So your friend's "fucking masterful" script didn't get any love from the Nicholl judges. Here's my advice about that.

So here's the deal: You - or maybe "a friend" - wrote something you honestly believe is freaking fantastic, yet you didn't make the final cut for the Nicholl Fellowship, or for Screenwriting Expo, or the Golden Donut, etc.  Why not?  Well, it's obvious, isn't it?  The fix is in, at least that's what a lot of these commenters seem to think about the recently announced Nicholl fellows.  One guy in particular expressed this righteous outrage:

The thing is, when it comes to writing contests, it's not a perfect system.  Another possibility?  Maybe you (or your friend) aren't as good as you think.  Or maybe you are.  Based on my experience, it could be any number of things but it boils down to this: As much as it's a rush to make the final cut or win a writing contest (and I'm not saying it can't be a career maker) you can't base your screenwriting aspirations on contest results alone.  Too many other factors besides quality come into play.

I've judged a couple writing competitions in the past.  One was a high school student essay contest with about a dozen $1,000 college scholarships at stake.  Entries were not anonymous and politics definitely came into play when it came to selecting the winners.  I found this extremely discouraging because I saw a deserving entry bumped for a reason that had nothing to do with quality.  There were many more worthy entries than scholarships and one that would have been a winner was bumped for a lesser entry in the name of playing politics.

And then there are the judges.  We are not infallible and at times, we are not fair.  Each essay was read and judged twice in order to weed out the top contenders, after which we all got together to pick the best of the best.  It was at that meeting that I discovered one of the few bad essays I'd read (and scored low) had surprisingly made the cut.  The reason?  The other judge who read it gave it high marks because she "felt sorry" for the student who wrote it.  I did too, but for a different reason: the poor kid was about to go out into the world practically illiterate.  But we were supposed to be awarding the scholarships based on merit, not need.  And somebody who might have merited it was bumped from the final group because of that judge.  Like I said, a lot of things come into play.  I never said they made sense.

The other contest I judged was Project Greenlight 3 and all entries (at least at the level I judged at - the top 1,000 online vote-getters) were completely anonymous.  I had no idea who the writers were or where they were located, and it never occurred to me to wonder.  It wasn't an issue.  Each one was read beginning to end and I had no idea how they had placed in the online voting, so I wasn't swayed by that.  The scripts themselves were all that factored into the judging.

Of the twenty Project Greenlight scripts I was assigned to judge there were four or five that I thought were absolutely fantastic.  I could easily imagine seeing them on the screen and would have paid money to see any of them in a theater.  These were good writers who knew how to tell a story and write a screenplay and they had written really impressive scripts.  If I was a producer, these writers would have had meetings.

The rest of my scripts were uniformly unimpressive.  Gratuitous and poorly written bloodbaths, predictable government conspiracies and other forgettable wastes of my time abounded.  People, I even had an Indian burial ground script.  One script in particular was so bad that I'm not sure how it made the first cut, unless the writer found a way to hack into PG's computer system to create votes for him or herself.  To this day I kick myself for not keeping a copy of it.  It had to be seen to be believed.  I can't do justice to its heinous awfulness.  And yet, somehow, it made the cut.

As absolutely deserving as they were, none of my great scripts ended up being the winner.  But as both a reader and a writer I was really impressed with them and wish I could have let the writers know how good they were so they wouldn't feel discouraged that they "lost" to the eventual winning script.  My guess is that Bob the Commenter's friends and their "fucking masterful" scripts probably fall into this category.

So it's not a perfect system.  But you know what?  Keep entering anyway and even more importantly keep writing, whether you win or not.  Because whether it's an award-winning screenplay, a novel, a blog or your shopping list, that's what we do.  We write.  But quit bitching.  The world isn't fair and neither are writing contests.  Deal with it.