Franklin Leonard, The Black List (detail), 2005.
How, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists . . . the origin of culture.
—UMBERTO ECO1
Lists only seem flat. We live in them and look through them. Through repetition, they give coherence to what eludes form. We cling to lists even when their contents burst at the seams. From Homer to Joyce, Dante to Whitman, we have long comprehended the universe through this vertiginous linear form.2 Rudimentary as they can seem, they permeate our interpretation of culture, down to how we catalogue our DNA. “Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists,” Umberto Eco said. They order our mental walk through innumerable paths. Their presence reminds us that there is ever more to evaluate on the horizon, more that otherwise might escape our view.
“There is this list, I gather, that travels around through all of the offices in Hollywood and everybody knows about it,” Meryl Streep told Charlie Rose at the start of an interview, recounting the unlikely journey that a screenplay had taken to get to her. “It’s the Black List. It’s the greatest scripts that are not produced,” Streep said, then paused giving a wry smile, “and maybe not producible.”3 Streep knew of it because one of her recent film roles came to her that way.4 The screenplay had been around Hollywood for a while, gaining no traction. Being voted on to the Black List garnered the script attention and then an all-star cast.5
The Black List is a way of getting at the truth that few expected—many iconoclastic scripts were the ones that executives thought had true merit, but studios were often too risk-averse to approve. After landing on the list, much can change. The list revealed the unproduced screenplays secretly beloved by major film industry dealmakers. By granting importance to iconoclastic talent, the Black List has altered how the film industry does some of its most lucrative business and has expanded the idea of what constitutes excellence in a screenwriter’s craft.
Seven of the last twelve Oscars for Best Screenplay went to scripts that were on the Black List. Three of the last five Best Picture Oscars were movies based on Black List scripts. The Black List has become a king- and queenmaker, a Hollywood institution, a triumph for screenwriters, particularly for those making scripts too “quirky,” as Jodie Foster said, to ever get made.6
If the Writers Guild of America logs approximately 50,000 new screenplays every year and major studios release only 150 films annually, the tight bottleneck means, as Scott Meslow of The Atlantic reminds us, that “all things being equal, an unproduced screenplay has a .3 percent chance of being made into a feature film by a studio.”7 Out of the 168 screenplays on the debut of the Black List, sixty-eight have been made into feature films. This produces a miracle of a statistic—40 percent and higher of the films that land on the Black List get produced and distributed.
I was in Los Angeles to figure out why its originator didn’t want anyone to know who he was, and how a simple list could shift an industry’s perspective.
“I was just an aggregator of information,” the Black List founder tells me, looking down at the table in the booth where we sat in Soho House’s glass-walled room, revealing a splayed aerial view of Los Angeles above the Sunset Strip, moving his copper dreadlocks off his shoulder.8 Though lightning-quick and handsome, he says that he’s grateful to have a job that is nowhere near the camera. Most of his conversations are on the phone, or sometimes over drinks. His restrained ambition has remained what it was when we attended Harvard College together (separated by a year): to be the person behind the person in charge. He created the list as a way to be better at his job as a development executive at Leonardo Di-Caprio’s production company, Appian Way. He kept his Black List-related anonymity for two years. But public curiosity became too great and, in 2007, a reporter identified the originator as Franklin Leonard, who had then become vice president of creative affairs at Will Smith’s production company, Overbrook Entertainment.
It started as an anonymous e-mail. In 2005, Franklin wrote to seventy-five colleagues in Hollywood asking them to send him a list of up to ten of their favorite screenplays. There were three conditions. First, they had to love it. Second, it could not be in theaters that year. Third, the script must have become known in the previous twelve months. Nearly all did as the anonymous e-mail asked. Three declined. A handful of others joined, which brought the final voting count to ninety. Franklin then tabulated a ranked list based on the number of votes each screenplay received, aggregating the information with just a few “simple moves on Excel,” he said. He slapped on a “vaguely subversive name,” and e-mailed it out anonymously to the people who had voted.9
The list’s name is only partially a reference to the historical Hollywood industry anticommunist blacklist—the group of studio executives, directors, producers, and writers questioned in Washington by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and prevented from working in Los Angeles by the Motion Picture Association of America. Franklin wanted to refute the idea that black stands for something undesirable.10 As a student back in a middle school in Georgia, he remembers having a teacher tell the class when talking about symbolism in literature that white is often considered good and black is bad.
