Matthew Hickman: Independent Screenwriting Fellowship Winner [Part 2]
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 2:
“Hello?”
“Matthew?” It was a British accent. He’s from England. Is it him? It has to be him.
“This is Cassian.”
My God, it’s him. Now what do I say? I’d been waiting for a phone call like this for years, and now it came at the most inexplicable, surreal moment imaginable. Before I had a chance to say much else, he led off by saying,
“You’re the one.”
Was this real life, or was I David After Dentist, and the fever was really and truly taking over? By this point I was frantically tapping my girlfriend, and was fairly certain that I was actually conscious — that everything I had hoped for since I first made the decision to pursue my unrealistic hankering to be a writer as a twenty-four year old law school dropout was finally, actually happening. How did this moment happen? How did I become a writer after all? There’s a great bit of dialog in The Sun Also Rises that perfectly captures my sentiments about it.
“Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”
In my mind, I became a writer the moment I decided to be one. Looking back on it now, this was probably good for my sanity and self-esteem, but the outside world was in no way obliged to agree with me, and for a long time it refused to do just that. Many friends were sympathetic toward my ambition in a diminutive way. There were many moments when I could almost read the thought clouds hanging over people’s heads. Isn’t that sweet? He’s following his dreams. Even my own mother feared I was making a huge mistake by turning my back on a secure career path to get an hourly-wage job and pursue a very nebulous one in California.
For four years, all I could do was assure them that I knew what I was doing, that everything would work out in the end. But would it? In the meantime, many of my friends were becoming corporate lawyers, college professors, and cardiology residents. This was the largest gamble I’d ever made, and if it didn’t pay off, there was no back-up plan for all that lost time and potential professional development. At a certain point, I realized, there would be no cutting my losses. I would die a writer, whether or not I ever made a cent from being one.
After speaking with Cassian that night, I’ve been feeling a lot more of the “suddenly,” part in Hemingway’s statement. I’m suddenly being treated like a writer, although in my mind I’ve been one for a lot longer than a few weeks. It was frustrating to see myself one way for so long while most other people looked at me as something else, but I think that’s a very necessary test for any young artist. When confronted with dissonance in what the world thinks of you and what you believe yourself to be, do you have the tenacity to fight back? I think a large part of whatever success I have had so far is in being too dumb to know when to stop.
What’s even stranger than all that for me to consider is how easily this all could have not happened.
Tomorrow in Part 3, Matthew talks about how it did happen.
For Part 1, go here.
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