“It is a deeply courageous thing to share something you\u2019ve written, that is 100 or more pages long, and ask for judgment. That requires courage,\u201d says The Black List founder and CEO Franklin Leonard. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThat is the courage that defines all artists on some level, right? So I think that we have an obligation given that dynamic to be as respectful and considerate as possible, and treat writers\u2019 work with care and consideration. Even if we disagree about the quality of it.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s been nearly two decades since Leonard started The Black List, which may be the least opaque way into Hollywood. In a town known for confounding, mysterious decision-making, Leonard\u2019s company stands out in its efforts to open doors to new writers and be as open as possible about how it helps them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Black List began when Leonard, a few years out of Harvard, was working as a junior executive at Leonardo DiCaprio\u2019s company Appian Way Productions. His job involved meeting industry contacts and reading scripts, novels, articles, comics, and anything else that might someday become a movie.
After a particularly unimpressive pitch for a movie that would have pitted DiCaprio against a toxic superstorm, Leonard began to wonder if there might be a better way to find great material than the traditional Hollywood pipeline.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So he made a list of 75 contacts \u2014 everyone he\u2019d recently met with \u2014 and sent an anonymous email asking them for a list of up to 10 of their favorite recent screenplays that were not destined for the big screen anytime soon. Almost all responded, as did several others who had heard about the idea. He assembled a spreadsheet, ran a pivot table, and made a PowerPoint that he emailed back to his sources. He called it The Black List. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since then, Leonard\u2019s annual Black List has grown dramatically in ambition and influence, highlighting more than 400 scripts that were turned into feature films, yielding more than 250 Academy Award nominations, and 50 Oscar wins \u2014 including four for Best Picture and eleven for screenwriting Oscars. Black
List films have earned more than $28 billion. A Harvard Business school study found that Black List scripts were twice as likely to be made into films, and generated 90% more revenue at the box office than similarly budgeted films that did not make the list.
Leonard takes care not to claim too much credit: \u201cI think it is dangerous of me to overclaim The Black List is the reason this person got signed. People got signed because the script was good. We just happened to tell
people about it,\u201d he explains.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Also Read:<\/strong> Furiosa<\/em> \u2014 George Miller, Anya Taylor-Joy on Chris Hemsworth on Medicine and Madness<\/a> Users \u2014 including your humble correspondent \u2014 appreciate The Black List\u2019s feedback service for the no-nonsense, quick evaluations \u2014 which cost $100 and take an average of six days. Enter a typical contest, and We talked with Leonard about who reads Black List scripts, matching writers and readers, and jumping from the Black List hosting site to the annual Black List that nearly everyone in the industry watches closely. He also talked about interviewing for his old job with DiCaprio.<\/p>\n\n\n\n TIM MOLLOY: How many readers does the Black List have? I\u2019m amazed how fast the turnaround time is.<\/p>\n\n\n\n FRANKLIN LEONARD: It varies widely how many people will be reading in a given moment. Once you\u2019re hired to read for us, you can sort of come and go as you please, as long as you continue to provide consistent, high-quality feedback. If you don\u2019t read for six months, you have to reapply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But I think people sort of graze consistently over time. At any given time,probably between 75 and 100 are active. It\u2019s not me with a bunch of emails trying to assign things. It\u2019s automated, where people are qualified to read in the format that they have experience in \u2014 film, television, theater. Then you indicate what genres you\u2019re interested in and we match by genre. <\/p>\n\n\n\n And then there\u2019s a third level, which I think is unique: We ask every writer to indicate whether their script includes sexual assault, child abuse, gunplay, whatever, and our readers have indicated subject matter that they don\u2019t want to read about. So we negatively match based on that, for two reasons. <\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t want our readers reading anything that\u2019s going to traumatize them, and I also don\u2019t want writers who are submitting work \u2014 and I\u2019m operating on the assumption that they\u2019ve written about the subjects in good faith \u2014 I don\u2019t want them to be judged by someone who believes that their experience is going to affect their experience reading the script. I want to give them the best shot of enjoying the thing. FRANKLIN LEONARD: I have to be really responsible, I think, about causation and correlation. But every year, there are at least a dozen writers who The Black List has previously highlighted as somebody to pay attention to, who end up on the annual list \u2014 and usually a fair bit more than a dozen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n TIM MOLLOY: What scares you or makes you nervous about the process?