Looking back on five years of the Black List website with Franklin Leonard

Five years ago this week, the Black List website launched as a service where aspiring writers could host their scripts, pay for professional evaluations and be discovered by industry members with access. It was the first service to incorporate all of these elements along with reputable industry access, and it built on the Black List brand originated by Franklin Leonard's yearly list of the most-liked unproduced scripts.

Over the last half-decade, the site has continued to evolve and expand its role, even as some of its competitors have closed up shop. The anniversary seemed like a good time for a "state of the Black List" check-in with Founder and CEO Franklin Leonard.


About a year after the launch, you stopped announcing every time the site led to someone being signed. I know your rationale for that is that it ceased being a newsworthy event and that since people are under no obligation to report this, you might not have an accurate count. With that in mind, do you have a sense of trends? Are the 2017 users who gained representation on a par with, say, 2013 or 2014?

Honestly, I wish we could track this kind of information more accurately, but in a similar way to the fact that it’s not news when an agency signs a client unless they’re leaving another agency, it’s not really news any more when the Black List played a part in someone getting signed. I only found out that several of this year’s annual list writers were discovered by their representatives via the site at the benefit we hosted celebrating the annual list two days later.

There are some pretty exciting stats about writers a bit further along in their careers now who found part of their start on the site: Seven movies have been produced in the last three years via scripts from writers who attribute the site to the movie’s momentum, including a Netflix acquisition (ZINZANA) and a Golden Globe nominee (NIGHTINGALE). At least a dozen writers have made the annual list who were discovered via the site, including two of the last three #1s (Kristina Lauren Anderson and Isaac Adamson) and two Black List screenwriters lab participants (Minhal Baig and Tom Dean.)

With five years of data behind you, have you made any conclusions about how the site most effectively is connecting writers with your professional users? Are the email blasts effective? Are there better results when the script recommendation comes via your Twitter? Do the Top Lists pull in a lot of attention? And are people finding ways to successfully promote themselves on the site even without purchasing reviews?

Dino Simone, Terry Huang, and Olga Vasileva continue to push the site forward and improve the effectiveness of all of these channels, and we’re constantly introducing new ones to further promote the good work that we identify. Some of those ways are small like tweeting the scripts that are included in the weekly email blasts. Some of them are larger, like new screenwriters labs for feature and episodic writers under Megan Halpern’s leadership.

That said, the biweekly featured script seems to be the most effective way to promote an individual script. That makes sense: it’s meant to be the script on the site with the most, highest ratings – a competitive position since scripts receiving scores of 8 overall or better from our readers receive as many as five free script reads for each high score.

I think that the hardest thing remains getting attention for your script without purchasing an evaluation, and that’s frustrating for us too. Still, we see roughly a quarter of scripts that don’t purchase an evaluation get at least one download from an industry professional, a number that consistently surprises me. I suspect that some percentage of those downloads are the result of screenwriters who actively promote the link to the script via queries, Twitter, etc.

I should also probably mention here that we give away a ton of free hosting and evaluations. One only need to follow us on social media, contribute to our Essential Films series on the blog, or read Scott Myers’s Go Into The Story to see opportunities to claim them.

What is the ultimate value in the Black List for the user now? Is it more of a place to be discovered by agents and managers via the email blasts, or is the value truly in competing for the many Fellowship and Partnership opportunities, such as the Verizon Go90 Fellowship, and the Michael Collyer Memorial Fellowship?

At this point, I think it’s important to think of the Black List as an umbrella organization for a number of things. There’s the annual Black List and the blcklst.com platform (and everything associated with it… the database, the partnerships, the Labs, etc.), but there’s also the Happy Hours, the Live Reads, and the blog.

Right now, we host monthly happy hours in 16 cities around the world, six annual live reads, and the blog is publishing constantly – via Kate Hagen’s amazing work as editor in chief, Terry’s terrific data work, and Go Into The Story, our official screenwriting blog. I mean, Scott Myers is the best.

