The Nicholl Fellowships in Screenwriting program is an international competition open to screenwriters who have not earned more than $5,000 writing for film or television. Entry scripts must be the original work of a sole author or of exactly two collaborative authors. Entries must have been written originally in English. Adaptations and translated scripts are not eligible. Up to five $30,000 fellowships are awarded each year.  Two of Sandi Jerome's scripts, LAST HAND and FIRST MAN were select out of a record breaking 6,048 entries to be among the 320 that advance to the next round. 

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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 (Jurassic Park), Scott Frank (Get Shorty), Pen Densham (Robin Hood: Price of Thieves), 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), James Toback (Bugsy), 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 Rmember,” 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).

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