<\/p>\n\n\n\n FRANKLIN LEONARD: Things that I spend a lot of time thinking about? One, how to most effectively communicate to aspiring writers out there what our services are, what the value proposition is, and how best to use them. One of the reasons why I\u2019m so open about this stuff on social media and when I have All writers should create a writer profile on the site. It\u2019s free. Have your bio, have a list of your scripts. Include a logline so they\u2019re searchable by our 7,000 industry numbers. I don\u2019t know what upside there would be in not having a writer profile on the Black List website. I think the other biggest piece is, I know how many good scripts and good writers we\u2019re finding. How do we most effectively communicate to as many working members of the industry as possible, “Hey \u2014 we found something great here, you really should pay attention”? <\/p>\n\n\n\n We do that in a number of ways. There\u2019s the eight-plus tweets, there\u2019s the emails that go out every Monday, there\u2019s the website that has these top lists. We do a ton of work that we don\u2019t even talk about and can\u2019t talk about, when people come to us and say, \u201cHey, we\u2019re looking for this kind of thing,\u201d and we can point them to specific things. Because when we do that, they\u2019re more likely to come back and look for more stuff. And I think that my calling is probably to help identify and help support writers who are capable of greatness, rather than me pulling my hair out and being miserable trying to be mediocre. On some level, TIM MOLLOY: You\u2019ve told a great story in the past about when you first sat down with DiCaprio for your job interview. He asked you your favorite movie and you had a moment where you froze \u2014 like we all do sometimes. I don\u2019t know what I\u2019d say. Should you say Titanic<\/em> because you want the job?<\/p>\n\n\n\n FRANKLIN LEONARD: I\u2019m never living this down. It\u2019s funny. For years, when people asked me how to prepare for a job in Hollywood, the advice I\u2019d always give was, \u201cKnow your favorite movie.\u201d Even before this happened. I ended up calling [Appian Way then-president] Brad Simpson, who became my boss. I said, \u201cWell, I\u2019m just gonna write a list of all of my favorite movies and why I love them. And I\u2019m gonna email it to you, if you could just forward it to Leo and be like, \u2018Look, sometimes people\u2019s brains freeze.\u2019\u201d Main image: The Black List founder and CEO Franklin Leonard. Courtesy of The Black List.
In addition to the annual list, in 2012 The Black List launched a unique online platform<\/a> where writers can share their work with readers, buyers, and employers, and receive scores of 1 through 10. If Black List readers give a script an 8 or higher, it gets special promotion to the industry via tweets, newsletters and other means. The site has hosted more than 100,000 scripts and provided more than 130,000 script evaluations, and has helped countless writers earn representation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
you might go months without feedback \u2014 and not get a chance to make changes in time to improve your script and score well.
Leonard\u2019s long list of achievements includes working in development for Universal Pictures and the production companies of Will Smith, Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, as well as serving as a contributing editor of Vanity Fair<\/em>. He earned the 2019 Writers Guild of America, East\u2019s Evelyn F. Burkey Award for elevating the honor and dignity of screenwriters, and is a member of the British Academy of Film and Television Arts and the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences.
But for all these accolades, he is not a movie snob. Ask him his list of favorite films, and he\u2019ll include Tommy Boy<\/em>. (We agree.) He\u2019s also happy to take to Reddit to answer questions from people who love
The Black List or want to gripe about a reader\u2019s feedback, and often tells people \u2014 as he did several times during our interview \u2014 that if a writer feels that a Black List reader failed to give a script the kind of attentive, helpful feedback it deserved, the company will often offer a free second evaluation.
