A California
native, movie
buff, and Jeopardy! contestant, writer Nicholas Thurkettle
graduated
from Bradley University
in 1999 with degrees in Theatre and Music and a Global Scholar option
from a
semester of study in the U.K.
At BU he
worked on dozens of shows as actor, director, composer/songwriter, and
a
variety of technical positions, and served as a member and chapter
president of
honorary theatrical fraternity Alpha Psi Omega. But his greatest
success came
through writing. Three of his original scripts were produced, and his
one-act Between
3 and 4 won awards from BU's Creative Expo and the Kennedy Center's
American College Theatre Festival.
KC/ACTF
also awarded Thurkettle a prize for theatrical criticism two
consecutive years.
He honed those skills writing hundreds of popular feature articles for
the
arts/entertainment sections of both school newspaper The Bradley
Scout
and city paper The Peoria Journal Star. Coupled with a film
criticism
award from the Illinois College Press Association, it earned him a
prestigious
fellowship from the National Critics Institute to attend the 1999
National
Playwrights' Conference at the O'Neill Center in Waterford, Connecticut.
Following
the conference, Thurkettle settled in Hollywood,
getting his foot in the industry door in the fall of 1999 through an
internship
for producer J. Todd Harris
at
then-named Davis Entertainment Classics. At first balancing the
internship with
freelance reading for Jaffe/Braunstein Films, Thurkettle soon parlayed
it into
a full-time staff job.
Over the
next four years as Davis Classics evolved into Davis Filmworks,
Thurkettle
progressed from intern to Story Analyst to Story Editor to Creative
Executive
to Director of Development, working on such films as Artisan /
Alliance-Atlantis's 29 Palms, Regent / Telefilm's
festival
sensation Burial Society, and Artisan
/ Splendid's Devil's Pond.
In fall 2003,
Thurkettle followed Harris to IPW Productions to serve as Director of
Development and head of the story internship program. In that capacity
he drafted
story treatments based on IPW's massive catalog of re-make and
adaptation
rights and used his extensive familiarity with the video game and comic
book
worlds to identify and secure promising new titles. He worked
one-on-one with
writers through an intensive process of notes to fine-tune their
screenplays
and treatments and stayed closely involved with the creative process
from
conception all the way through delivery.
In early
2004 he celebrated his first screenplay sale, independent
financier/producer
Room 9 Entertainment purchased his dark comedy Queen Lara.
A director and casting director are now attached and
Room 9 is eyeing a late spring/early summer 2006 start date. He is also
presently developing the thriller pitch Spook
Tour for New Wave Entertainment, an MGM-based production company.
In January
of 2005 Thurkettle left IPW to pursue a writing career full-time. In
June he
produced and directed a staged reading of his second full-length play,
the
ensemble comedy Hotel Chicago, at the
Ruby Theatre in Hollywood.
His sixth screenplay is ready for the spec market and will be submitted
in
January of 2006, and he has a first draft of his seventh and is hard at
work on
his eighth. He has also written numerous 10-minute plays, monologues,
and
feature treatments; and publishes photos, movie reviews, travel
stories, and
humorous columns about pop culture and life in Los Angeles on his weblog The Theory
of Chaos.
He was a
featured panelist at the 2001 Willamette Writers Conference in Portland, Oregon,
a regular guest lecturer at Columbia College of Chicago's Semester in
LA's pogram, and has judged for both UCLA's MFA Screenwriting
Competition
and the
Nicholl Fellowship. He is also the designer and primary lecturer for a
revolutionary and award-winning Internet II undergraduate screenwriting
course
at Cal State LA and his alma mater, Bradley, videoconferencing his
lectures
live to classrooms in two different states.
He is a proud
member of the Writers Guild of America and is represented by Melissa Read at the Read Agency. He lives
in Hollywood
with his cat, Nessie.
Current
as of December
2005
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