Black List website "success story" Justin Kremer reflects on how it launched his career

Mere weeks after the Black List website launched five years ago, an unknown writer named Justin Kremer became the first site user to be signed by representation. And this wasn't just any agency, it was with Creative Artists Agency, one of the biggest players in the industry.

I was an early supporter of Justin's work, but even by the time I'd posted my rave of his MCCARTHY, there was clear momentum behind it. Flash forward five years and MCCARTHY isn't in production, so I can imagine the cynics wondering what it all meant for Justin in the end. And what did it feel like to be at the center of the hype of the Black List's first success? Fortunately, Justin's here to take us through the last five years in his own words:

It was October of 2012 and I was fucking depressed. I’d spent the last six months lying on my couch, wallowing in self pity, as I searched for a job as a creative executive in the minuscule New York film community. I thought CE work was the best path toward the dream I had since the age of 16: becoming a screenwriter. But I had no prospects, no real plan, and absolutely no hope.

When I heard about the Black List’s new website. I didn’t think much of it. I uploaded a screenplay out of sheer boredom. I entered this experiment with no great expectations. I thought perhaps the site would reward me with a modicum of validation, in the form of a lukewarm/slightly positive review, at a time when I really needed a boost.

Forty-eight hours later, I was sitting in a friend’s basement when I refreshed my email, as I did compulsively those days (fine, I still do). It was Saturday night at 10 o’clock and there was no way a prospective employer would be emailing me, yet I persisted. I discovered an email from The Black List containing my review. It was positive. Very positive. My jaw hit the floor. I read it and reread it, convinced there had been some sort of mistake. This reviewer couldn’t have read my script, right?

Fast forward to the following Friday. I was sleeping when the phone rang. An agent was calling.

She was in New York City for twenty-four hours and wanted to know if I was interested in meeting.

I leapt out of bed, with a furor I haven’t matched since, and rushed to the train. I checked my email as I boarded. Another agency requested a call that evening. What the fuck. My head was spinning. I took the meeting, and the call, and suddenly I had offers of representation. When I returned home that evening, my friends and family surprised me with balloons and a cake. That was day one of the journey, but the euphoria I felt that day is a high I’ll chase for the rest of my life.

Forty-eight hours earlier, I was a loser with no direction. Suddenly, I was a loser juggling phone calls and meetings amidst the havoc of Hurricane Sandy, the greatest natural disaster New York had seen in ages. I spent much of the next two weeks in my car (the only place I could find a functioning electrical current to charge my phone), talking to folks selling me a dream. It was confusing. I’m a neurotic New York Jew terrified of disappointing people. Saying “no thanks” to potential reps was….a struggle. While I recognized that I was stuck with an embarrassment of riches, I was far more stressed than I was enthused.

How do I break the news to [insert rep here]?

Did I lead this person on?

And, most importantly…

Am I making the right decision?

Fortunately, I did, and found a wonderful manager in Adam Kolbrenner and the team at Madhouse. Adam's been by my side every step of the way, and I'd be lost without his sage advice.

The next step was a trip to Hollywood. I was a lifelong New Yorker, and hadn’t been to Los Angeles since I was a child. I flew in for a week of meetings and made the rounds, collecting Poland Spring from Burbank to Santa Monica. By the end of the week, a producer informed me that she’d like to “develop” an original idea of mine.

I was woozy. I heard the sound of a Brinks trunk. I had made it! I was a success.

…no, not quite. In fact, I was an idiot. I didn’t understand the meaning of the word develop. I didn’t understand the economics of life as a professional screenwriter. Hell, I didn’t make a dime for the first eighteen months of my career. Studios didn’t cut me a check just because I had landed reps and a spot on the Black List.

Life as a writer is full of false starts. One of the great challenges we face is in managing expectations, in finding a middle ground between overwhelming cynicism and bleary eyed optimism. Initially, I saw nothing but roses. Then, things took a turn. Every false start crushed me, and exacerbated my impostor syndrome. There was (and is) only one solution: keep writing.

