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

My chat with Black List Founder and CEO Franklin Leonard continues.

Go here for Part I.


Looking back over these five years, can you think of any instances where the site's achievements exceeded your expectations? For example, did you think that less than two months after the launch, MCCARTHY would appear on the annual list?

There are so, so many: How quickly it happened with MCCARTHY was definitely exhilarating. The stories of NIGHTINGALE and ZINZANA spring to mind immediately. Chris Salmanpour’s career. Minhal Baig and Tom Dean participating in the labs and then ending up on the annual list. Seriously there are way too many to mention with too many remarkable things and people associated with them. Best bet would be to read Kate’s interviews with writers who have found success via the site.

I have to admit, I've lost count at this point of how many scripts discovered on the list have become released feature films. Five years ago, did you think you'd see a substantial number of scripts from the service produced, or did you expect the site would have more success in launching the careers of writers who would see their first produced works on subsequent scripts?

I definitely expected that the site would have more career discoveries than produced movies, and that’s generally the case thus far. There have been seven movies produced in the last three years though, and all of those have premiered at film festivals like Toronto, SXSW, and the Los Angeles Film Festival. I expect we’ll start to see more, and a few produced films from writers discovered on the site with different scripts. BUBBLES, for example, was Isaac Adamson’s first script after Lee Stobby signed him after finding him on the site via another script.

I want to ask a little bit about your brief, aborted partnership with Scriptbook. In April, you announced a new service the Black List would provide is a report generated by an algorithm that would "indicates the commercial and critical success of a project, along with insights on the storyline, character analysis, target demographics, market positioning, distribution parameters [and more] prior to any made costs.” This was met with a lot of backlash from customers and professional writers alike.

Criticism of the Black List is nothing new. From the very beginning, I've seen writers accuse the site of taking advantage of aspiring writers. You've always met those criticisms head on and also reached out to people who've complained about their experience with the site. What was it about this particular criticism that struck a chord to motivate not only a complete reversal, but one that happened in a matter of days? You could have easily said, "If you don't see value in Scriptbook, you're under no obligation to purchase it." What merited going the extra mile in your response?

I really do view a significant part of the mission of the Black List as service to the community of writers. We partnered with Scriptbook because I know that many studios, financiers, and producers are increasingly deploying this sort of analysis in their own work, and I wanted to provide a best in class version of that sort of analysis to writers at a severe discount to what other parts of the industry were paying for it. I also believe that more information, rightly used, is always valuable.

Certainly, we could have continued the offering and left people to make their own decision about purchase, but the response was so overwhelming from the community – both online and from folks who I’ve previously sought wise counsel about how we can most be of service (John August, Craig Mazin, and Brian Koppelman spring to mind immediately) – I deferred to their judgment. I think it was the right decision.

I want this conversation to be mostly about the site, but with the annual list upon us, I feel like I'd be remiss not to bring up last year's LAX MANDIS PROJECT situation. I saw a lot of conversation - both on social media and in groups that I frequent - from people who felt the script should have been disqualified. I know you've said in the past that you don't think it's all that common that a script will end up on the list as a result of collusion. Has last year changed your approach at all to the annual list? Do you have anything to say to critics of the process that put LAX MANDIS on that list? What's your thought process for addressing a situation like that?

I generally prefer to address specific criticisms of the process rather than generalized critics of it. I think the important question is, why should it have been disqualified? Is it the subject matter? The author’s job? At the end of the day, I think the consequences for a script that lands on the list as a result of collusion (and I’m sure they’ve happened) are always negative in the long term. In the best case scenario, you attract attention to a terrible bit of work, and people stay away from the author in the future.

Finally, the last Black List Live reading of 2017 is upon us on November 18th. Originally these performances seemed to be aimed at reigniting interest in scripts from the annual list that maybe had grown cold. Indeed, it appears that was the case for GIFTED, which was released this year, and the reading for THE SHOWER was soon followed by Anne Hathaway attaching herself to star and produce in the film.

Recently, it seems the scripts have taken a turn towards being the more "unproducable" screenplays from the List, such as JAMES CAMERON'S TITANIC. As we head into 2018, what is the objective of the Live Reads in the Black List's overall mission?

First off, I want to give an incredible amount of credit to Megan Halpern (the Black List’s Events Director), Lisa Zagoria (our casting director), and the staff at the Montalban and now the Brooklyn Academy of Music for the live reads. None of it would happen without them. And the work that Megan and Lisa put in is truly extraordinary.

The shortest answer to this question is that we want to put on great night of entertainment wherein the screenwriting and the screenwriter is the star. I don’t know that that exists anywhere else.

Originally, we were only going to do scripts from the annual list, but increasingly we’ve found scripts on the site – Noga Pnueli’s I’M STARTING TO SUSPECT MY TEENAGE DAUGHTER IS AN ALIEN FROM OUTER SPACE, Max Schwartz’s NEW COKE, and Trey Ellis’s HOLY MACKEREL – that have played incredibly well too. Honestly, we’ve been mixing things up over the last year or so on that front, and I think we’ve got a few more tricks up our sleeve, starting with November 11th’s reading. You read that right, we’re moving it up one week.

One of the many things that I never could have anticipated is the extent to which absolutely incredible actors have participated and absolutely murdered their performances. It just blows my mind that we had Parker Posey and Molly Ringwald perform a screenplay we discovered on the website at the Cherry Lane Theater in New York.