USC Scripter Awards: ‘American Fiction’ and ‘Slow Horses’ Take Top Honors

The writers behind the feature American Fiction and the TV adaptation Slow Horses took home the top honors at the USC Scripter Awards, which honors the best adapted projects of the year. Both the original authors as well as the screenwriters share the award.

Author Percival Everett, whose 2001 novel Erasure inspired American Fiction, joined writer-director Cord Jefferson onstage. Jefferson praised Everett as a mentor and noted the author gave him a six-month option on the novel for free. He recalled reading Erasure in December 2020, amid the pandemic and after that summer’s Black Lives Matter demonstrations. “It felt like I was reading a book written specifically for me,” said Jefferson.

As for the TV winners, novelist Mick Herron, whose novel Real Tigers inspired TV creator Will Smith’s Slow Horses, accepted the honor, become the first to repeat two years in a row at the Scripters. Smith was busy working in Slow Horses and unable to attend, but asked Herron to read a short statement on his behalf: “This award is very important to me, because it also celebrates the author, without whom the show would not exist.”

In the film category, American Fiction topped fellow nominees Killers of the Flower Moon (Eric Roth and Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of David Grann’s book Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI); Oppenheimer (Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s book American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer); Origin (Ava DuVernay’s adaptation of Isabel Wilkerson’s book Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents); and Poor Things (Tony McNamara’s adaptation of Aliasdair Gray’s novel of the same name).

On the TV side, the episode of Apple TV+’s Slow Horses entitled “Negotiating with Tigers” won over an episode of Netflix’s The Crown called “Sleep, Dearie Sleep” (adapted by Peter Morgan from his his stage play The Audience); the episode of Amazon’s Daisy Jones and the Six entitled “Fire” (adapted by Scott Neustadter from the novel by Taylor Jenkins Reid); the episode of HBO Max’s The Last of Us entitled “Long, Long Time” (adapted by Neil Druckmann and Craig Mazin from the video game by Druckmann and Naughty Dog); and the episode of HBO Max’s Winning Time: The Rise of the Lakers Dynasty entitled “The New World” (adapted by Rodney Barnes, Max Borenstein and Jim Hecht from Jeff Pearlman’s book Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty of the 1980s).

The Scripter has predicted the best adapted screenplay Oscar multiple times, including for last year’s winner, Women Talking, as well as Schindler’s List, Sense and Sensibility, L.A. Confidential, A Beautiful Mind, No Country for Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire, The Social Network, The Descendants, Argo, 12 Years a Slave, The Imitation Game, The Big Short, Moonlight and Call Me by Your Name