The USC Libraries on Wednesday unveiled nominees for its 35th annual USC Libraries Scripter Award, which honors the screenwriters of the year’s best film and episodic series adaptations, along with the writers of the works on which they are based.
This year’s film nominees are the screenwriters and original authors from Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio, Living, She Said, Top Gun: Maverick and Women Talking. In TV, screenwriters were nominated for penning episodes of The Crown, Fleishman Is in Trouble, Slow Horses, Tokyo Vice and Under the Banner of Heaven.
Winners will be announced March 4 at a ceremony at USC’s Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library, set to be the first in-person awards-season event for the group since 2020 owing to the pandemic.
A total of 101 films and 67 TV adaptations made up this year’s field, which were whittled to the final lists by a selection committee that included screenwriters Eric Roth and Erin Cressida Wilson and authors Walter Mosley and Michael Ondaatje. Former WGA West president and current USC professor Howard Rodman is the 2023 committee chair.
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Last year, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s adaptation of the Elena Ferrante novel The Lost Daughter won the Scripters’ film prize, while Danny Strong won in TV for an episode of Hulu’s limited series Dopesick, based on Bety Macy’s nonfiction book. Both scribes went on to score Oscar and Emmy writing noms, respectively.
Here are this year’s finalists:
FILM
Guillermo del Toro, Patrick McHale and Matthew Robbins
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (Netflix)
Based on the fairy tale The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi (Penguin Classics)
Kazuo Ishiguro
Living (Sony Pictures Classics)
Based on the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy (Penguin Classics)
Rebecca Lenkiewicz
She Said (Universal)
Based on the nonfiction book She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey (Penguin Press)
Peter Craig, Ehren Kruger, Justin Marks, Christopher McQuarrie and Eric Warren
Top Gun: Maverick (Paramount)
Based on characters from the 1983 California magazine article “Top Guns” by Ehud Yonay
Sarah Polley and Miriam Toews
Women Talking (Orion/MGM)
Based on Toews’ novel of the same name (Bloomsbury)
EPISODIC SERIES
Peter Morgan
The Crown, for the episode “Couple 31” (Netflix)
Based on his stage play The Audience (Dramatists Play Service Inc.)
Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Fleishman Is in Trouble, for the episode “The Liver” (FX)
Based on her book of the same name (Random House)
Will Smith
Slow Horses, for the episode “Failure’s Contagious” (Apple TV+)
Based on the novel by Mick Herron (Soho Crime)
J.T. Rogers
Tokyo Vice, for the episode “Yoshino” (HBO Max)
Based on the memoir Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan by Jake Adelstein (Knopf Doubleday)
Dustin Lance Black
Under the Banner of Heaven, for the episode “When God Was Love” (FX)
Based on the nonfiction work by Jon Krakauer (Anchor Books)
