William Monahan's second produced screenplay was The Departed, a film that earned him a Writers Guild of America Award and Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.
21 Facts About William Monahan
2.
William Monahan attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he studied Elizabethan and Jacobean drama.
3.
William Monahan moved to New York City and contributed to the alternative weekly newspaper New York Press and the magazines Talk, Maxim, and Spy.
4.
In 1997 Monahan won a Pushcart Prize for his short story "A Relation of Various Accidents Observable in Some Animals Included in Vacuo".
5.
William Monahan was an editor at Spy during the magazine's final years, where he would come in at the close of the monthly issue to rewrite articles and improve jokes.
6.
In 1999 Talk magazine debuted, and William Monahan contributed a travelogue on Gloucester, Massachusetts, to the first issue.
7.
William Monahan met with Scott to discuss Tripoli, and Scott mentioned his desire to direct a film about knights.
8.
William Monahan suggested the Crusades as a setting, reasoning that "you've got every conceivable plot imaginable there, which is far more exotic than fiction".
9.
Tripoli was eventually shelved, but William Monahan retained ownership of the screenplay and therefore the right to consider new offers at a later date.
10.
William Monahan steadily secured work in the film industry throughout the 2000s.
11.
Brad Pitt's production company, Plan B, hired William Monahan to write an adaptation of Hong Kong director Andrew Lau's gangster film Infernal Affairs.
12.
William Monahan had negotiated a production write-through contract for Kingdom of Heaven, which allowed him to be present on the movie sets to make modifications to the shooting script during production.
13.
William Monahan's second produced screenplay was The Departed, an adaptation of the Hong Kong action film Infernal Affairs.
14.
William Monahan used his intimate knowledge of the way Bostonians talk and act, learned from his youth spent in the many neighborhoods of Boston, to create characters that The Boston Globe described as distinctly indigenous to the city.
15.
William Monahan was honored by The Boston Society of Film Critics with the award for best screenplay, by the Chicago Film Critics Association for best adapted screenplay, and by the Southeastern Film Critics Association with another best adapted screenplay award.
16.
William Monahan took an unusual route for a screenwriter and hired a publicist to run a campaign promoting his screenplay during awards season.
17.
William Monahan ended up winning two Best Adapted Screenplay awards for The Departed, from the Writers Guild of America and the Academy Awards.
18.
William Monahan received an award for his writing in film at the US-Ireland Alliance's second annual "Oscar Wilde: Honoring Irish Writing in Film" ceremony.
19.
In 2006 William Monahan negotiated a first-look producing deal with Warner Bros.
20.
In 2007 William Monahan was hired to work on two film projects: an adaptation of the Hong Kong film Confession of Pain and an original rock and roll film, The Long Play.
21.
William Monahan was initially assigned to executive produce and write the adaptation for Confession of Pain, under production by Leonardo DiCaprio's company, Appian Way, for Warner Bros.