“There was no racial animus there,” he clarified. “It was more, if you see a cowboy with a white hat, that’s probably your good guy, and if you see one with a black hat, that’s probably your bad guy. Yet even as a young boy,” he tells me, “I remember thinking, I don’t like the implications of this.” Neither did writer James Baldwin, film scholar Manthia Diawara, or any of the other artists, poets, and scholars who have detonated bombs of scholarship on the color-sign logic in literature and film noir, rooted in biblical texts, equating blackness with darkness and evil, and whiteness with purity and light.11
Like architect David Adjaye, who aimed to deftly invert color symbolism with his famed black buildings, such as the one designed for artists Lorna Simpson and James Casebere, Franklin turned the list’s black association into a statement. The tag line on the frontispiece of the list the first year was “THE BLACK LIST is well aware of the irony of its name. The second year, it was “BLACK is the new white.” In 2010 it was a reference to Jay-Z’s lyric, “all black everything.” “In a very subtle way, I’m trying to be black positive,” and he said, “in some way, Hollywood has embraced that element too.” People have pulled him aside and complimented him on the subtle inversion of racialized symbolism, particularly noticeable in an industry where power often comes in one color. Lisa Cortes, an executive producer of the Oscar-winning film Precious, said that she “loves that a seemingly subversive term could be something that is so empowering.” She went on to say, “As we all know, what is on the edge today becomes the mainstream tomorrow.”12 Though it was never the list’s explicit intention, highlighting improbable scripts from its inception gave it a deft political point of view. Works once on the brink of failure from lack of public acclaim can be more powerful than we often realize.
After he sent out the list, Franklin went on vacation as the Black List began circulating through Hollywood. “Everyone is in each other’s offices, calling each other, and debating the order of the list,” said William Morris Endeavor agent Cliff Roberts, who had a client on the 2005 Black List. “Traffic in the development community stops,” as agents read this free, unadorned tabulation of the secretly loved screenplays.13 Hundreds had e-mailed Franklin about it, unaware that he was the one who created it. Some agents would even call Franklin and pitch a client who they said they had on good authority would be on next year’s Black List, an impossible claim given the voting process required. Directors and screenwriters fixated on it as well. Precious director Lee Daniels told Franklin (without knowing he was the originator of the list) that he gets on the phone with Julian Schnabel and Wong Kar-wai once a year to talk about the scripts on it. With the creation of an anonymous e-mail, screenplays that failed to find any notice or acclaim were now ranked and recast as the ones to watch. An institution was born.
Franklin had a sense of what was happening mid-vacation when he checked his e-mail: he saw that his anonymous list had been forwarded back to him many times. Everyone was like, ‘Oh my God, what is this document?’ ”
“What did you think about the Black List becoming so public?” I asked.
“ ‘I’m going to get fired.’ ”
The list had exposed a fissure in the film industry that would be present in any field with pressure to conform to a particular formula of past success.
Here is the Black List from 2005, the first year it was released, truncated at the screenplays with more than six votes:
Of the top five screenplays on the Black List in 2005, two would be nominated for Oscars: Diablo Cody’s Juno and Nancy Oliver’s Lars and the Real Girl.14 Before landing on the list, these scripts by often then-unknown, obscure, or first-time writers were passed over by film industry producers and studios. Some of the featured screenwriters now command the highest figures in the business.15
When Franklin came up with the idea for the Black List, he was ending a three-month stretch of reading bad scripts that made him wonder if he was “either not very good at my job or this was the job in which case I needed to get the hell out of there.” Trying to find good screenplays had felt like trying to reap a mountain’s harvest with hand tools. If someone only read scripts all day each day, perhaps they could read 1,000 in a year. But in his best year, Franklin says he probably knocks out 500. For him, the quest to find those elusive 150 out of 50,000 seems like “walking into some kind of members-only bookstore that has all of the best and exclusive titles in the world. But it’s all organized alphabetically, and all of the covers are exactly the same. And your job is basically to not come home until you find the best book there.”16
“How bad are we talking?”
