Matthew Hickman: Independent Screenwriting Fellowship Winner [Part 3]

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 3:

For a long time, I stayed away from the Black List. Back when Franklin first opened the site up to aspiring writers, I uploaded a script which got me the only real meeting I have even taken — a story replete with former Navy SEALs seeking revenge for dead wives, Sinoloan drug lords, and shoot-outs at baseball stadiums in San Diego. It was a ridiculous Taken rip-off (one many of us have written) although at the time I was convinced it was brilliant. Somewhat unsurprisingly, the Black List’s reviewer hammered it, giving me a 4/10. My pride told me that they didn’t know good writing when they saw it, and my ego told me that I didn’t need some website loaded with Netflix algorithms and trendy vowelless spelling to help me find my way. I carried on and continued writing in relative anonymity.

Half a year later, a funny thing happened. I entered three scripts into the Nicholl Fellowship competition, and one of them advanced to the quarterfinals. It wasn’t my brilliant Taken ripoff that sent me there — that script languished in the middle of the pack — instead it was my first true, complete script, written long before the others, that got me there. This script was also a smaller, much less commercial story, a drama about a kid who felt lost and headed into the wilderness of North Dakota, the kind of thing I was much more naturally inclined to write. In a way, they were re-inforcing what the Black List was trying to tell me, a truism that I’d heard in many other places but insisted on learning the hard way: don’t chase what the industry is doing. Write what you want to. More than that, write what you absolutely have to. That’s the only thing that’s going to get you anywhere.

I decided to give the Black List another shot. I uploaded that first script that I wrote to the website, and the reviewers were much kinder to it. Sensing a trend, I uploaded the most recent script I had completed, very much in the same vein of ordinary people and the dramas of their lives, a hopelessly small movie, and waited. When the review came back, I was pleasantly delighted. They gave it a 9/10. I felt like I had been validated in some way, and was finally listening to what many of my readers had been trying to tell me. Stop writing what everyone else is. Focus on the stories only you can tell — it’s the only market where you don’t have any competition.

Not so long after that I got an e-mail about Cassian’s fellowship. I entered it almost as a lark, not really expecting any kind of result. I got the news that I was a finalist on my birthday, and spent the next week trying to craft the most important five hundred words of my life. I wrote about four thousand words before cutting my personal statement back down to those final three paragraphs, and I waited. Franklin told us Cassian would make a decision by the end of December, but it seemed likely I’d hear something before that, as Sundance is only a few weeks into January. Remember, I told myself. The medium is the message. If it’s an e-mail, go pour yourself a drink. If it’s a phone call, you’re in.

So when the evening of Friday the 13th arrived, an awful day to that point, all I had to do was look at the area code when my phone rang before my mind turned toward this. It was a number from Beverly Hills, almost the last neighborhood in Los Angeles where I would have expected a phone call on a Friday evening. He told me I had won, and we had a great conversation for about ten or fifteen minutes that I wish I could remember more of. I hung up the phone, called my mother and a few friends, then laid back on the couch and began sobbing for a while. I know that sounds like an odd reaction to some pretty wonderful news, but let me try to explain.

Let’s save that explanation for tomorrow and Part 4.

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

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