Forgive the brief diversion here, but I’d like to share the most important thing I’ve learned about life as a screenwriter. When I first started, my happiness was solely dependent on my work. I set a goal, and I obsessed over it. First, it was: land reps. Next: make the Black List. Then: book a gig. I swore to myself that if I achieved this one thing, I’d be happy. I was lying. Each time I achieved something I felt a fleeting burst of joy, and then… nothing. I wasn’t happy. Instead, I’d just move the goalposts again. Onto the next goal. That’s the one that’ll really change your life. It took me years to recognize that I was the one who needed to change. I needed balance, to find happiness outside of my work.

I digress.

The Black List allowed to me to build the career I have today. It landed me representation and lasting connections. Two years after an executive downloaded my script off the site and emailed me to say hello, we worked on a project together. Four years after the site shined a light on my dusty old script, it was revived again, and is still kicking.

I look back at my Black List experience with disbelief and a hell of a lot of gratitude. As I write this, the sun’s peeking through the window of my LA apartment (yes, I moved, and you should, too, if you’re serious about this). I’m sitting at my desk, as I do every day, writing. There’s no greater gift than that. So thank you, Black List. Thank you, Franklin. Happy Anniversary.

MCCARTHY's Justin Kremer signs with CAA after being discovered via The Black List 3.0!

Related: Read MCCARTHY on The Black List site!

[UPDATE: 7:40pm PST - see my update below the press release for my reaction to recent developments.]

Well, it happened.  About a month after launch, Black List 3.0 has its first success story!  Congrats to Justin Kremer.  What follows in the Black List's press release.

IN A TWIST, MCCARTHY BLACKLISTING IS SITE'S FIRST CONFIRMED SUCCESS

BLACK LIST WEBSITE DISCOVERY JUSTIN KREMER SIGNS WITH CAA LOS ANGELES

(November 18, 2012) – Only one month after launching its new online service allowing unrepresented screenwriters to have their work considered by industry professionals, the Black List can announce its first confirmed success story. Last week, screenwriter Justin Kremer signed with Creative Artists Agency. In a twist worthy of a screenplay of its own, Kremer's script chronicles the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy's anti-Communist fervor, the same fervor that wrought the Hollywood blacklist that partially inspired the Black List name.

"I submitted MCCARTHY to the Black List site out of sheer curiosity, and entered the process with absolutely no expectations," said Kremer. "The script had been completed for some time and was collecting dust in a drawer. The response I've received has been truly incredible. None of this would have been possible without the Black List site. The avenue it has provided has been invaluable, and one that I expect to breed many success stories."

The script was uploaded to the site on October 19, four days after its launch. Kremer paid for a single read from a Black List reader, and the high score that resulted merited inclusion in the site's weekly member email highlighting its highest rated scripts. After dozens of downloads from Black List industry members and further high ratings from those who read it, it quickly became the highest rated uploaded script on the site.

"We're incredibly happy for Justin and even moreso for everyone who will get to read MCCARTHY and the screenplays that he will have an opportunity to write now that he is represented by a major agency. He's a hell of a writer whose great work simply hadn't been exposed prior to his uploading it to our site. This is, simply put, why we created it," said Black List founder Franklin Leonard. "Beyond that, the coincidence of its content is just remarkable. My personal interest in this period of Hollywood history is no secret. It's part of why the Black List is called what it is. I'd be lying if I said I didn't read the script as soon as the review was completed to be sure someone wasn't playing an elaborate practical joke."

On October 15, the Black List, Hollywood's annual list of most liked screenplays, launched a paid service that allows any screenwriter to upload their script to The Black List's database, have it evaluated by professional script readers, and depending on its evaluation(s), have it read by as many as 1,250 film industry professionals currently a part of its membership site.

Since launch, over 1100 screenplays have been uploaded to the service, from 21 countries and 41 states.