“The best way I can explain it is to tell you about a script that I was pitched from a manager who called saying that he had Leo’s next movie. It was a call I’d get every Tuesday and Thursday.”17 He describes it, a screenplay called Superstorm. It’s about an oil company lobbyist, DiCaprio if he played the part, whose girlfriend, a meteorologist in DC, wants to end their relationship because there’s a massive hurricane off the coast of Africa that is going to destroy the East Coast from Maine to South Carolina. DiCaprio, distraught, does more research into the hurricane and discovers that its path over the Atlantic Ocean will cross over an active volcano, making it spew toxic sludge into the air, turning it into a biological weapon, destroying all civilization in the eastern part of the United States.
“At that point, I stopped the guy and said, ‘So basically, you’re pitching me, Leo versus the Toxic Sludge that will Destroy Humanity.’ And I wish I was making this up, but he said, ‘Well, when you say it like that, it sounds ridiculous.’ But here’s the sad part. Because of the way this town works, I still had the guy send me the script and read the first thirty pages of it before I felt confident enough to say, ‘Yeah, this is terrible.’ ”
Franklin was facing what he felt was the one thing worse than reading a morass of terrible scripts: another family getaway where he would face questions about his meandering path. It started when he survived a car crash that altered the course of his life. He had one thought on his mind now: You get one go around. A rigid model of success that stipulated being either a doctor or a lawyer had been ingrained in him since childhood. His mantra became, “Life is short. If I don’t enjoy it, I just have to find something else.”
The number of screenplays Franklin has read comes through in his three-minute synopsis of his search—from campaign organizing to journalism, to management consulting at McKinsey & Company in New York City in 2001, where he felt “instantly miserable,” though he was earning enough to pay off debt and found some enjoyment in his work on deals for nonprofit cultural organizations. He decided to quit a day before his entire analyst class was laid off, but luckily waited one more day. He ended up receiving five months’ severance pay and health insurance.
After that, he said, “I just threw myself into the wind.” This meant wandering around Manhattan and Brooklyn with his three roommates, an actor, a playwright, and a graphic designer, all without day jobs. “No matter what ridiculous plan we had,” Franklin said, he ended up watching three movies a day rented from Kim’s Video & Music on St. Marks Place, or going to the Union Square Barnes & Noble and reading about films so often that when he’d walk into the bookstore the employees would let him know if “his chair” upstairs was free. During the night of a snowstorm, he set up an all-night triple feature for himself: Amadeus, Dr. Strangelove, and Being There. At six A.M., he walked into his bedroom and booked a flight to Los Angeles. He found a job as an agent’s assistant within a week and has been there ever since.
The story of the Black List is not only about how many blockbuster and Oscar-winning and nominated screenplays it helped get made, but also about how many of these nearly never did. Landing on the list is often “the difference between a script that keeps getting passed from hand to hand without really being read and a script that gets an actual look from a studio and starts to get some money behind it.”18 Most scripts on the list are long-odds contenders from the standpoint of how studios make decisions. They were scripts written on spec where often the premise is very strange, very niche, but because the writer set a relatively high bar and then cleared it, they transcend the expectation that the premise is too weird to be good.
