Off The Hook Screenplay Makes Top 10% Of Nicholl Fellowships

Some bittersweet news this morning in regards to the Off the Hook screenplay and the prestigious Academy Nicholl Fellowships. And yes, I'm talking about the Academy -- the ones that give out those little gold statues once a year!

The good news is that the script made the Top 10% this year out of over 7,000 entries which is pretty cool. The bad news is that according to the email they sent me (see below), it just missed out on the quarterfinals by 3 to 8 points. OH SO CLOSE!

Can't win 'em all but rest assured I'll be back to stuff another script or two down Nicholl's chimney next year!

July 18, 2017

Dear John,

After completing over 15,400 reads, we’ve arrived at the next stage of the 2017 Academy Nicholl competition. After tallying the scores for the 7,102 entries, now we face the daunting task of informing too many writers of good scripts featuring compelling and entertaining stories, intriguing and engaging characters and strong craft that they have not advanced into the next round. Regrettably, Off the Hook was not one of the 361 entries selected as a Quarterfinalist in the 2017 Academy Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting.

Some good news: your script placed among the Top 10% of all entries and fell short of advancing to the quarterfinals by three-to-eight points. Beyond this, we do not provide exact numerical scores. All Top 10% scripts were read three times during the competition.

To tell you a little about the process: every script was read twice. We then considered the better of the first two scores and the highest scoring 1,227 scripts were read a third time. Each read resulted in a numerical score being awarded. Scores for each entrant's script were totaled, and the Quarterfinalists were selected on the basis of the two highest of the three scores.

On the bright side, I did have another script make the Page quarterfinals this week so all 'n all, not a bad week :)

John