Stooges+Parody+Wins+Faux+Faulkner+Contest+-+2004

=Stooges parody wins Faux Faulkner contest=

===Screenwriter David Sheffield won this year’s Faux Faulkner contest by imagining what it would’ve been like if William Faulkner — a Nobel laureate known for thickets of challenging (often parenthetical) prose — had written for the Three Stooges.===

===Sheffield’s 550-word script “As I Lay Kvetching” has Moe, Larry and Curly — “slack-jawed and splayfooted” — renovating a home, with the eye-gouging, nose-twisting slapstick guided by plenty of Faulknerian stage directions:===

===“At last it is Curly who picks up the plank, rough hewn and smelling of sweet gum, and — feeling the weight and heft and fiber of it — swings it innocently (bending to retrieve the tool, the ball-peen hammer dropped casually on Larry’s toe) and feeling the awful force of the blow as it (the plank) catches Moe upside his head...”===

===The 56-year-old Sheffield, best known as a writer for "Saturday Night Live" and a string of Eddie Murphy movies, returns to his native Mississippi this weekend to perform his script at the 31st Faulkner & Yoknapatawpha conference in Oxford.===

===“I think screenwriting is the antithesis of Faulkner,” Sheffield said from his Los Angeles home. “Faulkner is about the joy and profundity of language and words. The best screenwriting is invisible. The words should disappear into the faces of the actors.”===

===Sheffield was head writer for “SNL” from 1980-83, a job he landed after mailing comedy sketches to the show’s producers while working at a Biloxi ad agency. With writing partner Barry Blaustein, Sheffield helped create some of Murphy’s most memorable characters: trash-talking Gumby, goofy Buckwheat and James Brown in the hot tub.===

===Sheffield and Blaustein’s movie writing credits include Murphy’s “Coming to America,” “The Nutty Professor” and “The Nutty Professor II: The Klumps.” They’re working now on the screenplay for an updated version of “Romeo and Juliet,” with plans to have Murphy play several roles.===