Matthew Hickman: Independent Screenwriting Fellowship Winner [Part 4]

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 4:

After being in Los Angeles for a while, you adjust yourself to certain realities. You see your family a few times a year. You don’t go out to eat very often. Your life is a little bit of a grind, but it’s all for a higher cause, the reason you’re here to begin with. I was a struggling writer. This was what life should be like. When I first moved here, perhaps I expected a fairy tale like this to happen to me, but part of growing up and giving yourself a chance in this city is realizing that you build a career often by grinding it out, not winning the lottery.

I got to a point where I still believed that I could have a career as a writer, but that there wouldn’t be a magical phone call delineating the before and after periods in my life. That ideal didn’t exist for me, and now that it was actually becoming my reality, as strange as it sounds, it was kind of difficult to accept. As I described it to my friends, after a certain number of years existing as a struggling writer, you internalize the struggling prefix. It’s part of who you are, even if you don’t talk about it every day, even if you’re not wearing it on your sleeve or thinking about it much, it is still a fundamental part of your identity. Letting go of it, I think, takes time.

One last note. While I was in the middle of having my identity adjusted by this news and all it implied, a funny irony was unfolding on the television in front of me. My girlfriend bought us a cable subscription for my birthday — my first since college — and I make it a habit these days to keep the channel tuned to HBO or ESPN. That night, while I was laying on the couch in a fevered but happy haze, considering the winding road I had taken to my first real break, Savages was playing on HBO. Some of you have seen it, I’m sure. It opened in theaters the same month I had my only studio meeting on the “strength,” of my Taken rip-off. For those of you who haven’t seen it, would you like to read the premise? From IMDB: “Pot growers Ben and Chon (a former Navy SEAL) face off against the Mexican drug cartel who kidnapped their shared girlfriend.”

The similarities go further from there, but here was the take-home for me: don’t write what’s been done before. That big meeting I had which ultimately went nowhere was with the same studio that produced Savages. They want what only you can give them. Not what someone else already gave them. I think the readers at the Black List were trying to tell me this long before I was willing to listen. I was afraid for a long time that the stories I most wanted to tell weren’t going to sell. As I told Franklin at our first meeting a few weeks ago, I could not be happier to eat crow after the events of the last few weeks. I couldn’t be more grateful to both the Black List and Cassian, and I look forward to keeping you all updated on what the coming months hold.

A great introduction to Matthew and we can look forward to more as he jets off to the Sundance Film Festival!

For Part 1, go here.

Part 2, here.

Part 3, here.

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