Thomas Pope is a screenwriter who has worked on projects for Francis Ford Coppola, Ridley Scott, Barry Levinson, Penny Marshall, Frank Oz, Robert Redford, Wim Wenders, and many others. He wrote Lords of Discipline, The Manitou, Sweet Land, and Hammett, and was also a writer on Someone to Watch Over Me, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, F/X, and others. His book, Good Scripts, Bad Scripts, was a college text, and analyzes numerous successful and not so successful films that resulted from many successful and not so successful screenplays.
Pope, who is also a frequent speaker at the International Conference on Screenwriting and the Los Angeles Screenwriting Expo, applied to MacDowell at the recommendation of his screenwriting professor at the USC Film School, Irwin Blacker who was a MacDowell Fellow in 1958, 1959, and 1960. Pope credits his MacDowell Fellowship with introducing him to his wife, Freya Manfred, whom he saw in a documentary shown while he was in residence. While Manfred was not at MacDowell at the time Pope was there, he managed to get her address and wrote to her, expressing his admiration. The script Pope wrote while in residence later sold to Columbia Studio, but was never made into a film.
He retired from the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where he taught screenwriting, film analysis, and many related subjects. He is currently working on screenwriting, as well as a science fiction novel and a play.
