The screenwriters and authors behind Paul Thomas Anderson‘s One Battle After Another and Netflix’s limited series Death By Lightning were named winners Saturday night at the 38th USC Libraries Scripter Awards.
The USC honor is given to a work’s original author and the writer of the adapted screenplay.
On the film side, Anderson and original author Thomas Pynchon took the trophy for Anderson’s multifaceted crime drama One Battle After Another inspired by Pynchon’s 1990 novel. It marks the latest kudos for the script, which won at the Golden Globes and Critics Choice awards and was one of the film’s 13 Oscar nominations.
Anderson and Pynchon were previously nominated by the USC Scripters in 2014 for Inherent Vice, written and directed by Anderson and based on Pynchon’s 2009 novel.
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The One Battle script won out over fellow nominees from the films Frankenstein, Hamnet, Peter Hujar’s Day and Train Dreams.
In the episodic series category, screenwriter Mike Makowsky and author Candice Millard won for Death by Lightning, based on Millard’s nonfiction book Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine, and the Murder of a President. The four-episode Netflix series centered on the events that led to the assassination of President James Garfield (Michael Shannon) by Charles Guiteau (Matthew Macfadyen).
It topped a list of nominees that included the scribes and authors behind Dark Winds, Death by Lightning, Dept. Q, Slow Horses and Wolf Hall: The Mirror and the Light.
Tonight’s ceremony, a black-tie event emceed by USC Libraries dean Melissa Just at the university’s Town and Gown ballroom, also saw crime writer Michael Connelly accept the USC Libraries Scripter Literary Achievement Award. Titus Welliver, who played Connelly’s iconic police detective character Harry Bosch on Prime Video’s Bosch and a pair of spinoffs, presented the honor.