Screenwriting

From a snow-crested corner of Alberta, Canada, Kelly Oxford made her Hollywood screenwriting dream come true. She did it without leaving her close-knit family or giving up her free nationalized healthcare. She did it without toiling in Westside coffee shops or confronting painful rejections. She did it 140 characters at a time. Oxford, a suburban housewife and mother of three, is a Twitter superstar ( @kellyoxford ), with more than 350,000 followers. Oscar winners, late-night talk show hosts, even film critic Roger Ebert follow her on the social media service, eager to read wry observations about daily life and celebrity culture.

An American woman arrives in China to retrace the steps of her deceased daughter from a video diary the daughter kept of her trip to the 2008 Beijing Olympics. A young flautist travels to Beijing to audition for a conservatory. A seamstress for a fashion company is betrayed by her jealous boss when she designs a spectacular kite for the Beijing Kite Festival. Those are among seven winners in the short-film category of the inaugural Beijing International Screenwriting Competition, launched by the Chinese government in March as part of an ongoing strategy to expand its cultural influence and forge stronger ties to Hollywood.

In May 1997, the Los Angeles Times published J.R. Moehringer's heartfelt story "Resurrecting the Champ," chronicling the sad life of a professional boxer who was homeless and living on the streets. More than just a tale about the downfall of a sports figure, the article also dealt with Moehringer's relationship with "The Champ," as well as the writer coming to terms with his own father's abandonment of the family when he was a baby.

After making "Route Irish," a dark 2010 drama about private security contractors who had been in Iraq, British filmmaker Ken Loach and his partner, Scottish screenwriter Paul Laverty, were searching for their next project. "Paul will go away and start writing a few characters down, and we will decide if we want to do it," explained Loach, 76, best known for his uncompromising political and sociological dramas such as 1998's "My Name Is Joe" and 2006's "The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

Oliver Stone, Neil LaBute, Brad Bird and Andrew Stanton are among the filmmakers who are scheduled to speak at Screenwriting Expo 5, a four-day conference about writing and selling scripts that is open to the public. The event, sponsored by Creative Screenwriting magazine, will be held Oct. 19-22 at the Los Angeles Airport Marriott and Renaissance Montura hotels. Admission is $74.95. For registration and information, call (800) 727-6978 or go to www.screenwritingexpo.com.

The National Writers Workshop, a nonprofit organization for hopeful screenwriters, is holding its fifth annual screenwriting contest for minorities. American Film Institute graduate Willard Rogers founded the contest in 1990 as part of the workshop's Ethnic Minority Screenwriters Development and Promotional Program. Rogers, 53, head of the organization, established the $500 scholarship to discover talent in ethnic communities, which account for only 2.

William Rose, an American screenwriter who won an Academy Award for "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" and whose other Hollywood and British film credits include such classic comedies as "The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming" and "The Ladykillers," died at his home in England. He was 68 and the cause of his death last Tuesday was not reported. Rose, who also wrote the script for "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World," lived on the English Channel island of Jersey.

Oon this very page, I once advanced a controversial theory. I argued that America is more like ancient Egypt than the Roman Empire, should anyone mistake it for the latter. Instead of the dead, we worship the famous, close-yet-distant souls who live forever in the media netherworld of the here and now. The capital of our state is Hollywood, mirage-maker to the world, vast repository of immortals. That's why I call the place Cairo-by-the Mojave--'twas ever thus and 'twill always be so.

He was dead, I was told. Or at least he wouldn't answer my letters (he didn't). When I finally trapped him on the telephone, he said he was far too busy to grant an interview. I said I was coming to see him anyway. Would he talk? He said, "We'll see." Philip Yordan is the great mystery man of the post-1930s generation of Hollywood screenwriters.

I am proud to be a Hollywood screenwriter. Why? Well, not for the art or the money or the ability to have agents return my calls within weeks. No, it's because since the dawn of talkies, writers have always been the uncrowned kings of Hollywood, the secret titans of Tinseltown, the underground reel royalty. I didn't always feel that way. Forty years ago, when I first came to L.A.

Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, a novelist and screenwriter whose long collaboration with Merchant Ivory Productions yielded two Academy Awards for her work on the films “A Room With a View” and “Howards End,” has died. She was 85. Jhabvala died early Wednesday at her home in Manhattan after a long illness, said her daughter Firoza. A prolific author, Jhabvala (pronounced JOB-vah-lah ) wrote 19 novels and short-story collections that reflected the cultures she absorbed on three continents during her half-century career.

