Matthew Hickman: Reflections of an Independent Screenwriting Fellowship Winner [cont’d]
About 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, and allow me to share them with you. Here is the first part of a dispatch he sent me from the Festival:
Hello again everyone. Sorry it’s been so long since I wrote. One of the consequences of having your life turned upside down by good news is that your schedule gets a bit hairy (or even non-existent) for a while. That’s definitely been the case with me, and I apologize for not checking in sooner with everyone. It’s been my sincere intent, but that intent got lost in the shuffle.
Since I was awarded the Fellowship, a lot has happened. Before I came to Park City, I met Cassian and Franklin, who are two of the most regular, hard-working people you could hope to meet in the movie business, and exactly the kind of people I’d like to work with. I did an interview with KPCC in Pasadena, and I received loads of cold weather gear from Dockers via Paul + Williams, which I am endlessly grateful for in a town where the low tonight will be eighteen degrees or so. I met potential investors in my script, and I’ve talked to a few managers and agents as well. Balancing all of this with my regular job has been overwhelming in the best way possible.
I’m writing this on day three of the festival, from the warm recess of our cabin in Park City. It is a recess in the truest sense — Park City is an incredibly busy town during the festival, and it pays to check out for a few minutes once or twice a day to recharge and refocus. What do I think of the experience so far?
Utah is flat-out beautiful. This is my first time in the Mountain West, and I have to say, I get it now. For years I never really understood the intense appeal that trekking off into the wilderness and throwing yourself off a mountain on oversized-plastic toothpicks through the frigid cold held to some people, but I do now. Not only is it beautiful, but it’s serene in a way Los Angeles probably hasn’t been for over a hundred years.
The ironic thing about Sundance, however, is that it turns this town into a little bit of a zoo. I suppose back in the beginning only filmmakers came here, but that is far from the case now. Earlier this afternoon, a few seconds after walking by Zach Braff and a lady I presumed was his wife or girlfriend, I started to hear screaming and running from all directions behind me. I turned around to see teenage girls emanating from the (very) thin air to converge on a silver SUV — not one, two, or half a dozen. It was fifty, or even a hundred.
The culprit, I soon found out, was not Zach Braff at all, but One Direction. I had no idea they were here, or why, but I took a very surreal fifteen seconds of video at the tail end of the frenzy when they made their escape from what would have almost certainly been an unpleasant death under the crush of perfume, hair spray, and lovesick teenage adoration. So there’s that element of Sundance, and if you you don’t look too closely, you might miss some of the best parts of the festival by gawking at that kind of stuff.
What are those best parts? The movies, of course. Sure, there are lots of glitzy parties, and those can be fun for meeting folks and people watching, but there is a broader spectrum of stuff to watch here than any place I have been in my life. Many of these things, as a friend of mine pointed out, won’t find distribution deals that make it easy to see them after they are shown here, so I’ve been taking in as much as possible in between the different events and meetings. I have seen some incredible movies in the last few days, and it is in a very real way a movie fan’s paradise — a pristine city in the clouds where your main responsibility each day is to run from theater to theater, taking in the efforts of filmmakers from every corner of the globe. Could you ask for much more?
Tomorrow Matthew shares with us some insights he has learned from Cassian Elwes about the world of indie film financing. Quite informative and you won’t want to miss it.
To read Matthew’s entire first dispatch, go here.
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