One of the most implausible films that came from the Black List is a movie about a mentally-ill man so lonely that he buys an inflatable sex doll for companionship and a town so humane that they go along with the mentally-ill man’s scenario. Lars and the Real Girl screenwriter Nancy Oliver felt that the list “gave permission for other people to like it.”19 Before the Black List, “Lars had been making the rounds for a few years, but it was still an invisible property,” she said. Imagine asking another executive to spend precious time reading a script about a young man who treats a sex doll like his girlfriend. “I’m very confident in my taste,” Franklin says, “and even now, I would still doubt myself before going to James Lassiter (cofounder of Overbrook Entertainment) and saying, ‘You have to read that script.’ ” The list gave Lars, once lost in a holding pattern, so much cachet and exposure that actor Ryan Gosling, cast as the lead, admitted that since it had become “such a respected script . . . there was a certain level of fear on my part because whenever I’d mention it to people, there was always a ‘Don’t ruin it’ involved.”20
The efficacy of the Black List propagated a UK version in 2007: the Brit List.21 It has been particularly effective since in Britain there is no studio system as there is in Hollywood, no systematic way to get attention for this smaller set of more tightly guarded scripts. “It’s very much about bumping into, knowing, or meeting the right person,” the Brit List’s current organizer, Alexandra Arlango, tells me. While she admits that she likes the democracy of this process, where “anyone can pitch up and write a script,” represented or not, she is not alone in finding the process so loose—when even established producers struggle to find financing—that “it’s kind of scary.”22
The King’s Speech’s inclusion on the Brit List in 2008 garnered it attention in Hollywood, amplified when it landed on the Black List the following year. When David Seidler wrote the screenplay, his career, he felt, was “truly in the toilet” along with nearly everything else.23 He had just sold his family’s home, his second marriage was crumbling, and he was depressed after being diagnosed with bladder cancer. Even after the surgery to remove it, the doctors told him that there was an 80 percent chance that the cancer would be back in a progressed state in six weeks. He wrote The King’s Speech as his “last will and testament.” It was one more attempt for Seidler, who had come to Hollywood at age forty (“the age when most people are thinking about leaving”), and endured a series of near wins with no breakthroughs. He had first written a script for Francis Ford Coppola, Tucker: The Man and His Dream. Over the next twenty-five years, he had a run of constant work—at times, this meant television movies for markets in Germany and New Zealand when he couldn’t get work in the United States. But it wasn’t the work he wanted. One of his scripts had Michael and Kirk Douglas attached to it for a spell, but it fell apart. None of his feature-film scripts made it to the screen. “I’m not proud of myself for thinking this, but I began to think that I was jinxed,” he told me.
So when it came to The King’s Speech, he said, “It had to be made. If it didn’t, basically my life was over.” He wrote a draft, scrapped it, and finished a second version from his Pacific Palisades rental in those post-surgery six weeks. The drama chronicles Prince Albert’s unexpected ascension to the throne as George VI (played by Colin Firth) and his struggle to overcome his stutter with the help of unlicensed therapist Lionel Logue (played by Geoffrey Rush). Seidler also stuttered. He was born into an upper-middle-class family in England, raised in his early years by a caretaker who vanished after the Blitz, which took the roof off of his London home during World War II. German U-boats bombed the boat he was on en route to America to relocate from Britain. His stutter emerged. Seidler’s parents urged him to listen to George VI’s radio broadcasts for encouragement (“The King was far worse than you,” they’d say).24
Seidler hadn’t even pitched The King’s Speech to Hollywood studios. He didn’t think it had a chance. “If I had pitched a film about a dead British king who stutters, I would have been asked what I was smoking, where they could buy some, and then asked to leave. I didn’t even try,” he told me. His longtime manager said he loved the script, but he didn’t think a major studio would invest. Even Seidler’s son Marc questioned his judgment in choosing the script’s subject: “No one is going to spend an hour and a half watching someone trying to go through their lines.”25 Seidler had it sent to Geoffrey Rush’s agent, but it was initially rejected.26 So he created a semaphore game, giving it to his Cornell college roommate’s nephew, Tom Minter, an actor in London. Minter gave it to Joan Lane, a producer earning her living producing events for the royal family, such as the Queen Mother’s birthday. Some time later, she showed it to Simon Egan, who runs Bedlam Productions, and they optioned it. The aspirations for The King’s Speech were modest. “We were hoping to get maybe a one million or two million pound BBC Four camera production, that’s it. It was going to be a humble, tiny TV movie.” That was, until Harvey Weinstein saw the script when it appeared on the Brit List.
