Fifty-four Academy Awards and 267 nominations. That’s the sort of canonical foresight the Black List has had since first launching in 2005 as Hollywood insiders’ go-to index of screenwriters. The Social Network, Edge of Tomorrow, Selma, Don’t Worry Darling—each one was selected for the annual Black List survey before going on to critical and commercial acclaim.
“I knew there were great writers and great scripts that existed outside of the Hollywood ecosystem,” its founder Franklin Leonard says. “I wanted to find a way for that to benefit everybody.”
With success came growth, and growth brought opportunity. Fully established as a website and brand in 2012, the Black List has since proved itself a fundamental resource for agents, producers, and studios in search of their next hit. Across its nearly 20 years, it has platformed thousands of screenplays and television pilots. Today it boasts some 7,000 entertainment professionals.
In September, Leonard took another leap—expanding into the world of books. The Black List now hosts fiction manuscripts, and to help navigate the unfamiliar meadows of publishing, he brought on board Randy Winston, the former director of writing programs at New York’s Center for Fiction and a kingmaker in his own right.
As for how it works: Interested writers create a profile (free), upload their novel-length manuscripts of any genre ($30 a month), and, if they so choose, can pay for expert feedback from literary professionals via the site ($150). Like the annual Black List, the best manuscripts are featured in Leonard’s subscriber newsletter and guaranteed to land in the inbox of publishing industry power players.
Curious about the expansion, I phoned Franklin to hear how he again plans to capture lightning in a bottle.
JASON PARHAM: There’s no nice way to ask this, so I’ll just ask it. What makes you think you can pull this off again?
FRANKLIN LEONARD: It’s a fair question [laughs]. And I'll be honest, I was loath to jump into it. It’s not a great look to be like, “I'm from Hollywood and I'm here to save you.”
Yes, I know the Hollywood savior complex well.
And that was the last thing I wanted to do. I built this thing specifically to solve the problem and a system that I saw in Hollywood. I didn't work in books, so I didn't want to be presumptuous and assume that you just take that and apply it. So last year, Howie Sanders, a book agent at Anonymous Content, set up a series of meetings for me. She said, “You tell people how you plan to do this, and ask them to tell you where you are wrong.” I was very happy to discover that people were like, there's a need for this. The question became, how does this model need to be shifted so that it can be successful?
There’s an obvious need for it, as you said, but only because of very obvious problems endemic to institutions like Hollywood and publishing. Why are they so reluctant to change?
There's a lot of reasons. The most material one is actually just a practical one: There is a superabundance of material. There are more screenplays written every year than any one person could read, or any small group of people could read. There are more novels written every year than any editorial staff of a publishing house could read.
Way too many.
Inevitably in those economic conditions, as market dynamics, you're going to start triaging things and read things that come from people you know, because they vouch for it, or institutions that have a long history of being the sources of things that have value. In most cases, that means film schools. It may mean defaulting to what the agency sends or the things that end up on your desk via social relationships. And that's not an efficient way to find good things.
You felt the Black List could help fix that?
That previous way is a shorthand. It might allow you to find some good things. But it means that a lot of people who don't have access to those social networks, who don't have access to those institutions, but who do have talent and have written something amazing, are never going to find their way to your desk.
In a pre-internet world, there was probably some justification for that because how are you going to build a platform that allows everybody to submit their work and get feedback? But wherever the internet exists, you shouldn't have to move to New York or LA to get your work to the right people. What we're trying to do is provide that common application, that door into a closed garden that didn't previously exist.
Are you measuring impact in the same way that you measure impact on the film side?
There are a lot of ways. Is the feedback that we're providing valuable to the writers? When we say, here are the best things that our readers read, are people downloading them? And then, you know, the goal for all of this is the writers who have great material, people buy their work. So when the first book gets bought that is discovered via the site, that'll be a big moment. When the first book gets optioned for film and TV, that'll be a big moment. But these things were always going to take time. I anticipate early 2025 for a lot of those first landmark moments.
Speaking to those big moments for the Black List in years prior, I’m curious, do certain kinds of scripts tend to pique interest more than others? I wonder if that might also prove true for manuscripts.
With our annual list there's definitely a type. People talk about Black List scripts as a thing, they're usually a little quirky. They set for themselves a very difficult execution goal with their premise. And usually they deliver on that prompt, the promise of what is a very interesting log line.
For years, I've said that one of the easiest ways to get on the annual Black List is to write a biopic that’s about someone between the ages of 25 and 45 that we feel nostalgic about—Mr. Rogers, Britney Spears, George Lucas. Like, if you write that biopic and nail it, it's the sort of thing that people tend to go for on the annual list.
Interesting.
On the website, you see a lot of low-budget, high-concept scripts that sort of attract a lot of attention from producers and financiers. That just largely reflects the Hollywood market generally for material. If you write the giant hundred-million-dollar epic, it's really hard to get that made with an original script, period. But if you've written a low-budget horror movie with a high concept, you don't need a million people to know about the premise or to recognize the poster in the way that you do a hundred-million-dollar movie to turn a profit.
