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If You Don’t Want To Read About My Middle-of-the-Road Good News, Skip This Post

July 27th, 2004

I found out today I have made it to the quarter-finals of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences screenwriting fellowship program - The Nicholl Fellowship.

The Nicholl Fellowship basically invites anyone who hasn’t had huge monetary success in the area of screenwriting for Film & TV to send in a screenplay, apply, and try to snag one of the 5 spots they allocate to the winning screenplays/writers. The winners get a fellowship check for $30,000 and their names and scripts are provided to the Hollywood community. (This means agents for those that don’t have them, possible writing gigs and a potential script sale. Worst case scenario: meetings and a lot of free bottled water.)

Per the letter I received today, this year’s fellowship received about 6,100 entries, and they whittled that down to about 300 scripts for the quarter finals. So yes, a long way to go to the very end, but simply getting this far is a nice little ego-boost as well as it makes me feel not-so-bad about the twelve months it took me to rewrite the script I submitted.

If I don’t go any further than the quarter finals, at least I’ll be able to use this tidbit of trivia to get myself additional scoops of tuna from late-night workers at my local Subway.

(Ed note: Please search “quarterfinals” and “Nicholl Fellowship” to find the other 299 blogs being written by the other 299 quarterfinalists, and their identical post to this one, on their front page.)

Posted under Me, Screenwriting. |

Congratulations Pauly, that is quite an achievement!

Enjoy the extra tuna and good luck in the next round!

Comment by Hilary — July 27, 2004 @ 6:15 pm

WOOOOHOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!! That is really fantastic, and though I haven’t read the script, I feel sure that it is worthy of winning. I’m damn sure of it.

Comment by Lena — July 27, 2004 @ 8:14 pm

Good luck, Pauly. I guess we can all say “we knew you when!”

Comment by Jeff B — July 27, 2004 @ 8:56 pm

Congratulations!!! That’s fantastic. What are the chances of us getting a preview of the script… or an excerpt?

Comment by Ady — July 27, 2004 @ 9:08 pm

Thanks for the kind words, people!

As for an excerpt from the script — I can’t do that but I can tell you that it’s a Tim Burton-esque style story that takes place in a 1984 type society and involves, yes you guessed it, a magical fish.

Comment by Pauly D — July 27, 2004 @ 9:39 pm