William Inge Awards
OUR TEAM
“PICNIC” (1956)
Academy Awards Won Oscar Best Art Direction-Set Decoration - Best Film Editing
Nominated, Oscar - Best Picture - Fred Kohlmar - Best Director - Josh Logan Best Support Actor - Arthur O’Connell - Best Music, Score - Geoge Durning
BAFTA Nominated Best Film Best Foreign Actor & Actress William Holden - Kim Novak -Most Promising Newcomer Susan Strasberg
Directors Guild America Nominated Outstanding Director Achievement Joshua Logan - Golden Globes, Won - Best Motion Picture Director Joshua Logan
Grand Prix de l'UCC - Won, Grand Prix de l'UCC - Italian National Syndicate Film Journalists Nominated, Silver Ribbon - Best Foreign Film Joshua Logan
National Board of Review, Won, NBR Award - Top Ten Films - Writers Guild of America, Nominated - Best Written American Drama
“COME BACK LITTLE SHEBA” (1953)
Academy Awards, Won Oscar Best Actress Leading Role Shirley Booth - Nominated, Oscar Best Actress Supporting Role Terry Moore - Best Editing
BAFTA Nominated, Best Film - Best Foreign Actress Shirley Booth -Cannes Film Festival - Won, International Prize - Dramatic Film Daniel Mann
Won, Special Mention - Shirley Booth - Acting Performance - Nominated, Grand Prize of the Festival Daniel Mann
Directors Guild America Nominated Outstanding Director Achievement Dan Mann
Golden Globes Won Best Motion Picture Actress - Drama Shirley Booth - Nominated Best Motion Picture - Drama
Jussi Awards Won, Diploma of Merit - Foreign Actress Shirley Booth - Writers Guild of America - Nominated Best Written American Drama
National Board of Review - Won, Best Actress Shirley Booth New York Film Critics Circle Awards - Won Best Actress Shirley Booth
“SPLENDOR IN THE GRASS” (1962)
Academy Awards Won,Oscar Best Writing, Story, Screenplay William Inge - Nominated, Best Actress in a Leading Role Natalie Wood
BAFTA Nominated, Best Foreign Actress - Natalie Wood - Directors Guild America Nominated Outstanding Director Achievement Elia Kazan
Golden Globes Nominated Best Motion Picture - Drama - Best Motion Picture Actress & Actor - Drama Natalie Wood & Warren Beatty
Laurel Awards Golden Laurel Top Female Dramatic Performance Natalie Wood - Photoplay Awards Won, Gold Medal
“THE DARK AT THE TOP OF THE STAIRS” (1961)
Academy Awards Nominated, Oscar Best Supporting Actress Shirley Knight Directors Guild America Nominated, Outstanding Director Achievement Delbert Mann
Golden Globes Nominated Best Supporting Actors Shirley Knight - Lee Kinsolving - National Board of Review Won, NBR Award Top Ten Films
Laurel Awards Golden Laurel Top Musical Score Max Steiner - Nominated Golden Laurel Top Female Supporting Actress Eve Arden
LIFE MAGAZINE REVIEW
GOOD LUCK MISS WYCKOFF NOVEL
Pulitzer Prize, Academy Award winner, William Inge. one of America’s great dramatists who gave us Picnic, Come Back, Little Sheba, Splendor In The Grass and Dark At The Top Of The Stairs, re enters our lives with a gift of tenderness – and shock in his beautifully moving first novel.
Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff strikes with the emotional power and naked sensualism of Inge's best plays, exposing some of the deepest human yearnings, destined to remain forever in the subconscious like the first mortal sin.
Erotic midwestern gothic - Poetic naturalism - Freudian realism ! Whatever the category, Inge's novel has the qualities of a classic - characters hot with blood, a setting firm as earth, and social reverberations throughout. Inge's novel unfolds with the vagaries of repressive societies, neurosis, aberration, personal tragedy as if dictated by the ghost of Sigmund Freud..
Evelyn Wyckoff, a small town, virgin schoolteacher in her late 30’s is caught in her classroom in a flagrant sexual act with Rafe Collins, (now Rafi Khan - a Pakistani) a black college athlete who is a janitor at the school. Before the week ends, the emotional mountain of her actions buries her and she is run out of town. After a life of denying her inherent sensuality, her spirit dying and her body withering, she recklessly seizes the experience as relief from a psychosomatic loss of womanhood, leaving her with luck as her only hope for the future.
Raw and searingly real, the sexual explosiveness of Good Luck, Miss Wyckoff triggers Inge's creation of a woman thrust into such conflict with herself, her surroundings and other human beings that to survive at all is heroic. As Inge artfully reveals her character – from the tyranny of her parents and honored drudgery at college to her matronly liberalism and prisonlike rooming-house, emotion and reason become locked in a near-tragic embrace. as Evelyn Wyckoff awakens to her awareness of fleeting womanhood.
Rafe Collins (now Rafi Khan), the magnificently arrogant and brutal athlete suggests fulfillment, however symbolic, of Evelyn’s intellectual dream. Miss Wyckoff believes “interracial mating to be one of man's most difficult problems to solve during his life on earth. The world, in another century or two should consist of only one race, the human race.” In Rafi, she intellectualizes desire. And, she is lost when he forces himself on her:
Evelyn Wyckoff. is a character Dreiser would know and honor. She may signal confusion or she may evoke tears. But Evelyn Wyckoff cannot pass unregarded because she is a living woman and she hurts.