Justin Kremer attended New York University's Tisch School of the Arts and is a graduate of the Dramatic Writing Conservatory at the State University of New York – Purchase. He formerly worked as an assistant at Teddy Schwarzman's Black Bear Pictures.

Over the last seven years, the Black List has become one of Hollywood's primary arbiters of taste in material. The Black List started as a survey of several dozen executives' favorite unproduced scripts, the 2011 edition surveyed over 300 executives, over 60% of Hollywood's studio system's executive corps.

The Black List, run by founder Franklin Leonard and CTO Dino Sijamic, now includes the annual list of most liked unproduced screenplays, the membership community and "real time Black List," and the Black List blog, home of Scott Myers's "Go Into the Story" and Xander Bennett's "Screenwriting Tips… You Hack," two of the premier and best-trafficked screenwriting blogs online.

Over 200 Black List scripts have been produced as films grossing over $16 billion in worldwide box office. Black List scripts have won 25 Academy Awards – including the last two of the last four Best Pictures (SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE and THE KING'S SPEECH) and five of the last eight screenwriting awards (JUNO, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, THE KING'S SPEECH, THE SOCIAL NETWORK, and THE DESCENDANTS) – from 148 nominations. It is also solely responsible for tens of thousands of yearly introductions of Hollywood actors, directors, producers, and financiers to new material and writers they were heretofore unaware of.

Other notable Black List scripts include 21, 3:10 TO YUMA, 500 DAYS OF SUMMER, ADVENTURELAND, BABEL, BLACK SNAKE MOAN, CEDAR RAPIDS, CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR, DIVING BELL & THE BUTTERFLY, DUE DATE, EASY A, FANBOYS, FROST/NIXON, HANNA, IN BRUGES, INGLORIOUS BASTERDS, INVCITUS, JUNO, LARS AND THE REAL GIRL, NICK AND NORAH'S INFINITE PLAYLIST, NO STRINGS ATTACHED, ORPHAN, RECOUNT, RENDITION, SALT, SCOTT PILGRIM VS. THE WORLD, THE SOURCE CODE, STATE OF PLAY, SUPERBAD, THE BLIND SIDE, THE BUCKET LIST, THE FIGHTER, THE HANGOVER, THE IDES OF MARCH, THE KITE RUNNER, THE QUEEN, THE TOWN, THE WRESTLER, THERE WILL BE BLOOD, UP IN THE AIR, WE ARE MARSHALL, and ZOMBIELAND.

Update:  As The Site That Shall Not Be Linked has revealed, Justin Kremer had worked for the Black List briefly over the summer as an "intern."  Franklin Leonard has issued a statement that reads in part:

"From time to time, we put out calls for individuals to assist us with various tasks like transcribing interviews and alerting us to information about Black List scripts that comes up via the news. In exchange for such occasional assistance, we allow those individuals to call themselves interns though it is an “internship” in the loosest possible sense of the term."

Some people are alleging that this somehow is evidence of unseemly conspiracy.  I disagree, for the following reasons.

1) Even if Kremer had been a full-fledged intern, I don't think any of the Black List readers would know who he was.  I don't know the names of any of the interns working at the companies I read for.  What's more, I don't know the names of most of the READERS there.  My bosses like it that way, in fact, because it makes it easy for them to send one of us a script written by another reader and get unbiased comments back.

2) As I write this, MCCARTHY has 25 ratings on the site and has maintained a 7.7 average rating.  So even if we discount the Black List reader, that's 24 other ratings that have to be accounted for.  On Twitter, someone alleged that they had a lot of friends with access and if they wanted to, it would be easy for them to all rate the script a ten.  This overlooks the fact that if Kremer had 20-some friends important enough in the industry to have access, he probably could make use of those connections in better ways than manipulating a ranking algortihm.

Also, Franklin has indicated in the past that the algorithm is designed in ways that make this sort of ballot-stuffing ineffective.

