‘Conclave’ Takes Home USC Scripter Award

The USC Libraries announced the winners for the 37th annual USC Libraries Scripter Award, which honors the year’s best film and television adaptations, as well as the works on which they are based. This group of academics, industry professionals, and critics (for which I vote) is often predictive of the Adapted Screenplay Oscar race. Last year following its Scripter win, “American Fiction” took home the Oscar. Selection committee chair Howard Rodman announced the winners at a black-tie ceremony at USC’s Town and Gown ballroom, replacing the usual Doheny Library.

For the third year in a row, “Slow Horses” was nominated for episodic series, after winning the past two years, but this time lost to Hulu’s “Say Nothing” a limited series adapted by Joshua Zetumer from the sprawling nonfiction book about the Troubles in Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe. They won for the episode “The People in the Dirt.” ”Say Nothing” was produced by Colorforce’s Nina Jacobson and Brad Simpson. Zetumer took five years to labor over the complex adaptation, against the advice of his representatives. “If you fell in love with movies, or fell in love with TV,” he said, “chances are you fell in love with something dangerous.”

Peter Straughan, who was Oscar-nominated in 2012 for “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” won the Scripter award for film adaptation; Robert Harris, the author of the 2016 novel “Conclave,” was not in attendance. “Adaptation is a really strange process, you’re very much the servant of two masters,” said Straughan. “In a way it’s an act of betrayal of one master for the other. You start off with a book that you love, you read it again and again, and then you end up throwing it over your shoulder.”

Straughan is on a winning streak, taking home wins at the Critics Choice and BAFTA awards, and is expected to win the Oscar as well.

‘Say Nothing’©FX Networks/Courtesy Everett Collection

Past winners include “American Fiction,” “Call Me By Your Name,” “Moonlight,” “The Big Short,” and “The Imitation Game,” which all won Oscars. In fact, before 2019, eight Scripter Award winners went on to win Oscars.

At the USC Libraries annual fundraiser, actress-producer and library lover Jennifer Beals joined in the USC Libraries pitch. “If ever you are at a loss wondering if there is good in the world,” she said, “you have only to go to a library. There you will find shelf upon shelf of books where authors have poured their knowledge, their stories, their creativity on page after page . . . if a library is not the very best of what society has to offer, I don’t know what is.”

Earlier in the evening, Howard Rodman accepted the Ex Libris Award, which honors exceptional commitment to the USC Libraries. Rodman has been the chair of the Scripter Selection Committee for the past twelve years. Presenting him with the award was novelist Walter Mosley (“Devil in a Blue Dress”) who credited Rodman for being an influence on thousands of writers, producers, editors, directors, and “a gardener of revelation for those of us who didn’t know where we were going or even when we had arrived.”