WGA Announces Feature Access Project Honorees

The Writers Guild of America, West has announced its 2014 Feature Access Project honorees, recognizing nine WGAW members who competed in the Guild’s diversity screenwriting program. This year’s FAP honorees and their screenplays are:

Radha Bharadwaj — Final Boarding

Soo-Hyun Chung — Faith

Q.Terah Jackson III — Rustin

Joy Kecken — All-In

Tianna Majumdar-Langham & Chris Bessounian — Guns and Saris

LaToya Morgan — Same River Twice

Nayan Padrai — Billion Dollar Raja

Galen Tong — The Monkey King

Coordinated by the WGAW Diversity Department, the Guild project seeks to identify outstanding diverse writers and make their scripts available to entertainment industry decision-makers, including producers, studio executives, agents and managers, to help raise their profile and generate potential employment opportunities. More information about the honorees and complete versions of their screenplays can be found here.

“I’m very proud to be associated with the WGAW’s Feature Access Project for its second year,” said FAP advisory committee member Doug Atchison (Akeelah and the Bee). “This outreach program addresses two critical challenges in the film business — the limited cultural scope of American movies and the chronic underemployment of writers of color.”

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“The WGAW Diversity Department is pleased to introduce this talented group of Feature Access Project honorees to the industry,” said WGAW director of diversity Kimberly Myers. “This program is one of the ways in which we have been working to expand access for our diverse feature writers.”

“Any kind of validation or success within the Writers Guild contains a huge seal of approval which — most importantly — the industry recognizes. So when the winners were announced, my representatives were able to contact executives who had met me and give them an update, which led to a fresh round of meetings. For instance, I got a meeting at HBO, which I doubt would have happened without FAP,” said 2012 FAP honoree Zak Shaikh, whose FAP-honored script, The Ignoble Rise of Lord Rex, was optioned last year after a production company learned about the Feature Access Project and read the script posted on the WGAW’s website.

For FAP consideration, qualified minority writers were asked to submit a current, feature-length, unproduced spec script. Entries were read and scored on a blind submission basis by a panel of judges comprised of WGAW members recruited by the FAP Advisory Committee.

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