101 Greatest Screenplays of the 21st Century (*so far)

Some eyebrows, and possibly a few bushy mustaches, might have been raised when the WGA nominated this first-of-its-kind reality-meets-mockumentary for Adapted Screenplay back in 2006. But time has been a friend to Borat, and the surprisingly intricate script behind it—proving them more prescient, incisive, and meticulously crafted than even its appreciators at the time knew. “We’d sit around the writers’ room and imagine the scene,” Sacha Baron Cohen said at a Writers Guild Q&A event in 2007. “’What do we want it to look like?’ Looking at the script and the finished film, they’re remarkably the same.”