Franklin Leonard is Disrupting Hollywood Gatekeepers with The Blacklist

Franklin Leonard had a job in Hollywood reading scripts to find suitable projects to move forward. Fifteen years ago, he sent around an anonymous email to other people with the same job asking them for the best scripts they had, promising to send anyone who contributed the consolidated list. He got some good scripts, he sent what he called “The Black List” around to the participants, and went back to work.

It went viral. It is now an established annual list, and scripts on the list have now gone on to not just be produced but to receive over 200 Oscar nominations and make over $25 billion at the box office. The last eight best picture Oscars went to scripts featured on a previous Black List, as well as ten of the last 20 screenwriting Oscars. Scripts on the list have included “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Arrival,” “Argo,” “Spotlight,” and “Hell or High Water.” A Harvard Business School study found that scripts on the list were two times more likely to be produced and made 90% more in box office than scripts not on the list.

The Black List is now a website where aspiring screenwriters can upload their scripts, get feedback, and maybe even be discovered by a production company.

Leonard appeared this week at the beautiful new Washington DC screening room of the Motion Picture Association of America to talk about the Black List. He told one story about a script uploaded to the site that prompted a call inquiring about Arabic language rights. The film was first made in Arabic, which led to support for making it in English. And, Leonard pointed out, the screenwriter still lives, as he did when he was writing the script, in Georgia. He did not need to go to Los Angeles to get his movie made. Leonard calls it “a system that allows the industry as a whole to capture its good taste.” He described the “conventional wisdom” approach in Hollywood as “all convention and no wisdom.” This means perpetuation of the same stories and characters, generally ones that look and act like the studio executives themselves. Leonard also talked about disrupting the agents and agencies. “They overestimate the way in which they are indispensable.” The Black List is doing to the Hollywood gatekeepers what companies like eBay, Uber, and Airbnb have done to their industries.

Most important, though, Leonard made it clear that the way to get a script made into a movie is to write an excellent script. Don’t say, “Well, that terrible movie got made and my script is better than that.” Write the best script you can, understand that your first script is probably not movie-ready, get a lot of feedback, make revisions, and then upload it to The Black List and maybe you’ll get a call.