New York University has revealed its 2024 picks for its Black List-inspired Purple List of the best production-ready screenplays from Tisch School of the Arts graduate film students and recent alumni.
The four screenplays, selected via a blind reading process by industry insiders, are Blue Comedy by Vincent Lee Accettola, Little Phnom Penh by Chheangkea, Rubber Hut by Hanna Gray Organschi and Satoshi by Sara Crow and David Rafailedes.
Blue Comedy follows a celebrity comedian who recently came out of the closet who returns to the Boston stand-up scene to mentor a straight comedian for whom he’s developed feelings. Little Phnom Penh explores a Cambodian woman’s personal desires and changing family roles over two decades and between the U.S. and Cambodia after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime. Rubber Hut centers around a former ex-Pam Am stewardess who opens a drive-thru condom shop in her Italian Catholic town in 1992 Rhode Island, making her both a target of backlash and a hero. Satoshi is “the potentially true story” of the founder of Bitcoin.
Prominent filmmakers whose work was included on past editions of the Purple List, now in its 13th year, include Chloé Zhao (Nomadland, Eternals), Judas and the Black Messiah‘s Shaka King, Cathy Yan (Succession, Dead Pigs, Birds of Prey), Desiree Akhavan (Appropriate Behavior, The Miseducation of Cameron Post) and The Starling Girl’s Laurel Parmet.
Sixteen scripts from past editions of the list, founded by alumni Ashim Bhalla and Shandor Garrison and faculty member John Tintori, have gone into production.
This year’s winners were selected by a panel of producers, agents, managers, screenwriters, directors, cinematographers and editors representing organizations like WME, UTA, Verve, Paradigm, Gersh, Searchlight, Anonymous Content, Sony Pictures Classics, Roadside Attractions, Cinetic Media and The Sundance Institute.
More information about each of this year’s screenplays, provided by the Purple List team, follows.
BLUE COMEDY by Vincent Lee Accettola – DRAMATIC COMEDY A recently uncloseted celebrity comedian returns to the Boston stand-up scene to mentor an aspiring straight comic for whom he’s hastily developed feelings.
LITTLE PHNOM PENH by Chheangkea – DRAMA Spanning two ever-changing decades and continents following the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, a Cambodian woman in Phnom Penh grapples with her own deep personal desires and her evolving familial roles as a hopeful daughter, a watchful wife, and eventually, a single mother in America.
RUBBER HUT by Hanna Gray Organschi – COMEDIC DRAMA Rhode Island, 1992. An entrepreneurial ex-Pan Am stewardess opens a drive-thru condom shop in her Italian Catholic town. Overnight, Emanuella DelVecchio becomes the local lightning rod, a radical hero to the neighborhood teens and an unlikely threat to her tight-knit community.
SATOSHI by Sara Crow & David Rafailedes – COMEDY The potentially true story of a teenage anime-obsessed hacktivist who, after losing her scholarship to Stanford, returns home to Arizona to become the mysterious inventor of a new digital currency called Bitcoin.
