The Chesterfield Writer’s Film Project

The Writer’s Film Project (WFP) offers fiction, theater, and film writers the opportunity to begin a career in screenwriting.

This year, up to five writers will be chosen to participate, and each will receive a $20,000 stipend to cover his or her living expenses.

The WFP writers are chosen by competition, and evaluated on the basis of prose and dramatic writing samples. Selected writers form a screenwriting workshop in Los Angeles, using their storytelling skills to begin a career in film.

Each year, a mix of writers--fiction, theater, and film--has been chosen to participate. Each year, some of these writers have been affiliated with university writing programs, and others have been unaffiliated.

During the Fellowship year, each writer creates two original, feature-length screenplays.  Throughout the program, selected film professionals and Paramount Pictures executives serve as mentors, sharing their opinions and experience with the Fellows.

In past years, the group of mentors and guest speakers has included David Koepp (Spider-Man), Stephen Gaghan (Traffic), Scott Frank (Minority Report), Steven Zaillian (Gangs of New York), Daniel Pyne (Sum of All Fears), Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost), Andy Walker (Sleepy Hollow), Tom Schulman (Dead Poets Society), Harold Ramis (Analyze This), Warren Beatty (Reds), Nicholas Kazan (Reversal of Fortune), Buck Henry (The Graduate), Robin Swicord (Little Women), Ed Solomon (Men In Black), and John Briley (Ghandi).

At year’s end, WFP writers are introduced to various literary agents and agencies. Each writer has two quality screenplays to use as talent samples in the pursuit of writing assignments within the film industry at large.

Upon graduation from the program, many WFP writers have been signed by major literary agencies including the Creative Artists Agency, the William Morris Agency, and the United Talent Agency. WFP writers have been hired for writing assignments and have had scripts acquired by Tom Hanks, Quincy Jones, Steven Spielberg, Ron Howard, Wesley Snipes, and Francis Ford Coppola, as well as various studios and production companies including Paramount Pictures, Warner Bros., The Walt Disney Company, Universal Pictures, Sony Pictures, MGM, United Artists, New Line Cinema, American Zoetrope, Imagine Entertainment, and DreamWorks.

In the past several years, 15 films by WFP alumni have been produced, including Warner Brothers’ “A Walk To Remember,” Gramercy’s “The Matchmaker” (starring Janeane Garofalo), TNT’s “Hope” (directed by Goldie Hawn and starring Christine Lahti and J.T. Walsh), Paramount’s “Breakdown” (starring Kurt Russell; uncredited rewrite), Warner Brothers’ “Free Willy 2” (produced by Richard Donner), Universal’s “Julie Johnson” (starring Courtney Love), and Timothy Hutton’s directorial debut “Digging to China” (starring Kevin Bacon and Mary Stuart Masterson).

The WFP may produce the best of each program year’s work.  For each screenplay produced, the WFP will pay its author no less than the current minimums established by the Writers Guild of America.