Festival Research Part II: Electric Boogaloo

The following is a transcript of my interview with Joan Wai, Program Manager of the Academy Nicholl Fellowships Screenwriting Competition. It was a wonderful interview and I plan on following the festival throughout the years, maybe even submitting a screenplay of my own one day.

Q: How many entries did you get this year?

A: We received a record number 7,511 entries this year. This is our fourth year in a row breaking our record on the number of entries.

Q: What is the reading process like for the first submissions?

A: To assure a blind read, we ask our entrants to submit their scripts without their names or any identifying information, but about 25% of entries have left their info on there. So every script that's submitted is checked for contact information. The blind read is to eliminate any bias a reader may subconsciously get when they see a script from LA for example--one reader might think oh this will be derivative but a script from North Dakota will be fresh, or vice versa. We also hand assign every script to our readers. We track our reader genre likes and dislikes to give every script its best chance possible in the competition. For instance, if we have a sci-fi script that needs to be read, we will only assign it to a reader who likes sci-fi. There are additional factors that we take into account to get them a fair read. Safe to say, our assignment of scripts is a very laborious and painstaking process.

Q: How many people do you have reading the first round of entries?

A: We have over 70 readers in the first round.

Q: Who is typically chosen as a reader in this case?

A: We use professional readers with industry experience, some of them work in development. Many of our readers have been reading for us for a long time. New readers tend to come from referrals by our existing readers.

Q: How do you score entries? Do they use a scoring template/rubric? Are there scoring guidelines?

A: Every reader is required to attend a two hour orientation before they can start reading for us at the beginning of the season. We review our scoring guidelines and there is a score sheet where they write scores and comments to support their scores for every script they read. I also review score sheets our readers submit and provide feedback to all the readers for quality assurance.

Q: After the first round, how many are left? How does the reading process change with each round?

A: From the 7511 entries this year, 378 advanced to the quarterfinals, and 149 advanced to the semifinals. We will have our finalists soon, but in previous years, there's usually 10 that make it to the finals.

Points are accumulated as scripts advance in the competition. Every script gets a minimum of two reads. The first and quarterfinal rounds are read by our readers. In the semifinal round, we have members of the Academy volunteer to read. The volunteers come from various branches, so it's possible for a semifinalist to have an Academy member producer and screenwriter among those judging their script. In the finalist round, the scripts are read by the Academy Nicholl committee which is composed of Academy members as well. This year's committee is chaired by Robin Swicord, she's a member from the Writer's Branch.

Q: How far in advance do you send out your call for entries? How do entries typically roll in? Early? Late? In waves?

A: We aim to open our competition sometime in January. We announce it via our Academy Nicholl Facebook page and a press release goes out at that time. We set up three pricing tiers to try to space out the entries. Earlier is better for us in terms of processing of course. But lots of people like to wait until the last possible moment to keep working on their scripts before submitting it. Over 2000 entries came in on the last two days of this year's competition.

Q: How many paid employees do you have each year? How many volunteers?

A: This department consists of three paid full-time employees, the Director of the Academy Nicholl Fellowships, the Program Manager (myself) and the Program Assistant. We also have one or two temps helping us during our crunch period of submissions. Then there's our army of readers who we pay to read for us. The volunteers are the Academy members in the semifinal round and the Academy Nicholl committee.

Q: Do you use specific programming, trafficking, budgeting software? Do you like it?

A: We have a proprietary database that we use to track all our entries including the scoring and assignment of scripts as well as reader genre likes and dislikes. It's very sophisticated on one hand but it's also quite the process developing it with programmers to the point where it is today and it still could work better! We also use Quickbooks to print out check requisitions to request payment from Accounting for our readers. The Accounting department does the heavy duty work of tracking our spending and provides monthly reports for us to review and audit.

Q: What community outreach do you do outside of your festival season to keep your event on the public's radar and/or to raise funds?


A: Speaking on screenwriting panels is one way we do outreach, the majority of our efforts is via social media  press releases/coverage. We have a contact list of our quarterfinalists, semifinalists and finalists that we release to industry who request it. We tend to get press coverage when we announce our finalists and for our awards ceremony. The entry fees we receive go toward paying for the administration of the program, but the fees we receive come nowhere close to covering all the costs. In 2013, the Academy Nicholl Fellowships program received about $380,000 in entry fees. The program distributed $175,000 to the fellows and spent over $300,000 judging the entries alone.

Q: Can you describe what happens when somebody is chosen as a fellowship recipient (for instance, the fellows dinner and other such things)?

A: We host the fellows (flying them out to LA if they don't reside here) during awards week which includes a lunch with the Nicholl committee and a lovely awards ceremony. The week is capped off by an annual get-together where the new fellows are introduced to prior year fellows. Also, every month we host a lunch for the fellows to network. It?s a nice little community?a true fellowship of writers.

Q: How long have you been with the competition? What do you wish you had done differently or better when you first started out? What do you wish you knew then that you know now?

A: July was my 8th year working full-time here. Before that, I was a reader for the Academy Nicholl Fellowships, so a very long time. The competition is always evolving, every year we look for ways to improve the workflow and process for our entrants. Last year and this year we started releasing reader comments to our entrants as a bonus to those who reached a certain point in the competition. Last year we changed the annual awards dinner to a staged reading of script page excerpts from the Fellowship winning scripts which we will be doing again this year. The constant re-evaluation work is worth making this the best screenwriting competition in the world. I'm not very good with names so it took a while to learn all the names of our Fellows. That's something I wish I could have learned faster.