Seeking good to reward

It began back in 1974, a low-key award ceremony no bigger than a Shriners convention held at the Sportsmen’s Lodge in the San Fernando Valley. Back then, the Humanitas Prize quietly honored television screenwriters who managed to do good while also doing well. Small cash prizes were handed out to reward scripts carrying progressive messages felt to advance mankind’s self-understanding and somehow encourage the golden rule: love thy neighbor.

This year, Humanitas’ 30th anniversary may be best remembered as something of an annus horribilis. Though there was good work to celebrate on Thursday -- when Steven Knight’s feature film “Dirty Pretty Things,” Tony Kushner’s adaptation of “Angels in America” for HBO and Barbara Hall’s TV drama “Joan of Arcadia,” among others, were recognized -- to hear it from some in the industry, Humanitas’ goal has never seemed more at odds with Hollywood’s commercially minded operating principles.

“It’s been a hard year for the prize,” said Father Frank Desiderio, president of the Humanitas board of directors, who acknowledged that submissions in many of the award categories dropped significantly in 2004.

“Reality television is pushing sitcoms and made-for-TV movies off the air, there’s no governing body encouraging children’s television to have a pro-social message, and action movies are pushing the more humanistic movies to the fringe.”

Humanitas began in an era best remembered for giving rise to socially redemptive yet entertaining fare such as “MASH” and “All in the Family.” Over the next three decades, the prize -- the brainchild of a charismatic and well-connected Roman Catholic priest turned television producer, Father Ellwood “Bud” Kieser -- grew to include feature film, indie movie and children’s categories.

Along the way it became, with the Oscar, Emmy and Writers Guild of America awards, one of screenwriting’s more prestigious prizes.

The big picture

The difficulty in finding Humanitas-worthy scripts reveals just how marginalized entertainment that explores positive depictions of human relationships has become.

“The Humanitas problems reflect the problems of the screenwriting community in general,” said Barbara Hall, one of the award’s television trustees, who, recusing herself as a judge this year, won in the 60-minute category for the pilot episode of “Joan of Arcadia.” “Dramatic and comedic programming are down. Reality programming is up. It’s a very different market -- and medium -- than in years past.”

At a ceremony held Thursday at the Hilton Universal hotel, $115,000 was handed out. The other 2004 Humanitas Prize category winners were: Sundance feature film, “Mean Creek”; 30 minutes, “The Bernie Mac Show”; children’s animation, “Little Bill”; and children’s live action, “Crown Heights.” Christopher Carlson, a Columbia University graduate film program student, received the 2004 David and Lynn Angell Humanitas Comedy Fellowship.

The 800-pound gorilla in the room, of course, is the popularity of unscripted dramas -- reality shows that rose this year to make up some 700 hours of programming, up from 500 in 2003.

“There are hundreds of hours of what would have been devoted to scripted programming that now are not,” said Daniel Petrie Jr., president of the Writers Guild of America, West. “Obviously, if there is less room in the overall universe for screenwriters, there is that much less room for quality.”

The migration to cable

For serious screenwriters, that’s especially problematic, several longtime writers said, considering that high-quality, character-driven dramas have migrated from the big screen mostly to premium cable channels such as HBO and Showtime, which tend to have only a handful of series at any time.

According to Desiderio, the continued scaling back of TV comedies and dramas has everything to do with executive pressure to observe the bottom line.

“It all has to do with economics,” he said. “It’s cheaper to do reality programming that’s going to build an audience than to do a one-off TV movie that costs $3 million to make and you’ve only got one night to sell the ad time for.”

In addition to taking work away from screenwriters, Desiderio believes reality TV is fundamentally at odds with Humanitas’ mission. “Much of [unscripted drama] is really dehumanizing,” he said.

“Rather than exalting or ennobling the person, it’s the theater of humiliation. It’s the opposite of what we’re giving the prize for.”

Bottom-line pressures reach far beyond the reality-TV world.

One of this year’s winners, Chris Nee, who wrote an episode of the children’s animation winner, “Little Bill,” lamented in her acceptance speech that Nickelodeon had pulled the show off the air because it didn’t have a toy tie-in. “Without a plush, it wasn’t worth having on the air,” she said.

‘Celebrate what’s right’

Prize organizer Chris Donohue, however, downplays the difficulty of this year’s nominee selection process, highlighting instead the positive effect the Humanitas Prize has on the community. “I would stop short of calling it a problem,” he says. “It has to be a very active process of soliciting material. We can’t be passive in doing it. What we try to do with Humanitas is celebrate what’s right with television rather than what’s wrong with it. We want to do encourage those writers who are doing good work.”

Alex Lasker, a screenwriter who has worked in television and the movie business for 27 years, takes the view that it has always been difficult to write social justice into popular entertainment.

“What’s that old Samuel Goldwyn quote? ‘If you want to send a message, call Western Union,’ ” said Lasker, who co-wrote “Tears of the Sun” and “Beyond Rangoon.” “There’s always been an edict out there: Don’t use my movie for messages. But there was a time in the ‘70s when we were allowed to do it and were better for it. Now we’ve gone back into the dark ages.”

Award organizers and trustees insist that even if these are bleak days for smart, humanistic TV and movie scripts, the effect of the awards remains undiminished. “The Humanitas Prize is as relevant today as it was 30 years ago,” Donohue said.

“If indeed it is harder to find people to honor, the prize becomes more relevant -- its import is only increased,” added “The Last Samurai’s” writer-director Edward Zwick, one of Humanitas’ board of directors and a two-time winner of the prize. “If anything, the impetus is to somehow increase the size of the prize and therefore its net and reach and luster. It’s about doing whatever one can to try to focus the attention of the artistic community on that work.”