Variety Creative Impact in Screenwriting Award: Andrea Berloff Brings Grit and Gripping Drama to Big Screen

variety.com:

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.” In 2019, Berloff made her directorial debut with “The Kitchen,” a gritty adaptation of the DC Comics’ graphic novel about gangsters’ wives in 1970s Hell’s Kitchen.

But while Berloff, Variety’s 2022 Creative Impact in Screenwriting honoree, has worked consistently — and on an impressive slate of high-profile feature films — since that inaugural script sale in 2003, navigating the entertainment biz as a woman has not been with- out its learning curves.

Berloff, who made a name for herself as a master of the female-driven period piece when starting out, knew that if she wanted to achieve enduring, long-term success as a Hollywood screenwriter, she needed “to write like a boy.” “I kind of looked around and was like, ‘there aren’t a lot of female-driven period