It’s fitting that a film festival, which boasts the theme “Sand. Stories. Screenwriters.” should launch festivities with a venue honoring a freshly discovered script by a new screenwriter. At the Nantucket Film Festival 9, the Tony Cox Award for Screenwriting luncheon, held at the Wauwinet Inn on a far reach of the island, drew a heady crowd of well-wishers to honor the competition winners. The annual event presents the screenwriter award, named after former Chairman and CEO of Showtime, Tony Cox, who encouraged and nurtured new talent. Present for the ceremony were screenwriters’ jury members, Nantucket author Nathaniel Philbrick (Sea of Glory and In the Heart of the Sea), author Clara Bingham (Class Action), and award-winning journalist David Black. Islanders Anne Meara and Jerry Stiller joined in celebration.
Top kudos went to Jennifer Maisel for her script, “The Last Seder,” which according to the writer, has been in process for six years, first as a play, then as a screenplay. She describes it as a “big play but a small film.” Says Maisel, “It’s a family drama with some funny moments about four daughters who come home for their last seder in their family house before their father is put into a home for Alzheimer’s patients.
“When I first adapted it, I thought I might want to direct it. I had the idea of directing it in my parent’s house. It was when my parents were moving. I thought they’ll move out, and I could shoot there. The setting was what I imagined this house would look like. Then my mom passed away suddenly.
“Now as I move through time,” she continues, “I would want to be very close to the director who would do this film, but I don’t know if I need to be the director. I haven’t directed a film before.”
Maisel grew up in New York, but now lives near the pulse of filmmaking in Los Angeles. Her prizes include a “First Look” option by Showtime, a $2,000 cash prize, a month on Nantucket at the Screenwriters Colony, and a custom-bound copy of the script.
“No Forcible Entry” by Kate Bergquist and Patricia Updyke-Thorpe was a finalist. Amid the landscape of Boston’s Big Dig, a forensic psychologist, summoned by police to profile a Boston Strangler copycat killer, uncovers a DNA mystery which leads to truths about her own past.
Another finalist, Jeffrey Ikler’s “The Farmhouse,” capitalizes on a foreign locale in the 1980s to unfold a drama about two missing persons in Luxembourg, one a World War II pilot, and the other a lesser-known impressionist painter. Though separated by decades, the investigations turn out to be intertwined with their investigators’ lives.