All but the live reads are free, and like hosting and evaluations, tickets can be had for free with a bit of sweat equity following us on social media and the blog.

I suspect this question is specifically directed at the platform though, so I’d like to address that in depth. Honestly, there’s value on a number of fronts there, and it’s been specifically designed so that it can be. And it should since parts of it cost money.

Here’s where I think there’s value to be had:

1. Writer Profiles and Script Listing – This is probably the most underutilized part of the site at the moment, and it’s a HUGE opportunity for members of the WGA East or West and a number of other guilds worldwide. Entirely free, you can list your scripts, all of them, in our database. Title, author, logline, tagged with any of our over 1000 tags, representative and contact information, etc. The goal here is to build a Google for screenplays and pilots, so that any reputable industry professional can search for, say, “Action film with a budget under $20M with a female lead over the age of 40” or “Episodic Drama with a Latino lead between the ages of 25 and 35 with the theme of redemption” or “I’d love to find a writer with experience in the medical field” and if such a script or writer exists, they can find it and either download the script immediately or reach out to the appropriate person to get a copy of the script or connect.

2. Discovery (Representatives, Producers, etc.) – Similar to the writer profiles and script listings, industry professionals from agency assistants to producers to actors and directors are using the site to download material directly without the intermediary of a representative. Most of these writers are currently unrepresented, but increasingly we’re seeing those who are represented do the same thing to create incoming calls for their representatives. Being rated highly on the site attracts their attention to the script. It’s that simple.

3. Feedback – One of the kindest compliments I thankfully receive quite often is that a writer found the feedback they received on the site to be helpful in improving their script. Certainly, the cost is prohibitive for some – and we strongly advise everyone to push their script as far as they can quality-wise before paying for an evaluation – but our readers are quite good. And in the rare case where they fail to give you a full and close reading of your script, we want to hear about it so that we can replace the evaluation with a full and close reading and address the issue with our reader.

4. The Fellowships and Partnerships – One of the really exciting things that I didn’t anticipate before launching the site was the extent to which companies would reach out to us to help them find writers for various opportunities they wanted to offer. It’s been an incredibly wide range, from the NFL wanting two writers for WGA minimum blind deals to Cassian Elwes bringing one and now two writers to the Sundance Film Festival as his guests. Particularly for writers early in their careers, paying close attention to our emails, social media, and the Partners page is a wise idea.

Were these sorts of Fellowships part of your long game when you launched the site five years ago? Or did it emerge organically from companies coming to you, recognizing how The Black List could be a resource to them?

Definitely the latter. I wish I could claim to have had the foresight to predict that this would happen. They’ve definitely come about because companies have reached out hoping to take a non-traditional approach to talent discovery. In Cassian’s case, it was as simple as us running into each other and him saying “I want to find a brand new writer who writes Sundance type screenplays and I want to bring them to Sundance. Can you help?” In others, it’s grown out of conversations I’ve had with various companies explaining how the site works and where its greatest potential lies.

Have any of the Blind Script deals - such as the Warner Bros Script deal and the WIGS blind script deal borne fruit yet?

If by borne fruit, you mean movies produced, sadly none to date. If by borne fruit, you mean that writers have received blind deals or otherwise gotten work, then yes, very much so. Tasha Huo, Chris Salmanpour, and Suzanne Allain have received blind deals at Warner Brothers. Andrew Bluestone, who, incidentally, was discovered by his managers via the site, claimed that inaugural WIGS deal.

One thing I like about the Black List-related Fellowships and Script Deals is that there's no additional charge to enroll an active script in the process. Can you commit to that always being the case? Do you foresee any opportunities that would require a separate entry fee?

Unless the site changes radically in other ways or for some reason we’ve partnered with someone that requires for some reason that we not use the site, I can’t imagine any opportunities that would require a separate entry fee.

Come back tomorrow for Part II.