A Killer Script From San Quentin

Four of the five winners of an industry-sponsored screenwriting contest for ethnic minority writers are expected to attend an awards ceremony Thursday at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood.

The fifth will be sitting on San Quentin’s death row.

Kenneth Gay is serving a death sentence at the penitentiary north of San Francisco for having murdered Los Angeles police officer Paul Verna in the Lake View Terrace district during a routine traffic stop in 1983.

At the time, Gay and a companion, Raynard Cummings, were on parole and implicated in 13 violent robberies in the San Fernando Valley when they were pulled over by Verna.

Prosecutors said the men were afraid that Verna would arrest them. Each defendant said the other did the shooting, but prosecutors said Cummings fired the first shot at Verna, then handed the gun to Gay, who pumped five more bullets into the officer’s body. The convictions of the two men were upheld on April 29 by the state Supreme Court.

When Gay submitted a script he wrote in prison to the Writers Workshop for contest consideration, Willard Rodgers, founder and director of the organization, said that he was surprised at the degree of humanity in the story. He said that Gay’s selection as one of the five winners in no way meant that the workshop was condoning the violence of Gay’s past.

His script, titled “A Children’s Story,” was picked from among 170 submissions from across the nation. The story deals with nine children--all with mental or physical deformities--who are lost in a forest when the bus they are riding is involved in an accident and their leader is mauled by a bear. The kids then have to find their way back to safety and in the process of helping each other are surprised at what they can achieve.

It’s the first time in the five years of the workshop’s contest--which is sponsored by Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Entertainment, Quincy Jones Productions, Carsey-Werner Co., Norman Jewison, MCA/Universal, Dan Petrie Jr., Sony Pictures Entertainment and Oliver Stone--that someone in prison has won the award.

“It’s uplifting and it teaches the value of cooperation among people,” Rodgers said. “There’s not one bit of violence in the script.”

Rodgers said that there are actually inquiries about next year’s contest from four other people on death row in other states. “I’m baffled by this,” he said, musing why someone with Gay’s background would write a screenplay “that has such a positive message.”

In a telephone interview, Gay’s wife, Janice, said it was unlikely that her husband would return a Times request for an interview. In words that may shock some in Hollywood, she said: “He doesn’t want any publicity.”