Nantucket's Screenwriters Colony ends its scene
BY MARLI GUZZETTA
Nantucket is an island that loves to celebrate the creative process - with festivals, exhibitions, screenings and openings. With wine and cheese and wait staffs.

But the greatest testament to Nantucket's enduring artistic streak is the ability the island has to cradle a new work in its infancy, which is the point of the Nantucket Screenwriter's Colony. It wrapped its month-long annual residency last weekend.

It was a dark and stormy Saturday night when the eclectic group of four chosen screenwriters (Sophie Barthes, John Henry Summerour, Jan Motskin and Ted Kupper) and the program's executive director, Chase Palmer, gathered to toast the blustery boomerang of sand that had been their home since the beginning of the month, when the group absconded here to work and be inspired by their surroundings and each other.

"Writing is a solitary thing, and there's nothing like having a month of quiet and of being taken care of, but also of being around creative compatriots to discuss work, to inspire everybody," Palmer said.

Founded in 1999, the colony is meant to support a select group of screenwriters as they cultivate specific projects "distinguished by an obvious experimental or socially exploratory nature" that "push the boundaries of the craft, taking risks where prototypical commercial product shies away," according to the colony's website. If a project workshopped at the colony is produced, the colony asks for the credit "Developed With the Assistance of The Screenwriters Colony".

To come to the final four writers, Palmer spent about nine months - a perfectly natural gestation period - reviewing scripts received from industry nominations, approaching producers, festival programmers, screenwriters, filmmakers, colony alumni, development executives, industry journalists and film schools. (The colony is a recommendationbased program.)

"Anybody can submit, but we try to find writers who are committed to making this their career - people who already have some sort of foundation in the industry," Palmer said. "It's not an easy industry, so we want to spend our money on people who are doing this for their livelihood."

The writers received notification of their acceptance to the program at the end of the summer, and arrived on Nantucket at the beginning of October to stay at Almanack Farm, on the edge of Nantucket's cranberry bog conservation land. The program provides its residents with a gourmet, in-house chef, bicycles, computer equipment, a communal car and free movie rentals. All this is done with the support of community vendors like Orange Street Video, which provides the movies, and Young's Bicycle Shop, which provides two-wheel mobility. Robert and Katherine Young even hosted a local dinner for the participants this year.

"It's nice for the writers to go out and talk to people who know the island well and can be emissaries for what it's like to live out here," Palmer said.

Every weekend during the colony, two industry professionals arrive on island to serve as advisors for the writers and to workshop their scripts. This year, the advisors included a representative from Scott Rudin Productions as well as Whit Stillman (the writerdirector of "Metropolitan," "Barcelona" and "The Last Days of Disco") and Dan Harris (the writer behind the screenplays for "X-Men 2" and "Superman Returns" as well as for the recently-announced untitled sequel to "Superman Returns" and the film adaptation to Orson Scott Card's sci-ficlassic "Ender's Game").

The colony tries to bring as diverse a group of advisors as possible to account for the eclectic interests and backgrounds of its participating screenwriters.

Documentarian and child of the world, Sophie Barthes attended the colony as the winner of the Showtime Tony Cox Award for Best Screenplay in a short film at the Nantucket Film Festival. At the festival, Barthes also won the Showtime Tony Cox Award for Best Feature Screenplay with "Cold Souls" - the script Barthes brought with her to the colony. "Cold Souls" is about a real actor (playing himself) who is having a spiritual crisis when he comes across an underground soul trafficking network that can steal one soul and replace it with another - the protagonist incurs this soul switching and must chase his spirit all the way to Eastern Europe. In the time it took for tree leaves to show signs of red on Nantucket, Barthes found a producer for her film while here.

John Henry Summerour attended the colony this year while in the process of making a transition from actor to writer. (A Tisch acting graduate, he made his debut as an impressionable boy in 2003's club kid murder docudrama "Party Monster.") A Georgia boy and son of a preacher man, Summerour has been working on a script that dramatizes recent reallife events in his home state. His script is the bildungsroman of a young boy living in a town affected by the revelation that a crematorium in the city has been throwing corpses into the woods instead of disposing of them properly.

NYU film school grad Jan Motskin is a writer/director who came all the way from Los Angeles with his script, an adaptation of a short story that follows a couple in their obsession with the husband's younger brother, who is not a good guy. The film is dark; Palmer likened it to "In the Bedroom."

At 24 years old, Los Angelino Ted Kupper is the youngest of the group but he is by no means unequal. A recent graduate from USC's School of Cinematic Arts, Kupper currently has a blind deal with Paramount Studios. The script he brought with him to Nantucket is called "Elements of Style." It's a fun, intelligent and fictional depiction of William Strunk, Jr. and E.B. White - authors of the eponymous and seminal grammar tome - and their relationship as it depicts the eternal struggle between form and style.

Though relatively new, the colony has already ushered its alumni to success. For example, a script that Palmer himself workshopped at the colony in 2003 (when he was just a resident) is going into production in January. Starring Ewan McGregor, Ben Kingsley and Tony award-winner Dan Fogler, the film revolves around a young Alfred Hitchcock and is being produced by independent financiers.

Though it seems removed, Nantucket has been a relatively reliable

place to create works that resonate with the mainland masses. The people behind the colony - including chair and founder John S. Johnson and boardmembers Kit Carson, Mitchell Lichtenstein and Jeffery Soros - intend for the colony to be steeped in Nantucket's tradition of fostering great writers, which include the likes of Herman Melville.

"There's an overall flavor and vibe on the island that's conducive to writing and creativity. As a community, it's a good place to go. It feels creative," said Palmer, who added that getting out of the city - away from emails and phone calls - is a necessary, but not unique, asset to our location.

"Being away, being isolated in a creative atmosphere of other likeminded people is the point. But it's also beautiful here. It's the right time of year, when the town is mostly local, you can see the leaves change and you can tell that fall is in the air," he said. "It makes you want to sit at your desk

and write." I

For more on the colony and its alumni, go to www.screenwriterscolony. org.