For the second time, Cape Town writer Paul Ian Johnson has been selected into the Top Ten of Oscar-winner Francis Ford Coppola’s 6th Annual American Zoetrope Screenplay Contest. Johnson’s script A Tin of Paint made the cut in this year’s competition, while his screenplay The Last Marine was in the Top Ten in 2006, making him the first ever African finalist.
Johnson, who writes from home beat out 2,600 other entries and is now the first screenwriter to make the American Zoetrope Top Ten twice. A Tin of Paint was also a semi-finalist for the 2007 Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Nicholl Fellowship, Hollywood’s most important contest identifying the film industry’s best new writers.
A Tin of Paint recounts South Africa’s first anti-apartheid riot. The script deploys a multi-character approach in dramatically deconstructing the 1952 New Brighton uprising, a watershed rebellion against emerging apartheid repression, sparked by a misunderstanding over a tin of paint.
Johnson developed the screenplay speculatively, after being approached by Cape Town filmmaker Roy Zetisky. "Roy has spent the past decade piecing together witness accounts of the uprising," says Johnson. "This screenplay is very much driven by his longstanding passion to see it brought to screen."
A Tin of Paint has drawn positive industry and competition comment, with one US reader calling it "a skilful, morally complex dramatisation of a race riot, told with sincerity and urgency".
Zetisky is currently in the process of raising production finance for the film from local and foreign investors.
