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Writers Guild to Honor ‘Doubt’ Writer and Committee to Protect Journalists |
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This weekend, the Writers Guild of America, East (WGAE) will present its highest awards to an international organization to protect the freedom of the press and to a playwright whose latest play became an Academy Award nominated movie.
The 61st Annual Writers Guild Awards will take place today simultaneously in New York City and in Los Angeles. John Oliver, correspondent on “The Daily Show With Jon Stewart,” will host the New York ceremony at the Hudson Theatre.
WGAE, which represents writers in motion pictures, television, cable, new media and broadcast news, will give its Evelyn F. Burkey Award to the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ). The award recognizes contributions that have brought honor and dignity to writers everywhere. CPJ is an independent nonprofit organization that promotes press freedom worldwide by defending the rights of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal.
Says WGAE President Michael Winship:
In a world where freedom of the press is so often suppressed and its practitioners threatened, even killed, the CPJ stands in defense of the lives and liberty of those writers around the planet who so valiantly struggle to bring us the truth.
Past recipients of the Burkey Award include: Walter Bernstein, Martin Scorsese, the Museum of Television & Radio, Vaclav Havel and David Brown.
Playwright John Patrick Shanley will receive the union’s Lifetime Achievement Award. An award-winning writer and director, Shanley has written extensively for film and the stage. His latest play, “Doubt,” which opened off-Broadway in 2004, became the first of his plays to transfer to Broadway and then to the screen. The screen adaptation of “Doubt,” written and directed by Shanley, has earned him 2009 Academy Award and Writers Guild Award nominations for best adapted screenplay.
Shanley’s other original screenplays include: “Five Corners,” “Moonstruck” (for which he won an Oscar and a Writers Guild Award), “The January Man” and “Joe Versus The Volcano,” which he also directed. “Five Corners” was awarded the Special Jury Prize for screenplay at the Barcelona Film Festival.
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