Robert Cohen's screenplay Bystander was awarded the inaugural Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Student Grand Jury Prize for Screenwriting. Examiner.com attended a celebratory cocktail ceremony for Mr. Cohen at Hotel Chantelle. Bystander was selected by an awards committee comprised of Academy Award-winning actor Morgan Freeman; Academy Award-winning screenwriter Eric Roth; Len Amato, president, HBO Films; Dr. Darcy Kelley, Columbia University, and Dr. Dudley Herschbach, 1986 Nobel laureate, Harvard University.

Additional input came from the Sloan Foundation's four partners in screenplay development: the Tribeca Film Institute, Film Independent, the Hamptons International Film Festival and Sundance Institute. Cohen's screenplay was chosen from nominees that had earlier won Sloan prizes at the Foundation's six affiliated film school programs: AFI Conservatory, Carnegie Mellon University, Columbia University, New York University, University of California – Los Angeles, and University of Southern California. Cohen will receive a $30,000 cash prize, an additional $20,000 to be used in direct support of the project, and year-round support from TFI, including mentorship and guidance from scientific and film industry professionals, networking opportunities and industry exposure.

"It's very gripping film both dramatically and in terms of the science. The opening scene, it's based on a true story, but it's quite violent, and it grabs you by the throat ... The good thing about this movie is the science is a character, which is what Sloan is always looking for," said Dr. Darcy Kelley, a neuroscientist at Columbia and a juror.

Examiner: What is the film about?

Robert Cohen: The script is about the case of Kitty Genovese, who was murdered in 1964 and there were 38 witnesses. None of them called the police, or did anything to intervene despite witnessing this event and she died because of it ... The script is about the psychologist who studies the witnesses and eventually comes up with what's called The Bystander Effect, which is one of the most important and replicable effects in all of psychology, and I was a psych major when I was in undergrad, so I was interested in that angle of it!

Examiner: So how did you win this competition?

Robert Cohen: Actually, I wrote it while I was at NYU. I graduated a year and a half ago and then The Sloan Foundation does awards for student writers at film schools, so I applied for their grant while I was there and won that. That was like a $10,000 grant that goes to a couple diffrent people at each school, so there's maybe like 12-15 winners and then for this I didn't even have to apply, they took the winners of that from all six schools and pulled them together and picked one for this award.

Examiner: Congratulations! So what's next for you?

Robert Cohen: Right now, I'm working on a TV show and after that I don't know, but in terms of the script I'd love to try to get it made and I really sort of hadn't made any progress on that. I was using the script as a sample, but now that this has happened, hopefully this will get the ball rolling and they'll help me with the first few steps to get it started because I don't really know what those steps are, I'm looking forward to them mentoring me.

Doron Weber, vice president of programs for the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, said, "Tribeca film institute is going to mentor [Robert], we're going to link him up with an established screenwriter with real credits and with a scientist who has experience with this field and hopefully he can get a lot of industry exposure and he's going to develop the screenplay and what we'd like to do is see it produced and released theatrically."

Erin Hildebrand manages The Sloan Program at the Tribeca Film Institute. "The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation is our funder. They fund programs at various institutes, theater programs, schools across the country and they have been very generous to us over the last ten years. Until now, I've been managing the the TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund, which gives grants to filmmakers with projects at any stage -- narrative features at any stage that feature science/technology and math as a major theme or character inside those worlds and so we award those every spring, and now we are adding the the Sloan Grand Jury prize to the program so we're very excited about that. The students were nominated by their respective schools, and so the six screenplays were then put forth to a jury who ultimately selects the winner."

The TFI Sloan Filmmaker Fund is for screenwriters at any stage in their career. Jenny Deller, a recipient of that grant, wrote and directed "Future Weather," which will be premiering at various film festivals very soon.