The Jumper of Maine Lands at The Reading

The distinguished Filmmakers’ Selection Committee of Ballroom Marfa (an innovative cultural arts space located in Marfa, Texas) has announced that 2010 Nicholl Fellowship winner Andrew Lanham’s screenplay, The Jumper of Maine, will be presented as a staged performance for The Reading, a venture of the Marfa film program which showcases emerging screenwriters.

Academy Award-winning screenwriter Diana Ossana (Brokeback Mountain), executive producer and screenwriter Andrew Marlowe (creator of TV’s “Castle”) and veteran agent and producer Robert Shapiro (Empire of the Sun) selected Lanham’s script from the group of 2010 Nicholl Fellowship winners. The Jumper of Maine will be featured in two performances of The Reading at the Crowley Theater on March 26, 2011 and will be helmed by Dallas-based veteran actor-director John S. Davies (“Friday Night Lights”). Bruce Davis, executive director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), says that the Academy is watching the inaugural program with interest and calls the Ballroom Marfa presentation, “a new and intriguing wrinkle in the Nicholl Fellowships.”

Lanham, hails from Bangor, Maine and is currently in his final year of the graduate MFA program at the University of Texas. During the 2010 Austin Film Festival, Lanham won both the Drama Screenplay competition as well as the Latitude Productions Screenplay Award. “I am truly delighted for The Jumper of Maine to have been selected for The Reading,” says Lanham. “It is an honor not only for my script to have been chosen for such a unique opportunity, but to be welcomed into the Marfa community as well.”

For more information, visit http://ballroommarfa.org.