THE McFARLAND WRITING FELLOWSHIP

The McFarland Writing Fellowship is a $40,000 stipend awarded to an outstanding alumnus of the Writing Program.  The McFarland Fellow meets regularly for one year with an industry mentor and receives quarterly critiques from a panel of established Hollywood professionals while writing and polishing an original screenplay.  The fellowship is named in honor of retired Bishop Norman J. McFarland of Orange, CA, whose generosity made the fellowship possible.

Haynes Brooke, the first McFarland Fellow, was named in 2005.  He wrote the feature comedy screenplay Warhead, an offbeat story of a young man’s search for what it means to be a man, a dying Air Force pilot’s desperate quest to fix a 40-year-old mistake, and the misplaced nuclear device that brings them together.

Haynes is a Los Angeles screenwriter, actor and playwright who has had several of his plays staged at Tim Robbins’ Actors Gang theater company.