2006 Tribeca/Sloan Screenplay Development Program

At 42, Mark Williams, a doleful astronomy teacher, finds himself restless in his marriage and sick to death of his work. As the demolition date of his beloved Hayden Planetarium draws near, Mark becomes increasingly lost in the tedium of daily routines and small disappointments. But when an unexpected romance with a young, single mother suddenly springs up, his perspective on life begins to change. Written with unflinching naturalism and sharp-edged humor, “The Starry Messenger” explores the vast highs and lows of human existence, and shows just how easily life can be obscured by everyday encroachments and practical details.

KENNETH LONERGAN is an internationally acclaimed screenwriter and playwright. Several of his plays have had fabulous runs in New York, including Lobby Hero (Playwrights Horizons and the John Houseman Theatre), which received a Drama Desk Best Play nomination; The Waverly Gallery (Williamstown Theatre Festival, Promenade), which was a 2001 Pulitzer Prize runner-up; and This Is Our Youth, also a Drama Desk Best Play nominee. As for his work in film, Lonergan co-wrote Gangs of New York, which lead to his first Academy-Award® nomination. His film You Can Count on Me, which he wrote and directed, was nominated for an Academy Award®, and won a handful of other awards, including the Sundance 2000 Grand Jury Prize, the NY Film Critics Circle, and the AFI award for Best Film and Best New Writer. He is currently in post-production on his film Margaret, which he also wrote and directed.

Our Signature Selection, Kenneth Lonergan’s “The Starry Messenger,” is receiving scientific mentorship from Dr. Mark R. Chartrand, former director of the Hayden Planetarium as Kenneth adapts his Broadway-bound play to the screen for our program.

Challenger by Nicole Perlman examines the role that Nobel Laureate Richard Feynman played in the investigation of the Challenger space shuttle explosion. Motivated by his uneasy conscience at his participation in the Manhattan Project, Feynman is determined to ensure that there will be no institutional cover up of the negligence and ambition that led to the tragic explosion. Challenger uses the investigation as an opportunity to humanize the famously eccentric physicist.

NICOLE PERLMAN, 25, graduated with honors from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts with a double-major in Dramatic Writing and Film/Television Production. While in school, she interned at Pangolin Pictures documentary house, and in London with the BBC’s hit soap opera, EastEnders. In 2001, Nicole’s first feature-length screenplay Challenger won the NYU Sloan Grant for Science in Film. It went on to win first place in the 2003 Splendid Pictures/Script Magazine Open Door Contest. She was a finalist for the 2003 Screenwriter’s Forum Contest and won second place in the 2004 Applause Screenplay Competition. Nicole’s current projects include Capture the Flag, a space-race adventure drama being developed for Andrew Lauren Productions, and the synthetic diamond techno-thriller Carbon 13, also being developed in collaboration with Contrafilms.

I grew up listening to stories about Richard Feynman long before I even knew what theoretical physics meant. My family’s friends, some of whom studied under Feynman at Caltech, each have a favorite Feynman story to tell. Part rebel, part showman, and all genius, he is a man of incontestable zeal and accomplishment — a script could have been written about any one year of his life. For me Feynman’s greatest legacy was his infinite curiosity and his stubborn refusal to accept established truths, not just in the Challenger investigation, but in the laws that make up the physical world. He taught us not just how to question, but why it is imperative to our society.

Challenger is in the process of a re-write. Nicole’s science advisor is former NASA head Dr. Robert Frosch, and her film industry mentor is Janet Roach, who wrote the screenplays for Prizzi’s Honor and Mr. North. Nicole was named one of Variety’s Ten Screenwriters to Watch in June 2006. Nicole has also been hired to do an adaptation of Marina Palmer’s memoir Kiss and Tango for Fox 2000 and Sandra Bullock.

Dan Zeff’s Project Mustard is a comic imagining of what the British entry into the 1960s race for the moon between Russia and the U.S.A. might have looked like. Inspired by a British prototype vehicle that foreshadowed the current Space Shuttle design, Project Mustard harkens back to the legendary post-war British comedies. Eccentric characters, self-deprecating humor, and innocent romance propel this combination of comedy and rocket science.

DAN ZEFF’s standout short films That Sunday (starring Alan Cumming and Minnie Driver) and Dual Balls both won BAFTA nominations. Coping with Christmas, Zeff’s comic look at the holidays from a child’s perspective, won two BAFTAs and a Writer’s Guild award. Projects that Zeff has directed for the BBC include Sweetnight Goodheart (also written by Zeff), which premiered at Edinburgh and sold to HBO; the hit wedding comedy series The Worst Week of My Life; and Ideal, a comedy about a drug dealer starring Johnny Vegas. His drama Out of the Ashes, about the effect of foot and mouth disease on a family farm, was nominated for BAFTA and Royal Television Society awards. Zeff is currently directing the legendary Dr. Who, revived and reinvented for the new millennium. Zeff continues to work with some of the best writing and acting talent in the UK, including Russell T. Davies (Queer as Folk), Simon Pegg (Shaun of the Dead), and Martin Freeman (The Office).

It was a magical idea that developed from a newspaper article about the real Project Mustard, and a fascination with an era when rocket science had an enormously powerful hold on the world’s imagination and the sky really wasn’t the limit…The mixture of spiritual longing, practical ingenuity, and obsessive eccentricity, along with something quintessentially British in the whole doomed amateurishness of the project, really appealed. And it felt like an ideal scenario in which to write a really compelling, deeply human comedy.

— Dan Zeff (Writer/Director)

Project Mustard was born out of a newspaper article about how Britain had all the technology and engineering expertise to enter the space race, but no political will and consequently no real funding. We took that as a “what if?” jumping-off point. The idea of the U.K. competing with the superpowers to put a man on the moon seemed very silly, but no less dramatic for that. We could invent as much as we wanted, but the characters and the science always needed to be based in “a” reality. We wanted the audience to buy into whatever logic we created, leaving “history” outside the theatre. I’m a big fan of films where the writing and direction make you forget what you know to be incontestable truth.

— Andrew Bendel (Producer)

Zeff and producer Andrew Bendel are set to begin work on a new draft of their screenplay Project Mustard with UK writer Matthew Broughton. Former astronaut Dr. Jay Apt is serving as science advisor for the re-write.

Screenwriter, novelist, actor and television writer/producer Tom Leopold, who has written for Seinfeld, Cheers, Will and Grace, Ellen, Caroline in the City, and Hope and Faith, among many other projects, will serve as the screenwriting mentor for Project Mustard.