Variety's ten screenwriters to watch

In Variety magazine, ten screenwriters to watch - including British writers Joe Penhall and Paul Webb.

Screenwriting is the third career for Paul Webb, the 60-year-old British rookie whose scripts about Martin Luther King and the Russian oligarchs have got Hollywood buzzing.

He spent 10 years as a high school teacher in the drab commuter town of Reading, where he still lives, and then another 15 years as a communications consultant for the petro-chemical industry. But when he got bored with visiting construction sites in China, he quit to pursue his dream of becoming a writer.

The result was "Four Knights in Knaresborough," a play about the assassination of Archbishop Thomas a Becket in 1170, which was staged in London in 1999. Harvey Weinstein picked up the film rights, hired Webb to write the adaptation and gave him a first-look deal.

"It all happened so quickly, I thought that's the way it works," laughs Webb, wryly acknowledging that he hasn't managed to get anything produced since. Yet he's become one of the U.K.'s hottest screenwriters, thanks to half a dozen scripts that have caught the attention of such talent as Steven Spielberg, Brad Pitt and Michael Mann.