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A golden night for 'Birdman' screenplay writer

Former resident, co-writer of film wins Golden Globe

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Three years ago, when he began working on the script for “Birdman,” former Rockville Centre resident Alex Dinelaris didn’t expect that he’d be sitting in the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles on Jan. 11, waiting to see if he was going to win a Golden Globe.

But the film took home Golden Globe awards not only for its star, Michael Keaton, but for Best Screenplay as well, and has been nominated for nine Academy Awards, including for its screenplay.

“The whole thing has been sort of surreal so far,” Dinelaris said in an interview with the Herald. “When we started about two and a half, maybe three years ago, the script was so experimental in a way that you couldn’t sort of imagine it as being as widely embraced as it was.”

“Birdman” is the story of actor Riggan Thomas (played by Keaton), who achieved fame on the silver screen by playing a superhero called Birdman. Now he is trying to reinvigorate his acting career by staging an adaptation of the Raymond Carver short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” on Broadway. The movie was filmed as one long, uninterrupted shot with no visible cut-aways, something that Dinelaris said that director Alejandro Inarritu was planning since the beginning.

Dinelaris met Inarritu after the director read one of Dinelaris’s plays, “Still Life.” He liked it so much that he asked Dinelaris to help him with an early draft of the screenplay for the 2010 film “Biutiful.” The “Birdman” co-writers Nico Giacobone and Armando Bo also worked on “Biutiful,” and Inarritu brought them all together to work on “Birdman.”

The film was Dinelaris’s first credited work on a screenplay. But the 46-year-old never intended to be a writer. “I was on the stage in high school at St. Agnes as an actor,” he said. “Russ Siller, who’s a Rockville Centre native, he dragged me and put me on stage. He cast me in ‘Fiddler on the Roof’ as Tevye. Once I got the bug, I was destroyed. And I still thank him for all the years of hard work before this.”

During his high school years, Dinelaris spent most of his time at his father’s apartment in Rockville Centre, but also lived at his mother’s house in Lynbrook. He would sneak into the Lynbrook movie theater, the Criterion, and sit there all day, watching the same films again and again.

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