Ken Calhoun, assistant professor of Communications, won the Broadcast Education Association Award for Excellence for a screenplay based on a short story he wrote called “Noise Gate.”
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The story was published in the Greensboro Review in 2005, but Calhoun said the script is now quite different from the original work. The plot involves a young, troubled man who is working as a repo man for a music store. He repossesses rental instruments from families who haven’t paid the fees, and he often uses scurrilous methods to do his job.
“At one apartment, he encounters a kid who plays the trumpet like a jazz master,” Calhoun said. “The kid, who lives with his older sister in a rough neighborhood, has savant syndrome. Our streetwise hero is moved by the kid’s situation and decides not to repo the horn, but he has to find a way to switch the horn out with another.”
Calhoun said he hopes to shoot the 20-minute film next summer. This is Calhoun’s second award for screenwriting. While at Emerson, he won the Richard Duprey Prize for another feature-length screenplay.