‘Pinocchio,’ ‘Top Gun’ among nominees for USC Scripter Award

“Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” and “Top Gun: Maverick” are among the film nominees that will compete Saturday for the 35th annual USC Libraries Scripter Award, which honors writers of adapted screenplays and the original works on which they are based.

Also nominated are the writers of “Living,” “She Said” and “Women Talking.”

For television, nominees are the writers of “The Crown,” “Fleishman is in Trouble,” “Slow Horses,” “Tokyo Vice” and “Under the Banner of Heaven.”

Finalists for the awards were chosen from a field of 101 film and 67 television adaptations, according to USC Libraries. The finalists were chosen by a selection committee chaired by Howard Rodman, USC professor and past president of the Writers Guild of America, West.

Among those serving on the committee are film critics Leonard Maltin and Anne Thompson, authors Walter Mosley and Michael Ondaatje and screenwriters Eric Roth and Erin Cressida Wilson.

The winners will be announced during a ceremony at USC’s Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library. The event will mark a return to an in-person ceremony, following two years of virtual presentations due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Here is the formal list of nominations:

Film

— Guillermo del Toro, Patrick McHale and Matthew Robbins for “Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio” based on the fairy tale “The Adventures of Pinocchio” by Carlo Collodi;

— Kazuo Ishiguro for “Living” based on the novella “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Leo Tolstoy;

— Rebecca Lenkiewicz for “She Said” based on the nonfiction book “She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement” by Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey;

— Peter Craig, Ehren Kruger, Justin Marks, Christopher McQuarrie, and Eric Warren for “Top Gun: Maverick” based on characters from the 1983 California magazine article “Top Guns” by Ehud Yonay; and

— Screenwriter Sarah Polley and novelist Miriam Toews for “Women Talking.”

Television

— Peter Morgan, for the episode “Couple 31,” from “The Crown,” based on his stage play “The Audience”;

— Taffy Brodesser-Akner for the episode “The Liver,” from “Fleishman is in Trouble,” based on her book of the same name;

— Will Smith for the episode “Failure’s Contagious,” from “Slow Horses,” based on the novel by Mick Herron;

— J. T. Rogers for the episode “Yoshino” from “Tokyo Vice,” based on the memoir “Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan” by Jake Adelstein; and

— Dustin Lance Black for the episode “When God Was Love,” from “Under the Banner of Heaven” based on the nonfiction work by Jon Krakauer.

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