Variety Creative Impact in Screenwriting Award: Andrea Berloff Brings Grit and Gripping Drama to Big Screen
Malina Saval Associate Editor, Features In the late 1990s, after teaching herself screenplay structure by way of reading Viki King’s seminal go-to manual “How to Write a Movie in 21 Days,” Andrea Berloff emerged with her first feature script titled “Liberty,” a comedy set in a small-town Ohio dart tournament. “I had no idea at that point that there were three acts in a movie — I’d never had a class in it,” says Berloff, who cut her teeth as a theater major at Cornell U., poring over Greek tragedies and Shakespeare’s dramas. And while “very few people read that script,” the friends who gave “Liberty” a look served as “encouragement to keep writing,” says Berloff, who would go on to option her second, the biopic “Harry and Caresse” to Fine Line (the then-specialty division of New Line) in 2003, pen the Oliver Stone drama “World Trade Center” and net an Academy Award nomination for co-writ- ing, with Jonathan Herman, the 2015 N.W.A origin story “Straight Outta Compton.”