Actors Zoey Deutch, Gugu Mbatha-Raw, Rodrigo Santoro and Vince Vaughn will perform a live reading of selected scenes from this year’s five winning scripts at the 2017 Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting Awards Presentation & Live Read.
The event will take place on Thursday, November 2, at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. Effie Brown (“Dear White People”) returns to produce, and Rodrigo Garcia (“Mother and Child”) returns to direct for the fifth consecutive year.
Presenters for the evening’s program are five members of the Academy Nicholl Fellowships Committee: producer Julia Chasman (“25th Hour”), writer Larry Karaszewski (“The People vs. O.J. Simpson”) animation director Jennifer Yuh Nelson (“Kung Fu Panda 3”), writer Misan Sagay (“Belle”) and producer Robert Shapiro (“Empire of the Sun”).
Earlier this month four individual screenwriters and one writing team were selected from 7,102 entries as winners of the 2017 Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting competition. The winners are (listed alphabetically by author):
Vigil Chime, “Bring Back Girl” (New York, NY)
SJ Inwards, “Jellyfish Summer” (Marina del Rey, CA)
Max Lance and Jen Bailey, “The Queen of Sleaze” (Los Angeles, CA)
KG Rockmaker, “Last Days of Winter” (Montclair, NJ)
Cesar Vitale, “The Great Nothing” (Santos, São Paulo, Brazil)
Each of the winners will receive a $35,000 prize, the first installment of which will be distributed at the Live Read event. Since 1986, 152 Nicholl fellowships have been awarded.
Fellowships are presented with the understanding that the recipients will each complete a feature-length screenplay during their fellowship year.
