“Frankenstein,” “Hamnet,” “One Battle After Another,” “Train Dreams” and “Peter Hujar’s Day” have been named finalists at the 38th annual USC Libraries Scripter Awards, an honor that goes to the best page-to-screen adaptations of the year.
Because the Scripter Awards honor both the writer of the screenplay and the author of the original work from which the film or TV show was adapted, the announcement raises a big question: Now that he’s been nominated for a Hollywood award, will notoriously reclusive novelist Thomas Pynchon make an appearance at the ceremony where he’s been recognized alongside screenwriter-director Paul Thomas Anderson, who adapted Pynchon’s novel “Vineland” into “One Battle After Another”?
Of course he won’t, and neither will the late “Frankenstein” author Mary Shelley, who’s been dead for 174 years but was nominated alongside Guillermo del Toro, or novelist Denis Johnson, who died in 2017 and is a finalist with “Train Dreams” screenwriters Clint Bentley and Greg Kwedar.
The other authors who were nominated were Maggie O’Farrell for her novel “Hamnet” (and for co-writing the screenplay with Chloe Zhao), and Linda Rosenkrantz for the book “Peter Hujar’s Day,” which was adapted by director Ira Sachs.
In the Scripter television category, the finalists are the “Ábidoo’niidę́ę́ (What He Had Been Told)” episode of the series “Dark Winds,” written by Max Hurwitz and Billy Luther from the Tony Hillerman novels “Dancehall of the Dead” and “The Sinister Pig”; the “Destiny of the Republic” episode of “Death by Lightning,” written by Mike Makowsky and based on the Candice Millard nonfiction book “Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine and the Murder of a President”; the untitled first episode of the series “Dept. Q.,” written by Chadni Lakhani and Scott Frank from the Jussi Adler-Olsen novel “The Keeper of Lost Causes”; the episode “Scars” from “Slow Horses,” written by Will Smith and based on the novel “London Rules” by Mick Herron; and the series “Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light,” written by Peter Straughan and based on the novel “The Mirror and the Light” by Hilary Mantel.
With its nomination, “Slow Horses” becomes the first show to become a Scripter Awards finalist four consecutive years; it was already the only program to be nominated for three years in a row, and the only one to win twice.
The selections were made by a jury chaired by USC professor and former Writers Guild of America, West president Howard Rodman and consisting of journalists, authors, screenwriters, producers and academics.
This year, the Scripter rules were changed to make films and programs based on video games or on characters from previously published works ineligible. Works based on books, novellas, short stories, graphic novels, plays and magazine articles remain eligible.
While the Scripter Awards began as a prize that rarely matched the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay, its nominating committee and the Academy’s Writers Branch now agree on their finalists about 70% of the time, though they’ve only had a five-for-five match once, in 2016. Last year, four of the Scripter finalists went on to receive Oscar nominations, with Scripter finalist “The Wild Robot” replaced in the Oscar lineup with “Emilia Perez,” which wasn’t eligible at the Scripters.
Winners will be announced at a ceremony on the USC campus on Sunday, Jan. 24.