2003 Award Recipient

Award-winning film and television writer John Gay will receive the rarely given Edmund H. North Award from the Writers Guild of America, west. The award will be presented at the 55th Annual Writers Guild Awards ceremony on Saturday, March 8, 2003.

"John Gay epitomizes what it means to be a great writer and a great member of the guild" said Victoria Riskin, President of the WGAw. "Not only is his body of work awe-inspiring, but he has given countless hours to the betterment of his fellow writers. It is with great pride we give him our highest honor, the Edmund H. North Award."

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 Christopher Knopf, in 2002.

John Gay, who began his career in early television, has previously received the guild's Television Laurel Award in 1984 for outstanding achievement as well as its Morgan Cox Award in 1992 for service to the guild, and the WGAw service award in 1982. One of his first television scripts was "The Sentry" for Lux Theatre, which brought him a Writers Guild Award nomination. With Terence Rattigan he wrote the screenplay for Separate Tables, which garnered him both a Writers Guild nomination and an Academy Award^® nomination.

Over the next few years, Gay alternated between screenplays and television writing, working on such diverse projects as Run Silent, Run Deep, the film version of The Courtship of Eddie's Father, Sometimes a Great Notion, The Court Martial of George Armstrong Custer, The Bunker, which received both Writers Guild and Emmy nominations, Kill Me If You Can, which received a WGA nomination, The Long Summer of George Adams, a Writers Guild Award nominee, and Fatal Vision, which also received WGA and Emmy nominations. Gay has also been nominated three times for the Edgar (Edgar Allen Poe) Award, in 1985 for Fatal Vision, in 1986 for Doubletake, and in 1993 for Burden of Proof.

Gay, a member of the WGAw since 1958, has served on the guild's board of directors as an alternate from 1961 to 63, as a board member twice (1971-75, 1977-79) and as vice president from 1985 to 1987. Beginning in the early 1960s, Gay has served on more than two dozen guild committees, including the screen grievance committee (1962-73), TV-Film negotiating (1966), membership and finance (1967-68, 1979-81), Working Rule #8 disciplinary (1972-75), screen credits (1973-2002), strike planning (1980-81), and many others. He has been an officer of the guild's pension plan and its health fund, has held several positions, including president and vice president, of the guild's credit union, and has been a trustee of the Writers Guild Foundation.

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 and early 1950s, he worked on Flamingo Road, starring Joan Crawford, and the biography of Bix Beiderbecke, Young Man With a Horn, with a young Kirk Douglas, plus the science fiction classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. Then North 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.