Academy Award winning screenwriter (Forrest Gump) Eric Roth will receive the 2013 Kanbar Award for excellence in screenwriting at the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival running April 25 – May 9, 2013.
Over the past four decades, Eric Roth has been a major screenwriting presence in Hollywood. Roth won an Academy Award and a Writers Guild of America (WGA) Award for his screenplay for the Best Picture-winning Forrest Gump (1994), directed by Robert Zemeckis. He received his second Oscar, Golden Globe and WGA Award nominations for the screenplay for Michael Mann’s The Insider (1999), for which Roth also won the WGA’s honorary Paul Selvin Award and a Humanitas Prize. He garnered both Oscar and Golden Globe nominations for the screenplay of Steven Spielberg’s drama Munich(2005), and for David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008), which also brought Roth a BAFTA nod. Roth’s other writing credits include Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer (1998), Michael Mann’s Ali (2001), Robert DeNiro’s The Good Shepherd (2006) and a contribution to one of the last films by legendary film director Akira Kurosawa, Rhapsody in August(1991). More recently, he wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-nominated filmExtremely Loud & Incredibly Close, based on the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer.
The Award is named in honor of Maurice Kanbar, a longtime member of the board of directors of the San Francisco Film Society, film commissioner and philanthropist with a particular interest in supporting independent filmmakers. Kanbar is the creator of New York’s first multiplex theater and, most recently, Blue Angel Vodka.
Previous recipients of the Kanbar Award are David Webb Peoples (2012), Frank Pierson (2011), James Schamus (2010), James Toback (2009), Robert Towne (2008), Peter Morgan (2007), Jean-Claude Carrière (2006) and Paul Haggis (2005).
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