The Superior Express -

The first copies of a soon to be released book arrived this week at the author’s home in Superior. Lew Hunter, the retired chairman of the University of California at Los Angles (UCLA) film and screen writing department, will soon have a new book available for those interested in screen writing. The book features transcripts from 22 Oscar winning screenwriters.

A Southern Nebraska native, Hunter is an American screenwriter, author and educator and chairman emeritus and professor of screenwriting at the UCLA Department of Film and Television. More than half of the Oscar-winning scripts written in the past 20 years have been written by his former students.

As a screen writing professor, he invited many of those award winning writers to speak to his classes. Their lectures and interviews were tape recorded and with the help of Meg Gifford the recordings have been turned into a book of more than 500 pages.

Gifford is also a screenwriter and author. She won the Samuel Goldwyn award, the Sloan Science writing award and every showcase while under Hunter’s advisement.

The book titled, “Naked Screen Writing” will go on sale March 13. It will be available in bookstores and via Amazon. It is published by Rowman & Littlefield.

Hunter’s first book, Screen Writing 434, has sold more than 70,000 copies.

About this latest book, Alexander Payne said, “Novice and professional screenwriters alike can find advice and solace from this marvelous collection of interviews. Lew is a master teacher and this book extends his work in the classroom to us all.”

Contributors include Francis Ford Cappola, Bruce Joel Rubin, William Goldman, Julius Epstein, Alexander Payne, Jim Taylor, Alfred Uhry, Oliver Stone, Irving Ravetch, Harriet Frank Jr., Tom Schulman, Ted Tally, Ruth Prawer, Jhabvala, Ernest Lehman, Eric Roth, Jean-Claude Carriere, Frank Pierson, David Ward, Horton Foote, Ron Bass, Alan Ball, Callie Khouri, Robert Benton and Billy Wilder.