3) Even if somehow Kremer pulled off the biggest con possible and managed to get his script to the top of the list undeservedly, CAA still had to make their own decision to sign him.  No agent is going to sign a guy who was a mere INTERN just because of his contacts.  Not possible.  I know guys who were actually employees of CAA who couldn't get signed there!  CAA signed this guy because he wrote a kick-ass script.  Period.

I also want to point out that it's not surprising to me that an aspiring writer would sign up to do free work for The Black List, or that such a person would be among the first people to roll the dice on a new service.

And it ain't like The Black List picked ONE script and only one script to single out.  The weekly emails generally push at least ten scripts, and the site generally lists the top 15 uploaded scripts on one of its main pages.  MCCARTHY was one of fifteen and it kept gaining momentum.  If in the face of all of that, someone STILL wants to allege "bullshit," I sincerely doubt it's possible to make an argument that will satisfy them.

Read MCCARTHY on the Black List site! And an update on the other submissions

Well, I made it through the first 25 scripts that were submitted to my post on Black List 3.0.  I have to admit, the response was far beyond anything I expected.  I wasn't sure 25 people would even take me up on the offer, let alone the 60+ requests currently sitting in the comment thread of the earlier post.

I want to say right off the bat that I was somewhat impressed with the overall level of writing that I saw in those 25 submissions.  I've read for a contest or two and I've got plenty of experience with amateur-level submissions, so a part of me fully expected to be screaming "Oh dear God! Why did I sign up for this!" well before I got through ten submissions.  As a group, you guys are far more promising than most of the people submitting to contests and I saw blessedly little of the horrible newbie mistakes that drive me to drink.

Upon reflection, that makes sense.  The people responding fastest to my offer were more likely to be regular readers of my blog.  Thus, it's a good sign that what I've been bitching about for four years has really sunk in with you people.  For starters, I don't think I recall a single gratuitous mention of a woman's cleavage.

Of the 25, I think there might have only been two - perhaps three - scripts where I knew within a few pages that this was going to be a pass.  I expected at least a third of the scripts would have me stopping after a few pages to ask, "wait, what did I just read?"  So good work in not embarrassing yourselves.

I promised everyone I'd give them ten pages.  More than half of you had me intrigued enough to keep going further, just to see if your execution showed signs of living up to your concept, or just to see if you could sustain some of the positives of your script.  I'd say at least fifteen of you got me to page 20 and at least 8 of you had me reading past p. 35.  I considered announcing which scripts had me reading deeper into them, but I realized that probably wouldn't be helpful.  In some cases, it was the concept that kept me going, only for me to realize by p. 60 that things were being developed too conventionally or too slowly.  In other cases, a script started with a very strong first act, only to meander in the second act long enough that I knew it wouldn't be a high consider.  So I didn't want to leave anyone with the impression "You had me until p. 44, but p. 45 is where you fucked up, so fix that."

This is because I wasn't just looking for "okay" writing, or "decent" writing - I was looking for strong writing.  More than that - I was looking for a strong script.  After all, giving a good review to the script is like throwing up a flare on that specific idea.  Those of you guys with stronger concepts obviously had a distinct advantage here - especially those of you who communicated those concepts well in your logline.  Generic or familiar-sounding ideas had me less enthused from the start, but there were plenty of loglines that had me thinking "I can't wait to see how they develop THAT!"  (Not coincidentally, those were the writers who often got 30 pages or so to make their case.)

The flip side to this is that there were a number of concepts that faced an uphill battle with me for one reason or another.  In some cases, the issue was that the story was just too mundane or "small."  In other cases, the factor was a genre I didn't have a particular affinity for.  For instance, I'm not a huge Western fan - but at least two Westerns got me to page 25 or further.  I bring this up to underline that just because I didn't respond to a particualar idea, it doesn't follow that everyone will be as apathetic.