For years, people who read Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's novels assumed she was born in India. She wrote about swamis, social climbers, duplicitous landlords and other characters from the Indian bourgeoisie who inevitably found themselves colliding with curious visitors from the West. But Jhabvala was a Westerner herself: a German Jew displaced by war to England, who married an Indian man and settled in his country. She absorbed enough of subcontinental culture to portray it with clarity and comic sensibility in books that earned her comparisons to Jane Austen.

Fay Kanin, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter for the 1958 Clark Gable-Doris Day comedy "Teacher's Pet" and former president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, died Wednesday. She was 95. In a writing career that spanned more than four decades, Kanin penned screenplays for movies such as the 1954 Elizabeth Taylor romantic drama "Rhapsody" and television specials such as "Tell Me Where It Hurts," for which she won two Emmy Awards in 1974. She won another Emmy in 1979 for producing "Friendly Fire," a critically acclaimed Carol Burnett TV movie based on the true story of an American soldier killed in the Vietnam War. Kanin served as president of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences from 1979 to 1983, and was its second female president after actress Bette Davis.

For years Melissa Rosenberg toiled away as a TV writer, jumping from one show to the next, never finding the right fit for her voice and personality. Then she landed on Showtime's "Dexter" and the combination of her dark sense of humor and the show's edgy story lines melded together in a frothy mixture of critical acclaim and avid viewership. Rosenberg was on the Emmy-winning show for four years, convinced it was the best job she would ever have in television. Until now. The 50-year-old writer-producer, now best known for her screenwriting work on the wildly successful "Twilight" movie franchise, is the show runner behind ABC's new female-driven series "Red Widow.

In the latest effort by China to expand its cultural influence and build stronger ties to Hollywood, government officials in Beijing are looking for U.S.-based screenwriters to help tell their stories. The Cultural Assets Office of the Beijing Municipal Government on Monday will announce the 2013 Beijing International Screenwriting Competition, which organizers called a "groundbreaking initiative" to foster artistic collaboration and an ongoing creative dialogue between China and the U.S. Open to U.S.-based contestants of all nationalities, the competition will consider screenplays for feature films and short films centered on Beijing and its culture.

Ronald Dworkin Constitutional law expert and liberal scholar Ronald Dworkin, 81, an American philosopher, constitutional law expert and liberal scholar who argued that the law should be founded on moral integrity, died Thursday of leukemia in London, his family said. Dworkin, a professor of law at New York University and professor emeritus at University College London, was one of the best known and most quoted legal scholars in the United States and also an expert on British law. Dworkin was best known for the idea that the most important virtue the law can display is integrity - understood as the moral idea that the state should act on principle so each member of the community is treated as an equal.

When Steve Sharon wrote the screenplay to the Clint Eastwood thriller "The Dead Pool," he didn't rely much on outside help. He typed away on a computer in his Huntington Beach home. He didn't even use a typing service or a research assistant. "I can do the typing just as quickly myself," he said. "And I prefer to do my own research so I have a fuller understanding of whatever it is I'm writing about." But he does have his own special--and rather costly--computer equipment.

What superhero screenwriter will you not see at Comic-Con this year? That would be John August, who is toiling on the first draft of "Shazam!," the New Line Cinema film expected to bring Captain Marvel to the screen in one of the next few summers. "I've never been to Comic-Con," he says. "I'm sure I will be going down the road. I hear it's pretty intense, pretty massive." Massive and intense is exactly right.

"Hushpuppy grabs a baby chick and puts it to her ear. A TINY HEARTBEAT. She listens with focused wonder and intensity. " - from the "Beasts of the Southern Wild" screenplay Can we please drive a stake through the heart of the Screenwriting 101 commandment that using a voice-over is somehow cheating? Lucy Alibar, for one, would really appreciate it if all the script gurus would just pipe down. She's the co-screenwriter and, really, co-creator of "Beasts of the Southern Wild," which she and her friend since they were teens, director Benh Zeitlin, adapted from her play "Juicy and Delicious.

Steven Spielberg's "Lincoln" is a historical biopic more concerned with depicting the 16th president's log-rolling politics than his log-splitting childhood. "Lincoln," one of many high-profile films this season based on real events, has been warmly embraced by critics and audiences. But there's another group whose opinion matters - historians. "There have been other movies about Lincoln," said James McPherson, a Civil War historian, Lincoln biographer and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "Battle Cry of Freedom," in a recent interview after seeing the film.