Made for just $15 million, The King’s Speech grossed nearly $500 million in box-office sales. It went on to earn twelve Academy Award nominations, winning Best Director, Best Actor, Best Picture, and Best Original Screenplay. In that year, at age seventy-three, Seidler was the oldest person ever to win an award in that last category. Woody Allen bested his record the following year, setting up a joking rivalry between the two men. (“I told Woody, last one to win an Oscar over one hundred is a rotten egg.”)
The impact of landing on the Black List has become so seismic for some people’s careers that it’s often no longer seen as a tabulation of underappreciated scripts. Marquee name writers so often populate it now that some wonder whether the list is being manipulated by screenwriters’ agents wrangling as many favors as possible to get their clients enough votes to get on.
“It’s no longer a ‘best liked’ list at all, but more of a ‘browbeaten executives’ begrudging choices’ list,” one commenter ranted in 2009 on Deadline Hollywood. Others call it a popularity contest for films and agencies.27 Another screenwriter typified the complaint using the example of The Social Network, number two on the Black List in 2009 even though the film was already in production. “I don’t know what the spirit of the Black List was when they founded it, but I can’t imagine it was a way to recognize scripts Aaron Sorkin and Sony Pictures already decided they were producing,” a blogger said.
Franklin counters the stream of similar comments this way: “There’s something special about a place where Aaron Sorkin’s script for Social Network is number two behind a script by a total unknown who wrote a spec script about Jim Henson’s life by doing research from his home in Australia. It legitimizes Christopher Weekes’s work in a way that being at the top of the heap of previously undiscovered writers will never do.”28 Franklin also reminds me that the earliest Black List log lists (the few lines of text saying who is representing or producing the script) didn’t state whether a script was in production already. The later lists do publicize this, a difference that has skewed people’s perceptions, he believes. While before the screenplays were often unproduced and had no one attached, they often now have both going for them.
It was inevitable that the Black List would change. If it suffers from anything, it is the hipster complaint of “now that everyone loves them, they can’t be cool,” Franklin says, like listening to Radiohead before they were popular, but feeling like “now that everyone loves them I can’t listen to them driving down Sunset Boulevard and Silver Lake.”
The Black List shines a spotlight so large that for some writers the platform can help transform their world. Diablo Cody’s semiautobiographical script Juno, her first attempt at writing a feature-film screenplay, one that she says “nobody thought was going to be this blockbuster,” became a phenomenon aided, in part, by her exposure through the Black List. The movie grossed over $140 million, and Cody admitted to Scott Myers that she didn’t know how to handle massive success after obscurity. Cody felt that the time period where that level of recognition was permissive, when she knew that she “could do anything I want,” wasn’t at all helpful or healthy. One day she’s a writer who, she admits, made so many “mistakes” that certain lines in Juno still make her cringe. “When I wrote Juno—and I think this is part of its charm and appeal—I didn’t know how to write a movie. And I also had no idea it was going to get made! It was really just a hypothetical in every way.” Soon after, nearly anything she wrote could get a green light. There can be a cost to the permissive state that comes with constant achievement.
Too much success can make you overconfident, she said, describing how people often make “rash decisions when the wind is at their back. When it’s just ‘Yes this’ and ‘Yes that’ and ‘Anything is possible,’ you can really screw up.”29
Others find success after the Black List and then worry about being put in a box with their genre. Josh Zetumer, who wrote Villain, which appeared on the Black List in 2006—“a thriller about a guy stuck in a claustrophobic fire-watcher cabin”—said that afterward “the projects they threw me were not only thrillers, they were ‘guy-trapped-in-X’ movies. ‘Would you do a movie about a guy trapped in an elevator?’ ‘What about a woman trapped in an attic?’ ”30 Of course, the fear of being trapped in one role is a relatively good problem to have. It is better than having no role at all.
“Just by its very existence, the Black List makes Hollywood a much better place,” Zetumer says. “And that’s enough.”31
How did the Black List become such a powerful document? It is, after all, only a list. Franklin is careful never to overstate the role that it plays in Hollywood, but to me it seems that he gave it an artful setup. A study cannot explain the full story of behavior, but it must be said here briefly—the Black List took away the well-known Asch experiment that occurs in the process of green-lighting scripts. In the 1950s, psychologist Solomon Asch demonstrated how, without knowing it, we tend to abandon our own opinion altogether under two conditions: 1) when we anticipate that our opinion differs from that of a group and 2) when we have to state our dissent aloud. Asch demonstrated this idea with one experiment where he placed a volunteer in a room with seven other people who had all volunteered for a simple test in visual acumen.32 The volunteer didn’t know that the group was made up of actors deliberately giving incorrect answers. Each person in the group would take a turn and state aloud which line is of equal length to the line on the card on the left.
