Margaret Nagle (Boardwalk Empire, The Red Band Society) will receive the Writers Guild of America’s 2015 Paul Selvin Award for her The Good Lie screenplay.
Named after the WGA’s late general counsel, the Selvin Award honors scripts that “best embod[y] the spirit of the constitutional and civil rights and liberties that are indispensable to the survival of free writers everywhere.” Nagle will be feted at a ceremony on Feb. 14.
Released last fall, The Good Lie co-stars Reese Witherspoon as a no-nonsense, just-get-it-done type who helps three Sudanese refugees (the film’s protagonists) adjust to life in America and reunite their family.
“Margaret Nagle’s script for The Good Lie raises profound issues of resilience and survival in the face of unspeakable atrocities,” said WGAW president Christopher Keyser. “The struggles of the Lost Boys of Sudan in her film remind us how desperately all human beings strive for freedom. But what makes Nagle’s screenplay particularly heart-wrenching is that the civil war in Sudan was a humanitarian crisis of epic proportion, and yet many people were not even aware of it. In shining a light on the Lost Boys, Nagle illuminates their struggle for freedom and the paradoxical complexity of adjusting to it in the foreign culture of America.”
“Writing The Good Lie brought me face to face with the very highest and lowest parts of the human spirit, as well as the remarkable humanitarian organizations who risk their lives on a daily basis, and the Lost Boys and Girls themselves, who I am honored to call my friends,” Nagle commented. “To be a member of a guild that recognizes the fundamental importance of human rights means everything to me. I’m forever grateful to the WGA West and to everything Paul Selvin did to help this guild realize those rights.”
[via Variety]
