Final Draft Awards Give Writing Contenders a Wee Push IndieWire 3/3/2021
Every day on the set of “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” Sacha Baron Cohen, in the spirit of collaborative filmmaking, gave his director Aaron Sorkin ideas for cool things to stick into his screenplay. And every day, Sorkin politely said, “No.”
Sorkin likes to say that he’s already thought of everything as he paced around his office, acting out all the lines his characters are going to say. And after 10 years in the making, “The Trial of the Chicago 7” (Paramount/Netflix) is certainly deserving of the first ever Zeitgeist Final Draft Award for “a writer whose work consistently captures the mood of our time,” said presenter Baron Cohen.
But it’s what the series does with that premise that stands out. Youssef and his co-creators Ari Katcher and Ryan Welch bring a freshness to it that we haven’t seen before, which sets the series apart from anything else around.
Ramy lives in northern New Jersey with his parents Maysa and Farouk (Hiam Abbass and Amr Waked) and his younger sister Dena (May Calamawy),who couldn’t be less like the cliché of the dutiful Muslim daughter.
It’s less a series about a first generation American Muslim trying to negotiate a society rife with racism and suspicion of Muslims (although that does crop up, particularly in an episode that flashes back to 9/11) than about him trying to fit comfortably into his own skin.
It was an uneven fourth season for Noah Hawley s FX anthology: The show was still driven by an unequaled ensemble, exemplary period production values and clever dialogue, but struggled to bring its two-dozen main characters and myriad thematic swings together in its tale of organized crime in 1950s Kansas City. But for one episode, written by Hawley and Lee Edward Colston II and directed by Michael Uppendahl,
Fargo was in absolute top form. East/West did away with the sprawling cast other than Rodney L. Jones III s Satchel and Ben Whishaw s Rabbi to tell a quirky black-and-white road trip that touched on