Arthur M. Jolly

Arthur M. Jolly (he, him) had an early career as a stunt performer and coordinator, doubling such actors as Adrien Brody, Norman Reedus and Steve Buscemi. After working in the film industry for ten years, he became a helicopter pilot for 8 years, training pilots for the US Army and flying tourists into the Grand Canyon. He quit flying in 2006 to write full time.

Jolly's first success as a writer was winning an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nicholl Fellowship in Screenwriting for his feature comedy The Free Republic of Bobistan, about an oil rig worker who sparks an international incident when, to save a Cuban refugee, he declares the rig to be an independent country.

The Hero, a 360° Virtual Reality feature about a traffic cop flung into the middle of a futuristic war, won the Kay Snow Award in Screenwriting, a horror comedy The Working Dead was a semifinalist in the Austin Film Festival Table Read My Screenplay competition, and Eightball, a dramatic short film noir, was a finalist in the Pavaline Short Screenplay competition and won the 2017 Hammond House International Literary Prize for a Screenplay.

Produced feature films include Where We Disappear - which premiered in Los Angeles at the Dances With Films Festival in June of 2019, released in January 2020, and is based on his stage play A Gulag Mouse, about women surviving in the bunkhouse of a prison camp; and Under the Same Sky - a feature drama for Raz Entertainment (story by Tony Kamren, screenplay by Arthur M. Jolly and Arthur McClen) about a young Aghani-American rescuing his 8 year old niece from a forced marriage. Other produced films include the shorts Childish Things based on his play of the same name; and Eightball, shot in 2018 by Hammond House, directed by Curtis Hogarth, currently in post-production.

In 2013, Jolly was an alternate selection for the Fox Writers Intensive. A feature version of his play A Very Modern Marriage has been optioned.

As a playwright, Jolly has penned over 70 produced plays, with productions across the US and in Canada, Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa, and South America. He has won the Joining Sword and Pen competition a record three times, the Todd McNerney National Playwriting Award, The Region IV David Mark Cohen Playwriting Award, and was a finalist for the Woodward/Newman Drama Award. In 2016, 2017, and 2019, he was featured artist at the Last Frontier Theatre Conference. In 2019 he was invited by Houston's Alley Theatre to participate in the inaugural Alley at Ucross Residency. Jolly is currently developing a play with the Alley Theatre that was presented as the Early Draft Preview at the Alley All New Festival in January, 2020.

His published plays include A Gulag Mouse, The Ithaca Ladies Read Medea, Trash, Long Joan Silver, The Christmas Princess, The Four Senses of Love, Childish Things, How Blue is My Crocodile, Snakes in a Lunchbox, What the Well Dressed Girl is Wearing, Bath Time is Fun Time, Rising, Ashes, and two collections of short plays Guilty Moments and Thin Lines.