Michigan alumnus Angus Fletcher (class of ’98) has just become the envy of screenwriters everywhere, nabbing himself, along with writing partner Vineet Dewan, an esteemed Nicholl Fellowship for his screenplay “Sand Dogs.” Out of a record 6,380 scripts submitted to the fellowship, five were selected this year by volunteer Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences members to receive a $30,000 grant.

In celebration, Fletcher spent seven days rubbing shoulders with Hollywood elite during the week of the offical awards ceremony.

“It’s basically a whole week of you being celebrated,” Fletcher said. “You spend a couple days surrounded by people responsible for the greatest movies ever made in the past 40, 50 years. At dinner we were sitting next to the guy who made ‘Beverly Hills Cop,’ which blew my mind when I was a child.”

“Everyone you look at is sort of a hero,” he added. “All these people say very nice things about you and your head gets real large.”

Awarded to new writers who haven’t sold a screenplay for more than $5,000, the Nicholl Fellowship operates under the Academy of the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, otherwise known as the Academy. The Fellowship is known for being the most prestigious screenwriting competition in the nation. Notable Nicholl fellows from the past are now heavyweights in the industry. The group including Susannah Grant (“Erin Brockovich”), Mike Rich (“Finding Forrester”) and Andrew Marlowe (“Air Force One”).

“The Nicholl Fellowship started when a woman named Gee Nicholl — the widow of Don Nicholl, a TV writer best known for ‘The Jeffersons’ and ‘Three’s Company’ — brought the idea of helping new writers to the Academy in 1985,” Greg Beal, director of the Nicholl Fellowship, said. “There have now been 113 writers who have won the award. This is the 24th year of the Fellowship.”

Fletcher’s own initiation into the film industry started a little more humbly.

“A couple years ago, Vineet won a lot of awards for a very good short film called ‘Clear Cut, Simple,’ " Fletcher said. “I saw the movie and I was very impressed with his work, and we talked for a little bit and we made a connection.”

For the next year, Fletcher and Dewan would work together on the script now known as “Sand Dogs.”

“I would write a draft and Vineet would take the draft and make changes … Each of us would add different things. I’m more interested in plot and he’s more interested in design and detail,” Fletcher said. “We kind of kicked it back and forth like a ping pong ball.”

Fletcher and Dewan originally intended to submit “Sand Dogs” to the Sundance Screenwriting Contest, but missed the deadline for this year.

“We thought, ‘The Nicholl is such a big fellowship we probably don’t have a chance of winning, but we should give it a shot,’ ” Fletcher said.

A few months ago, Fletcher and Dewan were notified by Beal of their finalist standing. Since then, it’s all been a dream. They've been bombarded by e-mails from production companies that want to sign them and phone calls from agents and managers who want to represent them.

“Sand Dogs,” the winning screenplay, is about a young, idealistic American who travels to the highly volatile war zone of Gaza as a Red Cross ambulance driver. He befriends a slightly older Palestinian and starts taking part in border crossings, eventually getting sucked into a smuggling ring.

Although neither writer had direct experience with the story's events, both Fletcher and Dewan were attracted to the concept of an outsider entering into a world about which he knows nothing.

“Because I’m originally from England, I’m an American, but I’m also watching it from the outside. I think when you’re outside a culture you think you can fix it because you think you know things that people in the culture don’t see,” Fletcher said.

“But the situations are so complicated that the more you get involved, the more you find yourself compromising your own ideals,” he added.