollywood (for
example, MGM stands for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer), but a famous name
that will help usher in a new generation of talent.
“Over the years, the award has produced so many
distinguished people … it’s accepted that there’s a
level of quality with the scripts that are chosen,” Goldwyn
Jr. said.