“One Battle After Another” and “Death by Lightning” Saturday were named the recipients of the 38th-Annual Scripter Awards.
The annual award honors the year’s best adaptation of the written word for the screen in the categories of film and television. The winners were announced at the black-tie Scripter Awards ceremony at USC’s Town and Gown ballroom on Saturday.
USC Libraries dean Melissa Just served as emcee. In her opening remarks, she described what sets the Scripters apart from other adapted-screenplay honors. “The USC Libraries Scripter Awards are unique for focusing solely on uplifting writers’ creators of fiction and nonfiction books, and the screenwriters who translate these original works to film and episodic series.”
Writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson and author Thomas Pynchon won the Scripter for “One Battle After Another” in the film category. The screenplay was inspired by Pynchon’s novel “Vineland” and, according to event organizers, “reimagines Pynchon’s darkly comic vision of American paranoia, political disillusionment and generational reckoning through a contemporary cinematic lens.” The novel was published by Little, Brown and Company in 1990.
“I’m very honored to have this award,” Anderson said via video message, “and extremely honored to share it with Thomas Pynchon, which it’s a great sentence to say.”
The two were previously Scripter finalists for the 2014 film “Inherent Vice,” written and directed by Anderson, based on Pynchon’s novel of the same name.
In the episodic series category, screenwriter Mike Makowsky and author Candice Millard received Scripters for “Death by Lightning,” based on Millard’s nonfiction book “Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President.”
According to organizers, “The series revolves around the 20th president of the United States, James A. Garfield, and his eventual assassin, Charles Guiteau, dramatizing the political and social forces that shaped Garfield’s brief presidency.
Makowsky recounted during his acceptance speech the way in which he became acquainted with Millard’s book.
“It was about eight years ago now that I was at the Grove Barnes & Noble and I picked up this book “Destiny of the Republic” by Candice Millard about the assasination of our 20th president, James Garfield. I’m pleased to say I read it all in one sitting. I was absolutely floored by it, just blown away by the way Candice made history feel electric and immediate and vital.”
In addition to honoring the art of adaptation, the annual Scripter ceremony also celebrates the role of libraries, both on the USC campus and in the larger world, which USC President Beong-Soo Kim made clear in his remarks.
“The beauty of a library,” Kim said, “lies in its power to both welcome everyone into its confines and challenge them to broaden and deepen their perspectives and beliefs.”
Also receiving an award during the event was acclaimed crime writer Michael Connelly, who accepted the USC Libraries Scripter Literary Achievement Award.
“I’m at a loss for words, even though that’s my business,” Connelly said. “I write these stories, we make TV shows, they’re entertainments but at the same time you’re trying to explain this place, this place we all love. And sometimes we get it right, and sometimes we’re close. To get acknowledged for this is really beyond the pale.”