Five Oscar nominees and winners who don’t actually exist
Winning an Academy Award is on the bucket list of most actors who work in Hollywood. After all, even if they genuinely believe their work is more about the craft than gaining recognition, that recognition is still pretty damn gratifying when it comes about. Being nominated for an Oscar is often viewed as an honour in and of itself, as it places a star in rarified air in their chosen profession, even if they don’t win.
Naturally, though, considering the Oscars is an institution with nearly a century of history, there have been some questionable nominees and winners over the years. Every year, cinephiles, journalists, and industry insiders turn themselves inside out arguing about who should and shouldn’t have been up for awards, devoting countless column inches to picking over the Academy’s choices.
While it stands to reason that the Academy won’t always get it right, it would be nice to think that, at the very least, they’d always nominate real people for their prestigious Little Gold Men. Astonishingly, though, that hasn’t always been the case, and several people who don’t actually exist have been nominated in the past. Even more astonishingly, a couple of them actually won.
How does that work, you may ask? How can a fictional person compete for a trophy on Hollywood’s biggest night of the year? Well, it’s generally because of a series of strange events and curious decisions – and it’s never happened in quite the same way twice.
Five Oscar nominees/winners who aren’t real people:
Roderick Jaynes (‘Fargo’, 1996/’No Country For Old Men’, 2007)
Roderick Jaynes is an outlier on this list. You see, like everyone else you will soon read about, he does not exist in corporeal form. However, that hasn’t stopped him from being nominated for an Academy Award not once but twice.
In 1997, Jaynes was nominated for ‘Best Film Editing’ for his sterling work on the Coen brothers’ black comedy crime classic Fargo. He lost out on that evening but returned to the Oscars more than a decade later. In 2008, Jaynes was again nominated for editing a movie by the Coens – the neo-western masterpiece No Country For Old Men – but again, he walked away empty-handed. Or, at least, Jaynes would have walked away with nothing – if he wasn’t a figment of the Coen brothers’ oddball imaginations.
They edited both movies themselves, just like the other 13 flicks on their CV that credit Jaynes as the editor. As a couple of bashful weirdos, though, they didn’t like their names being included so often in the credits, so they created Jaynes out of thin air. Over the years, they even gave him a backstory as an 80-year-old English recluse who came out of retirement to work with them because they were boneheads who had no clue about editing.
Nathan E Douglas (‘The Defiant Ones’, 1958)
In 1953, a young actor on the rise in Hollywood named Nedrick Young was summoned to the office of Jack Warner, head honcho of Warner Brothers. He was handed a letter to sign that stated he had never been a member of the Communist Party. This was during the frightening period when Senator Joseph McCarthy enacted a desperate search to root out communists across America, and now the House Committee on Un-American Activities had turned its attention to Hollywood.
Young was a man of principals, though, and he outright refused to sign the letter. “His exact words were, ‘Absolutely not!'” his wife, Elizabeth MacRae, said. “There was no evidence to present against him of any wrongdoing. He saw it for what it was: a witch hunt. He refused to take part.”
Unfortunately, this moral decision cost Young everything. He was blacklisted as an actor and was forced to work as a truck driver. The only work he could get in movies was screenwriting under the pseudonym Nathan E Douglas. In 1959, one of his scripts penned as Douglas – the aptly-named The Defiant Ones – was nominated for ‘Best Screenplay written directly for the Screen.’ Amazingly, Douglas won, but it would take until 25 years after his death for his real name to be officially credited as an Oscar winner.
Pierre Boulle (‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’, 1957)
This one is slightly murky because Pierre Boulle did very much exist. However, the ‘Pierre Boulle’ who won an Oscar for writing the Bridge on the River Kwai screenplay technically didn’t. Allow us to explain.
Boulle was a French author who most famously wrote two novels adapted into iconic Hollywood movies: Planet of the Apes and The Bridge on the River Kwai. When Kwai was turned into a 1957 war epic by David Lean, though, the book was adapted for the screen by Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson. They should have been the men nominated for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay,’ but both were blacklisted as communist sympathisers – so it was decided Boulle would get their nomination.
To make the situation all the more farcical, though, Boulle not only had nothing to do with writing the script, but he also didn’t speak or read a word of English. So, in the end, he won an Oscar for a screenplay he didn’t write and couldn’t have understood, even if he wanted to read it. Foreman and Wilson were finally recognised for their work in 1985, despite dying in 1984 and 1978 respectively.
Donald Kaufman (‘Adaptation’, 2002)
When Charlie Kaufman was hired to adapt Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief into a screenplay, he struggled so thoroughly with the process that he eventually stopped trying to adapt it at all. Instead, he wrote Adaptation, a script about his trials and tribulations trying to write the screenplay while dealing with self-loathing and writer’s block. Within this script, he created a fictional twin brother Donald, who was instrumental in helping him crack the whole endeavour.
Kaufman actually credited his resulting script to himself and Donald, even though Donald wasn’t a real person. When Spike Jonze turned it into a unique, trippy movie, Nicolas Cage played the roles of the fictionalised Charlie and the not-real-at-all Donald. These turns landed him a ‘Best Actor’ nomination and, hilariously, the Kaufman twins were also nominated for ‘Best Adapted Screenplay.’
Seeing his fictional twin brother share an Academy Award nomination with him was a strange experience for Kaufman, who admitted, “I honestly did not think this movie would ever see the light of day. I didn’t think this movie was going to get made. Putting myself in the script was a really hard thing to do. I wouldn’t have done it if I had some distance from it. I wouldn’t have set out to do it.” Whoops.
PH Vazak (‘Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes’, 1984)
In the early ’80s, word spread around Hollywood that famed Chinatown screenwriter Robert Towne had penned his magnum opus: a 170-page epic entitled Greystoke. Amazingly, the script – a reimagining of the story of Tarzan – wasn’t even finished. Still, Towne’s reputation was so legendary that Warner Brothers snapped up the rights to the unfinished script in exchange for Towne getting a green light on his directorial debut, Personal Best.
Hugh Hudson, director of Chariots of Fire, was hired to helm the movie, and he reworked the script with writer Michael Austin. The resulting picture was given the tongue-twisting title Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes, and was a minor box office success. However, it was also nominated for three Oscars, including ‘Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium.’ Strangely, though, the nominees were Austin and the mysterious PH Vazak. Who was PH Vazak? Why, it was Towne, of course. Or, rather, Towne’s loyal pooch.
“Robert Towne never liked it, of course,” Hudson told The Hollywood Reporter in 2016. “Why would he? It was his baby to begin with, but he sold his baby, to put it that way. And when we did the film, he put the name of his dog on it.” Yes, ‘PH Vazak’ was Towne’s Hungarian sheepdog, and he figured that was preferable to his name being associated with a movie he hated. Hudson chuckled, “It’s the only dog that’s ever been nominated for an Oscar.”
