MovieBytes Interview:
Screenwriter Ken Kristensen

An interview with screenwriter Ken Kristensen regarding the Nicholl Fellowships Writing Competition.

A: The Nicholl-winning script is OUT OF BREATH, which I co-wrote with Colin Marshall. It's an ensemble dramedy. Two estranged brothers, drawn together by their father's sudden illness, cross paths with a Mexican gambling addict on the run from the mob, and a old Jewish widower who's intent on dating a married woman. It's fun and funny, and sometimes dark. But it has a big heart, which I think holds all its parts together.

A: The Nicholl Fellowship is the premiere screenwriting contest in the country--I've wanted to enter it for years. OUT OF BREATH was also honored at Columbia University with the Ezra Litwak Award For Distinction in Screenwriting.

A: The Nicholl process is down to a science. They've been doing it for more than 20 years. Everything that was promised was delivered--and so much more.

A: One of the great things about the Nicholl Fellowship is that you get to meet the committee and ask them what they thought of the script. They are all big Hollywood players and their feedback is enormously valuable.

A: In the last three weeks, dozens of reps, producers and executives at studios have asked for OUT OF BREATH and my other scripts as a direct result of the publicity around the Nicholl win.

A: I was a journalist who got fed up with the magazine world and wrote a screenplay as a way of exercising my need to tackle a different kind of narrative. It was such a depressing-but-fulfilling experience. Depressing in the way the screenwriting process can be an emotional roller coaster. Fulfilling in that once you've nailed the story there's a real sense of personal growth. More-so than journalism, where the process can often be merely compiling a mass of facts with a few choice quotes. Anyway, after writing that initial script, I decided that screenwriting was where I wanted to take my career.

I dove head first into it by going to Columbia University's graduate film program. I graduated in May 2008. I've written eight feature scripts, two tv specs, and two graphic novels for Image Comics and Dark Horse Comics. Currently I'm also a producer on the shows JAIL and INSIDE AMERICAN JAIL (on MyNetwork and TruTV respectively).

A: I currently live in Los Angeles. I seem to be one of the few transplanted New Yorkers who loves LA.

A: A few weeks before the Nicholl Fellowship was announced I finished a big, fun action script, MISSING LINC. It's in the True Lies/Lethal Weapon tradition. When his ex-wife is abducted, the world's best bodyguard must break a Catholic priest out of jail and go south of the border to track down the Mexican Mafia kidnappers. My management company, Circle of Confusion, and my agency, Brant Rose, are taking it out.

As far as my future scripts...per the Nicholl Fellowship rules, I'm required to write a new script (or more) in the next twelve months-- I'm very very excited about that. The Nicholl administration will be tracking my progress and doling out the Fellowship money every few months. That script is an historical thriller, the story of the first FBI undercover operation. I'm going to have a first draft by March.

Posted Wednesday, December 3, 2008