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.”
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.