Nicholas Thurkettle

Nicholas Thurkettle has worn many hats in the creative world – screenwriter, playwright, novelist, journalist, editor, ghostwriter, stage producer/director, feature film story executive and consultant, teacher, production crew member. He works independently in Los Angeles with the continuing goal of bringing good work to audiences anywhere he can find them.

Thurkettle graduated from Bradley University in 1999 with degrees in Theatre and Music and a Global Scholar option from a semester of study in the U.K. At BU he worked on dozens of plays and served as chapter president of honorary theatrical fraternity Alpha Psi Omega. But his greatest success came through writing. Three of his original scripts were produced, and his one-act play Between 3 and 4 won awards from BU’s Creative Expo and the Kennedy Center’s American College Theatre Festival.

KC/ACTF also twice awarded Thurkettle prizes for theatrical criticism. He honed those skills writing hundreds of arts/entertainment features for school newspaper The Bradley Scout and city paper The Peoria Journal Star. The ACTF awards earned him a prestigious fellowship from the National Critics Institute to attend the National Playwrights’ Conference at the Eugene O’Neill Center in Waterford, Connecticut.

Thurkettle got his foot in the Hollywood door in December 1999 through a script-reading internship for producer J. Todd Harris at the 20th Century Fox-based feature film production company Davis Entertainment Classics. Over the next four years he rose to the position of Director of Development, focusing on the creative development of such films as Artisan/Alliance-Atlantis’ 29 Palms, Regent/Telefilm’s festival sensation Burial Society, and Artisan/Splendid’s Devil’s Pond.

In fall 2003, Thurkettle followed Harris to IPW Productions to serve as Director of Development and head of the story internship program. He helped initiate and develop projects based on IPW’s massive catalog of re-make and adaptation rights, including the script that became Dimension Films’ 2010 release Piranha 3-D. In January of 2005 Thurkettle left feature development and IPW to pursue his writing interests full-time.

His screenwriting career had already kicked off in early 2004, when independent financier/producer Room 9 Entertainment (Thank You For Smoking) purchased his dark comedy Queen Lara. In the summer of 2006, Wish I Were Here, a family movie written by Scott Lipanovich and developed by Thurkettle based on his story idea, was optioned by Emmy-winning TV, film and theatre director Arthur Allan Seidelman (The Sisters, Hill Street Blues). His thriller 7 Red was optioned in 2008 by producer Branon Coluccio (The Condemned), has attached a director, and is presently in the packaging stages.

He has simultaneously maintained an active schedule of theatre work. In June of 2005 he produced and directed a reading of his stage play Hotel Chicago at the Ruby Theatre in Hollywood. He works regularly with the acclaimed LA theater company Sacred Fools, where he has directed for their Fast & Loose 24-Hour showcase; and written, directed, and even performed in their Serial Killers showcase. His 10-minute play Christmas Pizza was featured in the benefit festival The 12 Plays of Christmas, staged by Hogmanay Productions at the OC Pavilion in Santa Ana in December 2008, and three more 10-minute plays – The Jersey Kid, Self-Sealing No. 10, and Acne, Braces, and Frizz, Oh My! – were staged at his alma mater Bradley University in April 2010.

Since 2002 he has served as the designer of and primary lecturer for an award-winning undergraduate screenwriting course at Bradley, videoconferencing his lectures live via Internet II. In addition, he has guest lectured for Columbia College of Chicago’s “Semester in LA” program, spoken on panels at the Creative Screenwriting Expo and the Willamette Writers Conference, and judged for both UCLA’s MFA Screenwriting Competition and the Nicholl Fellowship.

In 2008 Thurkettle branched out into film production, working positions such as production assistant, boom operator, 2nd Assistant Director, and 1st Assistant Director on various independently-produced short films and web series. The short film WarZone, for which he served as 1st Assistant Director, played at prestigious film festivals including LA’s Dances With Films and the Vancouver International Film Festival.

He contributed a travel feature to the launch issue of the Southern California lifestyle magazine Inside Look, served as a pre-launch ghostwriter and editing consultant for the startup web magazine Kyoto Planet, and contributes episode reviews to the reality show blog/podcast I’m Not Here to Make Friends. In the summer of 2009 he was commissioned to co-write Family History, a science-fiction novel, and his short story Tourist Trap was published in the autumn 2010 issue of the literary quarterly Paradigm. He also publishes photos, movie reviews, travel stories, and much more on his weblog The Theory of Chaos, where he has posted over a million words since early 2004.

He enjoys cross-country road trips, roller-coasters, and competing on game shows; and he has been a proud member of the Writers Guild of America since 2004.

IMDB.com credits