Like what Jordan Peele did with Get Out.
Exactly. Or the Blumhouse model. It doesn't reflect anything specific to the Black List website as much as it reflects the marketplace for material in the industry. I suspect that will be a similar dynamic in the fiction space.
That makes sense.
If I had to speculate—and I want to emphasize this is pure speculation—I think we’re going to find a lot of genre material first. Mostly because when it comes to high-end literary fiction, there's an assumption within the publishing industry that most of the places to find literary fiction are a given. You go to Iowa. You go to Columbia. But if it’s a YA book, a crime thriller, or something in the fantasy sci-fi realm, that person may not have gone to Iowa. I have an instinct that there's going to be more of an interest in that stuff on the platform, at least initially. It also reflects a lot of the conversations that I had early on with people in the publishing industry that were like, “How do we find those things?"
When the Black List launched in 2005, it did so in a very different media landscape. TikTok and Instagram hadn’t yet seized our attention. Streaming wasn’t a pillar of entertainment the way it is now. Have today’s new attention metrics changed what studios or publishers look for in a story? I imagine it changes what they think might sell, and thus what they buy.
Yes, but I don't think it changes how we approach what we do. But those changes are inevitable. BookTok has changed the book marketplace to the point where audiences are buying some books in large volumes. So those shifts definitely exist. We're providing a platform that identifies good stuff on its own terms, whatever it is. We're able to continue to service buyers, whatever it is they're looking for, even if tastes change because of market factors. All we want to do is identify the strongest things and share them with everybody.
But identifying and platforming a talented writer doesn’t necessarily equate to success.
That's one of the things that I am unfortunately deeply aware of. We can find the best things. We can tell everybody in the world, this is amazing. You should do something with it. But we don’t make the books. We don’t sell them. We don't determine the marketing budgets. We don't determine the awards. The same is true of TV and film. At the end of the day, we are serving these things into a system that has deep and abiding systemic failures into it.
This year several Black and brown editors and executives were laid off, among them Lisa Lucas and Tracy Sherrod. Recent surveys paint a dire picture of the publishing industry’s commitment to racial and sexual diversity, which Lucas referred to as “provisional investments.” With those kinds of gatekeepers gone, doesn’t that make it harder for the Black List to have the impact you intend?
Probably. Ultimately we're serving those writers into a system that isn't yet optimized to serve us all audiences. It's unfortunate because the consequence of that is that those businesses and the systems are making less money.
I don’t know the exact estimates, but I imagine they are missing out on a lot of money by only serving certain audiences.
That's one of my big frustrations with the backlash to diverse hiring. It's like, yes, there's a moral and ethical imperative there to have a culture that's as diverse as the audience. There's also a financial imperative to serve the audiences that exist for the cultural products that you make. And it's highly unlikely that if you don't have a diverse workforce engaged in identifying and marketing those cultural products, that you'll achieve optimization for your financial outcomes. There was a 2021 McKinsey & Company study focused on Hollywood that found that the industry is losing $10 billion annually as a result of anti-Black bias.
That’s more than I would have guessed.
In subsequent years they released a study on anti-Latinx bias and anti-Asian American bias. The Latinx numbers were somewhere between $12 and $18 billion annually, and between $2 billion and $4 billion for Asian Americans. So we're talking about $30 billion being left on the table as a consequence of anti-person-of-color bias. That’s to say nothing of anti-queer, anti-woman, anti-disability bias. Look, there's a lot of money to be made by making a diversity of cultural products that service the diversity of the audience globally.
Is that anti-diversity bias deliberate in some way? Or is the industry, as people say, just slow to change?
I don't know if it's deliberate slowness as much as it is a reflection of the extent to which they don't prioritize it. There's a difference between We're intentionally moving slowly and This is not a priority and therefore it doesn't get resources and attention. And I think it's probably the latter, which is its own version of intentionality.
Totally.
But I don't have a lot of patience for “progress takes time,” because I look at how industries have responded to moments when they know there's money to be made. How quickly did the publishing industry adapt to the notion of e-readers? How quickly did Hollywood adjust to the notion of streaming content on the internet? They respond quite quickly. Why haven't more resources been devoted to hastening and solving these problems for the financial benefit of everybody? In large part the perception is, This is nice to have. We need to do right by our employees of color, ethically and morally. It's not thought of as, We as a business can make a lot more money by getting this right. If it was framed as a must-have, the orientation around solving these problems would be very different.
Extremely different.
My question is, how long are shareholders going to tolerate more suboptimal financial results born of bad decisions being made by leadership around solving these problems? Every study that I've ever read that looks at box office commercial success, the thing they want most is a great, well-told story. If we start from that presumption and invest based on that presumption, I think we all stand to make more money and enjoy more great stories. The Black List is one tool that can facilitate partially solving these problems. But we are by no means the only thing that can.
