The authors and screenwriters behind the film “American Fiction” and the series “Slow Horses” won the 36th-annual USC Libraries Scripter Awards last night (3/2). Selection committee chair Howard Rodman announced the winners at a black-tie ceremony at USC’s Doheny Memorial Library.
The Scripter Awards recognize the year’s most accomplished adaptations of the written word for the screen, including both feature-length films and episodic series.
In a Scripter first, novelist Mick Herron and screenwriter Will Smith repeated as winners in the episodic series category. They took home the award for their contributions to the episode “Negotiating with Tigers” from season three of “Slow Horses,” which Smith adapted from Herron’s book “Real Tigers.”
Smith could not attend due to work on the next season of “Slow Horses” but relayed his sentiments through Herron.
“This award is very important to me,” Smith said, “because it also celebrates the author, without whom the show would not exist.”
In the film category, author Percival Everett and screenwriter/director Cord Jefferson won for their contributions to “American Fiction,” based on Everett’s novel “Erasure.”
Jefferson told the audience that he read Everett’s book in December 2020.
“It felt like I was reading a book written specifically for me,” he said. “It felt like I understood what was going on in these characters with the story at a molecular level.”
Everett’s win marks another Scripter milestone, as he is the first USC professor honored with the prize.
Saturday also marked USC Libraries dean Melissa Just’s first turn as host of the annual ceremony since her appointment last November. In her opening remarks, Just hailed libraries as creators of community and belonging.
“I believe libraries are great connectors of people, like all of us here tonight, with information, ideas, and the preserved record of human knowledge and experience,” she said. “We enable people to gather, to learn together, and to find common ground with each other and with the past–and in doing so, create a brighter future.”
Earlier in the evening, Linda Cassady accepted the Ex Libris Award, which honors exceptional commitment to the USC Libraries, on behalf of her late husband, George Cassady. Cassady was a longtime USC Board of Councilors member and in 2000 donated the G. Edward, M.D. and Margaret Elizabeth, R.N. Lewis Carroll collection, one of the world’s most significant collections of works by and related to the “Alice in Wonderland” author.
Harvey Weinstein hit with new sex crime charge in New York
Harvey Weinstein pleaded not guilty Wednesday to a new sex crime charge in New York, as he awaits retrial in his landmark #MeToo case.
Details of the new allegations were not immediately available. He was charged with committing a criminal sex act.
The jailed ex-movie mogul has long maintained that any sexual activity was consensual.
Prosecutors revealed last week that Weinstein had been indicted on additional sex crime charges that weren't part of the case that led to his now-overturned 2020 conviction. But the new indictment was sealed until his arraignment.
Prosecutors have said that the grand jury heard evidence of up to three alleged assaults — two in hotels in the Tribeca neighborhood and one at a lower Manhattan residential building. The purported incidents took place from the mid-2000s to 2016, prosecutors said.
But it's not clear whether any of those allegations underlie the new indictment.
While bracing for the new charges, Weinstein also is awaiting retrial after New York state's highest court this spring overturned his 2020 conviction on rape and sexual assault charges involving two women. The high court, called the Court of Appeals, ordered a new trial, which is tentatively scheduled to begin Nov. 12.
The Court of Appeals ruled that the then-trial judge unfairly allowed testimony against him based on allegations that were not part of the case. That judge's term expired in 2022, and he is no longer on the bench.
Prosecutors have said they'll seek to fold the new charges into the retrial, but Weinstein's lawyers say it should be a separate case.
Weinstein, who also was convicted in 2022 in a Los Angeles rape case, remains behind bars while awaiting his New York retrial.
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