Matthew Hickman: Independent Screenwriting Fellowship Winner [Part 1]
Less than a month ago, there was this announcement:
The Black List and Cassian Elwes have announced the winner of their first Independent Screenwriting Fellowship.
Unrepresented screenwriter Matthew Hickman will attend the upcoming Sundance Film Festival with the producer behind 2013 awards contenders Lee Daniels’ The Butler, All Is Lost, Dallas Buyers Club and many other films.
Hickman was chosen based on his script An Elegy for Evelyn Francis, which was hosted on the Black List website. He beat nine other scripts with indie sensibilities from unrepresented writers with lifetime earnings of less than $5,000.
“I work at a regular job in retail. I don’t have contacts in the movie business,” Hickman said in a statement. “Despite this, I have always hoped that if I wrote stories which were good enough, eventually I would find people who wanted to help me bring them to life. For aspiring writers in my shoes, the Black List is our broadest, most credible link to the people who can do just that. They provide access to the kind of professionals who can help jumpstart a writer’s career, as I have been incredibly fortunate to discover in Cassian Elwes. This fellowship is the greatest opportunity that a writer like me could ask for, and I cannot thank [Black List co-founder] Franklin Leonard and Cassian enough for creating it.”
Elwes, who also spent 15 years arranging financing for nearly 300 films as the head of William Morris Independent, said of Hickman’s script, “I could not get it out of my mind. He wrote something that was both human and real and created a character that actresses will want to play. Matthew is exactly the type of writer I was hoping we would find through the Black List — a new original voice that could benefit from this experience that he will receive in Sundance. I could not be more grateful to the Black List for helping me create this fellowship, and I hope Matthew gets from the experience as much as I know I will.”
Matthew has kindly agreed to write a public journal of his experiences before, during and after the Sundance Film Festival (which begins next week), and allow me to share them with you. Here is Part 1:
It was a Friday night when I got the news. I had a particularly miserable day at work — the kind that drives you to go home, pour a drink, and then fall asleep on the couch without even eating first. Only I couldn’t do that, because once I got home I took my temperature and learned what I had felt all afternoon was no fluke; I was definitely sick. I felt hot, weak, dazed and confused. I told my girlfriend I was going to take a nap on the couch for a few minutes, then pulled a fleece blanket covered in our cat’s hair over me without taking off my work shirt. My best friend, three time zones and two thousand miles away, texted to ask how I was doing. I replied:
“Shitty. A customer died in our parking lot before I came in today. And I’ve got a 100.5 fever.”
That customer’s name was Charles Fox. Fox was the kind of guy who defied easy categorization. I made his acquaintance over several years through his repeated patronage of the UPS Store I work at in Santa Monica. I’m told that many years ago, the West Side was a rough and tumble kind of place. Fox was a holdover from that era, a guy who literally helped rebuild Main Street. He was a relic from the days of rent control, someone who could probably never afford an apartment at market prices in the middle of all the post-production houses and dry bars that now dot the streets he helped modernize.
He had a giant belly, like Santa Claus, and a beard to match, that was stained brown at the corners of his mouth from the packets of menthols perpetually dangling from his shirt pocket. He was nothing if not whatever he felt like being, and he walked into our store on more than one occasion with his shirt unbuttoned to his chest, or even better, all the way, sharing the full glory of his full figure with our other customers. He would walk in our front door unannounced, usually with items that looked like they had been pulled from a thirty-year-old storage unit, and just say one word. “McKinleyville.”
This was my queue to find a suitable box for whatever dusty items he laid on the scale, be it an antique leaf blower, a pile of expired newspaper coupons that you’d be excused for thinking was garbage, or tacky Christmas decor from the Reagan era. He sent these items to his son, who lives in rural Northern California, for God knows what purpose. I gradually evolved from thinking he was nuts to thinking he was a badass. He never questioned our prices and always paid cash, which is more than I can say for many of our more proper customers.
That morning, Friday the 13th, he had a heart attack after leaving the grocery story which anchors our strip mall and died in the driver’s seat of his car. I’ve had people much closer to me than him die in my life, but there was something about the way that he was just carrying on with his normal day when it happened that really bothered me. I know we run around constantly forgetting the fact that one day this will all end, but the rest of that afternoon I was keenly aware of the way a person can exist — and then not — and how odd that is. How unfair that is. Some people have the afterlife waiting for them, I guess. I hope they’re right. I hope Fox did.
I was laying on the couch, trying to persuade myself to stop thinking about the problem of existence that has plagued every man and woman since the dawn of time, the one which no one has ever solved and so it did me no good to consider, when the phone rang. Probably my mother, or Justin, checking up on me. Call them back later. Go away, world. I ignored the phone. It stopped buzzing. Finally, there was silence — but only for a moment. It started ringing again. What’s going on, I wondered. Maybe someone needs something. I hope nobody’s in trouble. I picked up my phone to see who was being so relentless. It was an unrecognized number in Beverly Hills. My mindset instantly shifted. This is it, I thought. It’s him. I answered the phone.
I’ll leave you with that cliffhanger and we’ll pick up with Matthew’s saga tomorrow: His first conversation with Cassian Elwes and his reaction to it. If you have any questions for Matthew, please post in comments and I will forward them to him.
Comment Archive