I was reading these submissions specifically with an eye to finding scripts that would rate at 8, 9 or 10.  I wanted to find the real undiscovered gems that could stand up to scrutiny once passed into professional hands.  I'm optimistic that there are a lot of 6s in those submissions, and 6s that could easily make it to a rating of 7 or even 8 with some rewriting.

Also, one writer let me know via Twitter that he'd seen a marked uptick in traffic to his script and even heard from an agent after submitting his submission in the comment thread last week.  He seemed to believe that there was a direct connection between the two, and while I'd love to crow about that, I've not seen many instances of reps following up on material promoted on my site before.  (Having said that, traffic was WAY up on Friday.)  But if anyone else has something like that happen, please let us know, okay?

But what you really want to know is did I find that undiscovered gem?  Yes - sort of.  MCCARTHY by Justin Kremer was the clear winner in this showdown of the first 25 scripts.  In some ways I'm surprised and some ways I'm not.  This script was spotlit in an email the Black List sent out last week to all their professional users, following a very positive evaluation from one of the Black List readers.  Also, the Black List algorithm predicted that I'd rate this script as an 8.3, which is more or less accurate.

Beyond that, I'm not big on political scripts.  Despite COLLEGE REPUBLICANS being #1 on the Black List two years ago, I wasn't really a fan of it.  So it's not like I'm predisposed to the material - plus I had to look at COLLEGE REPUBLICANS through the marketability lens, and political material is kind of a powder keg these days.  My feeling is Repulican viewers would claim that the film was an unfair, propeganda-driven hatchet job on Karl Rove (oh, the irony!) while Democratic viewers would take issue with the fact that it doesn't depict Rove as half the sub-human pond scum we know him to be.

(And if you take issue with that characterization, look up what the man did to John McCain in the 2000 primary election.  It was a vile, evil act of race-bating that not only relied on the worst elements of his party, but in fact fed those fires to make those elements a dominating force in that party.  I've always loved Cindy McCain for saying, "No, I'd stab him in the front," after being asked if she ever would be tempted to stab Rove in the back.)

But a bio-pic of noted asshole and Senator Joe McCarthy is a different prospect, because nearly everyone with half a brain agrees that McCarthy's anti-Communist witch hunts were an horrific abuse of power and a dark time in our nation's history.  (Those lacking that half a brain can be discovered here.) But there's something fascinating about exploring a person who more or less branded himself as a larger-than-life defender of freedom while basically making his name synonymous with the most egregious and repugnant forms of political grandstanding.

This is not only a well-written, well-paced script - it has what every script needs: a fantastic villain.  One scene in particular stands out, about 30 pages in, McCarthy's grandstanding has already begun to make waves.  A campaigning Dwight Eisenhower is so disgusted by his actions, he doesn't even want to be photographed with him.  Instead, the Presidential candidate requests a private meeting with the Senator, during which he essentially says "The fuck?!" and "No, seriously... the fuck?!"  He basically tells McCarthy that he doesn't agree with what the Senator stands for and isn't scared to say that in public.  He demands McCarthy apologize to the people he's hurt and McCarthy's response can pretty much be translated as, "Eh, bite me" and "Suck it, Ike."

So McCarthy has to introduce Eisenhower at a rally and he does just that and only that.  No puffed up speech.  No "I endorse this guy." Pretty much "Here he is.  He's running for President."  And then the amazing thing happens.  Eisenhower comes out ... and basically endorses everything that the slimy Senator stands for.

That set of scenes alone ensured that I was gonna stick around to see Jackass Joe run out of town on a rail when the the wheel of fortune eventually turned against him.

Those of you with Black List access can find McCarthy here.

I'll gradually work my way through the other submissions.  November's a busy month for me and I know I won't be able to blow through 25 scripts as fast as I did before.  I'm still optimistic I can find one really good script that hasn't yet been spot-lit by Black List readers.  I recognize that to pull that off, I'm going to need to move fast though.  I'll keep you guys updated as I go.