The Cinderella Man, an upcoming movie about legendary Depression-era boxer James J. Braddock, is still in production but the Oscar buzz already has begun.

“It’s definitely one of the greatest rags-to-riches stories in all of sports,” said Clifford N. Hollingsworth, who wrote the original script for The Cinderella Man. The film promises to be the breakthrough project in a screenwriting career that the Barnwell native embarked on after earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees in journalism and education from USC in 1977 and 1979.

Ron Howard is directing the movie, with Russell Crowe as Braddock and Renée Zellweger as his wife, Mae. Cinderella Man portrays the return to the boxing ring of a once down-and-out former light heavyweight boxer who eventually faces Max Baer, the heavyweight champion of the world. Filming began in April and distribution to theatres is scheduled for next April.

The story of how Hollingsworth brought Braddock’s life to the screen is no less inspirational, in part because the screenwriter managed to get a foothold in what one industry insider warned him was “the hardest business in the Western Hemisphere to break into.”

Part-time jobs kept food on the table while a series of fortuitous events provided Hollingsworth much-needed encouragement during his early years of struggle in Los Angeles. He got strong responses to his early scripts and even had a script optioned by a fledgling production company though it later foundered. He eventually was invited to studio meetings to talk with producers who liked his work, but their enthusiasm always stopped short of a sale.

About the time Hollingsworth, a lifelong boxing fan, thought of throwing in the towel to pursue another line of work, he remembered Braddock, whose life comprised one of the most famous boxing stories of all time. Producer/director Penny Marshall loved Hollingsworth’s script about Braddock beating overwhelming odds and being embraced by the American working class as a symbol of its hopes and dreams. She took the script to Universal Studios, which optioned the screenplay in 1996.

What followed, owing to the usual vagaries of Hollywood filmmaking, was another frustratingly lengthy period of time before production of the movie would begin in mid-April. In the interval, several luminaries were discussed for the movie’s leading roles before Howard, Crowe, and Zellweger signed on for the project.

“Delays like this happen all the time,” Hollingsworth said, “especially when a studio views a picture as a potential award winner. In situations where they’re going for the cream of the crop to work on a film, you invariably run into delays because somebody might not be available right away.”

Now that the movie is playing out before the cameras, Hollingsworth is ready to pitch new scripts he’s been holding with the assistance of the duo that helped him negotiate The Cinderella Man, Ed McCormick, a Denmark, S.C., agent, and Irby Walker, ’76 law, a Conway attorney.

“I’ve already done a lot of research,” he said, “and I’ve got a lot of things in the works.”