He\u2019s also upfront about not yet knowing what the impact of A.I. will be on screenwriting, or where exactly to draw the ever-shifting line. But he is certain about one thing: If a Black List reader uses A.I. for an evaluation \u2014 something disappointed screenwriters sometimes accuse various contests of doing \u2014 that reader will be
fired. He hasn\u2019t had to fire anyone so far. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
TIM MOLLOY: There\u2019s The Black List you started in 2005, with unproduced scripts that people in the industry thought should be produced, and then there\u2019s also the website that writers can submit scripts to to get feedback. How often do the scripts on the latter skip over to the annual list?<\/p>\n\n\n\nBlack List Founder Franklin Leonard on His Advice to Screenwriters<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
these conversations is I think there\u2019s a lot of misconceptions about what The Black List is and how it functions. If people better understood how we think about it, and what its goals are, people would think about it very differently. And I frankly think a lot of the criticisms would recede.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I\u2019m not going to tell people how to spend their money, but exhaust all the free resources you have at your disposal to make the script as good as possible before you spend any money on it. \u2026 Put your best foot forward if you\u2019re going to spend money on The Black List.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I personally believe that the industry undervalues writers. There are a lot of studies of the industry that reflect that. A good script is the best business plan. And if you have a good script, you can get a good
director. And if you have a good script and good director you can get the talent.
TIM MOLLOY: The dream is a script that\u2019s almost bulletproof.
FRANKLIN LEONARD: Well, the reality is, there\u2019s never been a script that couldn\u2019t fail. It still requires incredible people, incredible artists pouring into that script, to make it realize its potential. A lot of people in this business love to quote William Goldman: \u201cNobody knows anything.\u201d
What they fail to quote, and they fail to remember, if they read the rest of that paragraph, is that he basically says, nobody knows anything, it\u2019s a guess every time out \u2014 but if you\u2019ve done the work, it can be
an educated guess.
What he\u2019s saying is, you can have four aces and you still may lose. But you can give yourself a better chance
by paying attention to what works and what actually has value. And I would bet if I could interview William
Goldman now, he would say educated guess-wise, the best starting place is a great screenplay.
TIM MOLLOY: Why didn\u2019t you ever want to write screenplays yourself?
FRANKLIN LEONARD: I do a little bit of writing. It\u2019s mainly like journalistic and editorial writing. \u2026 I took fiction writing classes in college, and I would say, with possibly more than a healthy ego, I\u2019m a decent writer.
I don\u2019t think I\u2019m a great writer. I think that the time and effort and frankly emotional pain that it would take for me to write something great is not \u2014 if I could get there at all \u2014 I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s worth it for me. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have too much respect for what writers actually do. I\u2019d rather work with the great ones than try, and fall short of their greatness.
TIM MOLLOY: I mean, you changed the industry. So there\u2019s that.
FRANKLIN LEONARD: Thank you for saying that. But for me, I have an incredible amount of reverence for what writers do, especially the ones who do it incredibly well. I see an industry that does not support them adequately. It frustrates me, both as someone who loves great movies, and as someone who wants to see this industry be successful \u2014 and someone who wants the business to work.
I\u2019m kind of a nerd. I\u2019m an efficiency person. I like systems, right? I built this entire thing around a spreadsheet of screenplays. I want the system to work well. And I see the system not working well.<\/p>\n\n\n\nFranklin Leonard on Knowing Your Favorite Movie<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
You\u2019ve got to have your list of movies that you can talk about. Think about what those say about you. Have some from different decades in case people want to ask you about something before the year 2000.
Yeah, in this interview, Leo asked me my favorite movie, and I just froze. I couldn\u2019t think of a movie, much less a favorite movie. And any movie that sprang to my head, I could immediately make 100 arguments for why that was an embarrassing answer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
TIM MOLLOY: So do you have an updated list of favorite movies?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
FRANKLIN LEONARD: It changes day to day. I would say those that stay toward the top of the list are A Prophet<\/em>, the French film; Being There<\/em>, one of my all-time favorites \u2014 some days it\u2019s probably number one; Amadeus<\/em>, a banger; Dr. Strangelove<\/em>; Parasite.<\/em> I\u2019m always loath to mention recent films because you always worry that there\u2019s a recency bias\u2026 but I think that one\u2019s going to stick around. I think that one\u2019s uncom-
monly brilliant. When Harry Met Sally<\/em>; Do the Right Thing<\/em>. Tommy Boy<\/em>.
I think people underappreciate those early-mid \u201990s SNL actor movies like Billy Madison<\/em> and Tommy Boy<\/em>. They\u2019re incredibly well-structured and very, very funny. And their politics I think are really interesting \u2014 about who deserves success in a capitalist society. I think those movies are sneaky, super smart.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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