Inspiration comes in strange forms, and the Samuel Goldwyn Writing Awards chose to validate an array of idiosyncratic ideas, from inept frontier doctors to spider private investigators. The awards were given out Monday at the UCLA Faculty Center.
All University of California students are eligible to apply to the annual contest. First prize is awarded $15,000, second prize $7,500, third prize $4,000 and two honorable mentions are awarded $2,000 and $1,000 respectively. Past award-winners include Francis Ford Coppola (“The Godfather”) and Eric Roth (“The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”). The judges for the competition this year included Pete Hammond, a Movieline film critic, Tom Rothman, chairman of TriStar Productions, and Jennifer O’Kieffe, 2007 first-prize winner. All three judges were at the awards ceremony to congratulate the winners and deliver remarks.
First prize was awarded to Rocco Pucillo, a UCLA graduate student in screenwriting. Second prize went to Jared Robbins, a UC Riverside graduate student in screenwriting. Third place was shared among three winners, Jeffrey Baker, a UCLA playwriting graduate student, Sean Harrigan, a screenwriting alumnus from UC Irvine, and Turner Hay, a screenwriting alumnus from UCLA.
The winning screenplay by Rocco Pucillo was “Inspector Sun and the Curse of the Black Widow,” an animated mystery in the style of Agatha Christie’s “Murder on the Orient Express,” with a twist: All the characters are bugs, each with their own unique function – the titular inspector is a spider. Pucillo was inspired to write the script by an incident on a plane trip to Paris.
“They were serving food, and when I lifted the lid there was a cockroach,” Pucillo said. “It scurried off into a crack in the plane … so I started wondering where it went, and this idea of a whole ’30s bar scene under the plane came to be.”
For Pucillo, the award means validation for a risky career change. Before attending graduate school for screenwriting, he had worked production on a number of films, including “The Simpsons Movie,” during which he was attending professional school at UCLA. Two years ago he quit and applied to the screenwriting program at UCLA.
“I quit a lot of good jobs,” Pucillo said. “So it’s nice to get this sort of sign that it may have been the right decision.”
Validation was important for all of the award winners, as many of them are just graduating and on the cusp of entering the professional world. For Hay, who wrote “Broken Gray,” a Texas-based gangster film with southern elements derived from Hay’s upbringing in Virginia, the win holds some personal value.
“It was the first script I’d ever written at UCLA, so it means a lot,” Hay said. “And it’s exciting. I’m graduating, I’m heading out into the world, and as they said, it opens doors.”
For Baker, who has a play opening in London, the award is another feather in the cap.
“It’s a nice pat on the back, you know,” Baker said. “It’s meaningful, it’s motivation to keep writing.”
His screenplay was “Dr. Acker’s English Elixir,” a lighthearted tale set in the American frontier of a snake oil salesman who unwittingly stumbles upon a formula that has the power to cure, and has to pretend to have actual medical expertise.
“The idea came to me because I had had medical issues,” Baker said. “And in the hospital I’d always ask: ‘What if this were the frontier? What if?’ They never liked that.”
The judges were especially pleased by this sort of inquisitive originality.
“Every one of you had a unique voice,” O’Kieffe said at the ceremony. “This award changed my life, it started my career, but remember to always to do this kind of original writing.”
Hammond was enthusiastic about the quality of the films from the point of view of a film critic.
“It’s great to have gotten to see the process from the very beginning,” Hammond said. “I could see any of these screenplays as movies.”
Rothman concluded the ceremony with tempered encouragement, offering words of advice about the industry.
“It’s far from over,” he said. “It’s a mile, not a dash, but at least you’re in the race.”