Latest in Exclusive Scripts

EXCLUSIVE: The journey to screen of BAFTA-competing UK feature Rocks was not conventional. The film underwent an organic development process over a number of years that saw director Sarah Gavron and her team cast a group of non-actor schoolgirls and then, alongside writers Claire Wilson and Theresa Ikoko, build a…

Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series, which highlights the buzziest scripts of awards season, included 12 movies that made the cut in the Oscar nominations Monday morning. In the Screenplay races, this year Deadline featured seven out of the 10 films including all five films nommed in the Adapted Screenplay category…

EXCLUSIVE: The late Audrey Wells was a prolific screenwriter and director whose work focused on strong female characters, from 2003’s Under the Tuscan Sun and 1999’s Guinevere through to 2018’s The Hate U Give. That trend continued with Over the Moon, Netflix’s animated musical about based on a Chinese myth about a…

Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari is an American film that tells the story of a Korean American family as they uproot from their more metropolitan life in California to a rural one in a small Arkansas town in search of the American dream. In case you didn’t catch on, this is a very American film. In A24’s drama, Steven Yeun…

EXCLUSIVE: The United States vs. Billie Holiday, Hulu’s dramatic retelling of the “Strange Fruit” singer’s battle against the federal government, originated as a single chapter in Johann Hari’s 2015 book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. When tapped by director Lee Daniels to pen the…

EXCLUSIVE: Sacha Baron Cohen had no plans to make another Borat movie after the success of 2006’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan, which broke the satire mold (and the bank) and made Baron Cohen’s intrepid journalist Borat Sagdiyev far too popular to pull off a…

Joe and Anthony Russo went back home for their return to directing after guiding Avengers: Endgame to the biggest box office haul in history. That’s where they found Cherry, the Apple TV+ indie drama based on the novel by their fellow Cleveland native Nico Walker. The book was based on Walker’s own experiences and…

EXCLUSIVE: David Fincher’s Mank has been near the top of the heap this awards season, scoring the most nominations at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice Awards and a place on the AFI Top 10 movies of 2020 for the take on the relationship of screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles during the writing of the…

EXCLUSIVE: In 2014, French playwright Florian Zeller won the Molière Award for Le Pere, a play about an aging man’s bout with dementia. Seven years, a TV series and a French film adaptation later, Zeller brings his words to the big screen and to the Oscar-season awards race. Starring Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman…

John Lee Hancock wrote the screenplay for Warner Bros’ crime thriller The Little Things in 1992, around the time he penned A Perfect World and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, both for director Clint Eastwood. At the time an in-demand screenwriter, he hadn’t been a director yet, and the script, about a pair of…

EXCLUSIVE: Kelly Reichard’s First Cow, based on her frequent collaborator Jonathan Raymond’s 2004 novel The Half Life, brings new life to pre-statehood Oregon and the early Americans seeking to stake their claim in the burgeoning Pacific Northwest. The A24 film, which is up for three Film Independent Spirit Awards…

For Nomadland, writer-director Chloé Zhao adapted Jessica Bruder’s 2017 book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century into a screenplay, got Frances McDormand to star in the movie, and hasn’t looked back since. The film, the third in the Beijing-born Zhao’s trilogy of a sort on the state of the…