2002 Award Recipient

Award-winning television writer Christopher Knopf will receive the rarely-given Edmund H. North Award from the Writers Guild of America, west. The Award will be presented at the 54th Annual Writers Guild Awards ceremony on Sunday, March 2, 2002.

"Few have given as much of their time and devotion as Christopher Knopf," said Victoria Riskin, President of the WGAw. "I am proud to announce that he is the recipient of the Edmund H. North Award. Because of his efforts on behalf of Guild members for the past 40 years, working screen and television writers face a brighter future."

The Edmund H. North Award is given to writers whose courageous leadership, strength of purpose and continuing selfless activity in behalf of the Guild through the years—as well as professional achievement of the highest order—have served to establish the Writers Guild of America as a pillar of strength and security for writers throughout the world. Past recipients include Mary McCall Jr., Charles Brackett and Richard Breen, Randall MacDougall, Daniel Taradash and John Furia Jr. The last person to receive the North Award was Frank Pierson, in 1999.

Knopf, who has received three Writers Guild Awards for his television writing, has written, among many others, the television movies Scott Joplin: King of Ragtime (for which he received a Writers Guild Award), Mrs. Sundance, The Girl Who Spelled Freedom, Baby Girl Scott, and the miniseries Peter and Paul. He wrote the pilot episode for the classic 1970s television series The Big Valley. Knopf received a Christopher Award for The Girl Who Spelled Freedom (1986), a Humanitas nomination for Not My Kid (1985), an Edgar Allen Poe Special Award for Cold Night’s Death (1973), an NAACP Image Award as co-executive producer of Equal Justice (1990) and Emmy nominations for The Girl Who Spelled Freedom and Loudmouth (1958).

Knopf joined the Guild in 1950, while it was still the Screen Writers Guild. He was President of the Writers Guild of America, west from 1965 to 1967, National Chairman of the Writers Guild of America from 1967 to 1969 and, for the same years, Vice President of the International Writers Guild. Over the years, Knopf has served on many Guild committees, including MBA Enforcement (member 1956-60), Screen Credits (member 1957-62, 1990-2000), TV Credits (vice-chair 1961-62 and 1969), Screen Grievance and Disciplinary (member 1959-64), Agent Writer (member 1963-65, 1972-73), Producer/Writer Cooperative (member 1970-72), Affirmative Action (chair 1978-81), Strike Planning & Service (member 1980-81), Officers Nominating (member 1987, 1991, 1995, 1997, 199, 2001, chair 1993), and Credits Review (1989, 1994-96). In addition, he was a trustee of the Pension & Health from 1979 to 1981, Vice President of the Writers Guild Foundation from 1979 to 1989, and a trustee of the Motion Picture Relief Fund from 1957 to 1959. Knopf received the Morgan Cox Award in 1991.

Edmund H. North, long-time Guild activist, began his screenwriting career in 1934, co-writing operatic musicals for Grace Moore and Lily Pons. In the 1940s, he worked on Flamingo Road, starring Joan Crawford, and the biography of Bix Beiderbecke, Young Man With a Horn, with a young Kirk Douglas. By the 1950s and ‘60s North had turned his attention to war films, writing Sink the Bismark!, Damn the Defiant, and his most famous script, Patton, in 1970, co-written with Francis Ford Coppola—for which he and Coppola shared an Academy Award. He died in August of 1990, at which time the Founders Award was named for him.