Friday night I got the opportunity to attend a talk with three of my writing heroes: "The Jack Oakie Celebration of Comedy in Film featuring Judd Apatow, James L. Brooks and Larry Gelbart." James L. Brooks is one of the major reasons I started writing. I saw Terms of Endearment when I was a little kid and sobbed like...that little kid in Terms of Endearment. I have seen Broadcast News fifty times, and consider it perhaps the finest romantic comedy ever written. As Good As It Gets is a modern classic, I loved I'll Do Anything, and even have a soft spot in my heart for Spanglish. Oh, plus The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi, and the guy has been with The Simpsons from day one! No further questions, your honor.

Brooks' incredible skill of seamlessly blending laughter and heartbreak clearly made a huge influence on Judd Apatow (although from reading all the articles about him, you'd think Apatow invented the practice). Like Brooks, Apatow did a lot of television work (the classics Larry Sanders Show, Freaks and Geeks, and Undeclared), and lately he's written and directed two of the best film comedies of the decade -- The 40 Year-Old Virgin and Knocked Up.

Larry Gelbart wrote Tootsie (with Murray Schisgal) -- one of the greatest screenplays ever penned, comedy or otherwise. That script earned him an Oscar nomination, as did Oh God! He earned Emmy nominations for writing, producing, and directing episodes of the classic sitcom M*A*S*H, and his writing career spans more than 50 years.

These three dudes on one stage, plus little cameos from the likes of Garry Shandling, Leslie Mann, and Jonah Hill. It was quite a night. Apatow kicked off the evening by sharing that he had been in that very theater as a boy, to see Steven Spielberg's notorious flop 1941. "I thought this was about comedy," quipped Gelbart.

According to the Writers Guild of America, the best screenplay ever written is Casablanca. And that really is ever -- the introduction to their list of the best 101 (a PDF of the list is here) indicates that the balloting was open to films made in any language, in any country. (And yet only six of the 100 best screenplays of all time aren't American? And Children of Paradise isn't one of them? Yeah, I buy that.) Also near the top of the list are such usual suspects as Chinatown, Some Like it Hot, and All About Eve which, despite the hype, continues to stun me with its sharpness every time I see it.

The fun of lists like this, though, are the surprises -- and the getting angry when your favorites are neglected. Going through the top 101, I was pleasantly surprised to see that actual screenwriters respect screenplays I love, like those for The Wild Bunch (#99), Grand Illusion (#85 is way too low, but at least it's on there), Broadcast News (#51), and All the President's Men (#53), the last of which strikes me as very nearly perfect. But by the same token, I was pretty stunned that Forrest Gump (#89) made the list, along with Jaws (#63), the former simply because I think it's a cloying, awful movie, and the latter because, though it's one of my favorites, there are a couple of scenes that have always struck me as awkwardly written, and there a tendency in the screenplay to cheaply create a depth by hinting at conflicts and emotions that are never actually proved to exist. On the neglected pile I'd throw virtually all the wonderful foreign films that, as usual, have been ignored, from La Dolce vita and the previously-mentioned Children of Paradise to The Rules of the Game, and the spare-but-wonderful Le samouraï.

So, here's something to think about on a lazy, rainy weekend: screenplays. What pisses you off about the list? What favorites are missing? And what did the WGA get exactly right?