A NICHOLL’S WORTH OF FELLOWSHIPS

The late Don Nicholl was an English writer-producer who worked with creator Johnny Speight on a television series called “Till Death Do Us Part,” which Norman Lear translated into an American landmark called “All in the Family.”

Nicholl came to Hollywood to join Lear, was executive producer of “All in the Family” for a season and became co-creator and co-producer of “The Jeffersons” and a lesser series called “The Dumplings.” The series prospered, and so did Nicholl.

Six years ago Nicholl and his wife Gee decided, as she said at a luncheon this week, “to put back into the business some of the money we’d made in the business.” They established fellowships in Julian Blaustein’s graduate screenwriting course at Stanford.

Meanwhile Don Nicholl died, but he and his wife had been so pleased by the fellowships that Gee Nicholl decided to widen the program through the Motion Picture Academy, in Don’s memory. Blaustein, now retired from Stanford, headed the selection committee. Applications this first year were limited to California undergraduates and graduate students in screenwriting. The prize was alluring, a $20,000 no-strings stipend for each of three winners, enabling them to work on their projects for a year, at least, free of naggling financial worries. There were 99 applicants.

“In our young days, you could exist very cheaply on coffee and doughnuts,” Gee Nicholl says. “Don was a newspaperman. He’d run away from home at 16 to join a small paper, doing the kind of thing where you interview survivors about how they feel. He was making very little, but our rent was only 30 shillings a week which was then--what?--not $5 a week. But coffee and doughnuts are very expensive these days, and let’s not even think what the rent is.”

The first three fellowship winners met Gee Nicholl at a lunch on Tuesday. They are Jeffrey Eugenides of Stanford and Allison Anders and Dennis Clontz, both of UCLA, chosen on the basis of work submitted and descriptions of the film they plan to write. They prove that three is a cross section.

Allison Anders didn’t start college until she was 28 and had two daughters, now 12 and 9. She was born in Ashland, Ky., but has lived in Los Angeles 17 years. She worked as a production assistant on Wim Wenders’ “Paris, Texas,” and plans a script, “Triple Crown,” set at a race track.

Dennis Clontz, who came to Hollywood with his family when he was 7, began as a playwright, and his work has been produced at local Equity-Waiver theaters. He has taught at UCLA and held a clerical job at The Times to underwrite the coffee and doughnuts. His script proposal involves the contemporary rodeo world.

“I’ve worked, just to buy the time to write,” Clontz says, “and I was gearing up to work again. I think the fellowship can cut three to five years off that process of slogging along and trying to get good while you’re also trying to stay alive.”

Jeffrey Eugenides, originally from Detroit, graduated magna cum laude from Brown, where he did a lot of writing and acting. “I wanted to be an actor,” he says. “My family thought that was crazy. I wanted to be a writer, and they didn’t think that was crazy. I think they were right.” He got his master’s from Stanford last spring. “I knew what I wanted to do, but not what to do to make a living. Write ads? About prunes, maybe. Then the telegram came from the Academy, and I thought, ‘No prunes.’ ”

He had submitted a short story and the script of a “Hill Street Blues” episode, and is writing a screenplay about some young people in that painful period between college and career.

Eventually, the Nicholl Fellowship program will be open to new writers nationally. Next year, writers will be eligible who live in Texas, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey and the New England states, as well as California.

“I feel like an athlete who’s been in training for years,” Dennis Clontz says, “then you finally get a chance to stretch your muscles and go all out.”

Whether the freedom to work around the clock without fretting over a paycheck will produce an Oscar or splendid grosses or both somewhere down the road is anybody’s guess. But it’s an enviable chance to go for it.

“All we want them to do is write, write, write,” Mrs. Nicholl says.

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“All in the Family” was based on the British series, “Till Death Us Do Part,” (the correct name) not on a series called “Till Death Do Us Part.”

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