By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com

The Black List Announces Cassian Elwes Screenwriting Fellowships At Sundance

Posted Wednesday, January 27th, 2016 - Comments Off on The Black List Announces Cassian Elwes Screenwriting Fellowships At Sundance
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THE BLACK LIST ANNOUNCES THIRD ANNUAL CASSIAN ELWES INDEPENDENT SCREENWRITING FELLOWSHIPS AT THE 2016 SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

 

PARK CITY, UT (January 27, 2016) – The Black List and Cassian Elwes announced that they had selected not one but two 2016 Cassian Elwes Independent Screenwriting Fellows who joined them at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival. This year’s Fellows are Kristina Zacharias and Terrell Garrett. The fellowship allows unrepresented feature writers with an independent sensibility who have made less than $5,000 in aggregate in their film or television writing careers to attend the Sundance Film Festival all expenses paid.

 

Said Cassian Elwes, “I had the privilege to spend a long weekend with my new fellows Kristina and Terrell. I have no doubt that their dream of being Hollywood screenwriters will become a reality. It was an absolute pleasure to get to know them both and look forward to helping them along their paths. I am so grateful to the Blacklist for giving me this opportunity.”

 

The Black List Founder Franklin Leonard added, “Bringing one writer to Sundance for the last two years has been incredibly gratifying, we’re overwhelmed by Cassian’s generosity at bringing two. I think it just goes to show how much talent is out there and, if I may say so, how well the Black List website is doing at identifying it.”

 

Kristina Zacharias is an American writer who spent her early childhood in Tunisia, Bangladesh and Egypt before settling in the suburbs of Northern Virginia. After graduating with a Film and Media Theory degree from Virginia Tech, Kristina moved to New York City where she discovered a passion for Screenwriting. While working full-time at NYU and writing, Kristina created and produced a monthly performance series for local writers, musicians and comedians in Brooklyn. Kristina’s screenplay, Restavek, about a child slave in Haiti, made the Nicholl Fellowship’s “Next 100” list and was a Second Rounder in the Austin Film Festival’s screenwriting competition in 2015.

 

After studying English Literature and Psychology at Asbury University and Georgia State University, Terrell Garrett settled in Tyrone, Georgia and focused on writing stories. For the past ten years, while working as a barista at Starbucks, Garrett wrote screenplays. During this time, he was mentored by a retired screenwriter and now used bookseller who learned the craft from his own mentors, Waldo Salt, Ring Lardner Jr. and Ian McLellan Hunter. “Call me a romantic, but I like to think that they are also my mentors by proxy.” Before Starbucks, Garrett waited tables, worked in a print shop, and had a short stint as a videogame designer.

 

Past fellows have included Matthew Hickman, a former Santa Monica UPS store retail employee selected on the basis of his script AN ELEGY FOR EVELYN FRANCIS now represented by WME and Writ Large, and Boston-based screenwriter Mike Harden, whose script, A GOOD MAN, has been optioned by Mutressa Movies after an introduction by Elwes himself. In the two years since his selection, Hickman has additionally completed an original feature for Construction Film and several paid rewriting jobs.

 

ABOUT THE BLACK LIST

 

The Black List, an annual survey of Hollywood executives’ favorite unproduced screenplays, was founded in 2005. Since then, more than 270 Black List scripts have been produced, grossing over $23 billion in box office worldwide. Black List movies have won 37 Academy Awards, including three of the last six Best Picture Oscars and eight of the last fourteen Best Screenplay Oscars.

 

In October of 2012, the Black List launched a unique online community where screenwriters make their work available to readers, buyers and employers. Since its inception, it has hosted more than 20,000 screenplays and teleplays and provided more than 32,000 script evaluations. As a direct result of introductions made on the Black List, dozens of writers have found representation at major talent agencies and management companies, as well as sold or optioned their screenplays.

 

Currently, the Black List hosts over 2,700 scripts for consideration by over 2,500 film industry professionals ranging from agency assistants, to studio and network presidents, to A-list actors and directors.

 

More information on the Black List is available at www.blcklst.com. For regular updates, join our mailing list or follow the Black List on Facebook and Twitter.

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It shows how out of it I was in trying to be in it, acknowledging that I was out of it to myself, and then thinking, “Okay, how do I stop being out of it? Well, I get some legitimate illogical narrative ideas” — some novel, you know?

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I was walking down the street and I ran into Bradbury — he directed a play that I was going to do as an actor, so we know each other, but he yelled “hi” — and I’d forgot who he was.

So at my girlfriend Barbara Hershey’s urging — I was with her at that moment — she said, “Talk to him! That guy really wants to talk to you,” and I said “No, fuck him,” and keep walking.

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