Staring at the page, it looks obvious which one is correct. When asked alone, without this planted group scenario, the person would give the right answer 95 percent of the time on average. Yet in the group experiment, the volunteer would go along with the group of actors and give a correct answer only approximately 25 percent of the time. The larger the number of opponents in the group, the more errors the volunteer made. Yet when each volunteer learned about the influence of the group on their answer after Asch revealed the results of the experiment, they typically expressed little or no awareness of changing their answers in response to group pressure. In other cases, they claimed that they weren’t sure of the answer. Not only do we often give up on ourselves when faced with holding a minority opinion. We don’t even know that we’re doing it.33
Solomon Asch experiment, Scientific American, 1955. Reproduced with permission. Copyright © 1955 Scientific American, Inc. All rights reserved.
When we decide not to give up on our dissenting view, the body pays a price. Neuroeconomist Gregory Berns discovered this when updating the Asch experiment in 2005 at Emory University by using fMRI imagery. He wanted to determine what was going on in the brain when individuals shifted their opinion to conform to that of the group. His study found that in instances where a person gave an answer that was different from the group’s, there was more activity in the amygdala, initiating the “fight-or-flight” feeling we get in a state of trepidation.34 Standing your ground in the face of a majority requires courage, the hallmark trait of the iconoclast.
The film industry constantly repeats the Asch test. It’s an industry where you have to equate one thing to its closest comparable to approve a script for production and distribution. Determining what will be a commercial success requires judging how well the script in front of you conforms to past films, signaling your opinion in public, and summoning the bravery required for dissent. In the case of uncommon screenplays, this is even more difficult; making a comparison between an unusual work and an existing one is nearly impossible. Producer Michael Uslan, for example, said that Annie was the most frequent comparison to the Batman film franchise, which he produced. “That was the only other cartoon movie they could think of, you know,” he said with lingering exasperation from the years before, “Little orphan Annie!”35
By soliciting opinions through a protected e-mail and distribution system, Franklin eliminated this invisible Asch test for film industry executives and the fear associated with public dissent. The anonymity of the Black List created a private space; public adjudication became sequestered exchange. He was not asking what scripts would be most successful commercially. He was just asking which ones they loved. It reduced the relevance of those benchmark comparisons—the sequels, the superheroes, or more formulaic models that allow studios to try to “formalize and repeat success,” as filmmaker Stanley Kubrick bemoaned.36
Yet as I thought more about the unintended power of the Black List, I couldn’t overlook one ironic fact—Franklin had been working for the production company founded by Will Smith, who has become one of the biggest box-office movie stars by applying his acting skills to projects with a clear chance of commercial success. The result is that Smith has remained one of the few golden tickets of Hollywood casting.37 In the 1990s, he was better known as the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air and has said that he couldn’t get a meeting with Hollywood execs, yet his goal was “to be the biggest movie star in the world.” Smith and his partner, Lassiter, decided to look at a list of the top-ten-grossing films and assess the trends. Lassiter and Smith, who once longed to be an engineer and almost enrolled at MIT, noticed a pattern. “We realized that 10 out of 10 had special effects. Nine out of 10 had special effects with creatures. Eight out of 10 had special effects with creatures and a love story,” the actor revealed to Time in 2007. What are Smith’s recent movies? Largely alien movies and creature movies with love stories: Men In Black II; Bad Boys II; I, Robot; Hitch; The Pursuit of Happyness; I Am Legend; Hancock; and Seven Pounds. They also realized the importance of international box-office receipts. “Being able to get $30 mil in England, 37 in Japan, 15 in Germany is what makes the studio support your movies differently than they support other actors’ movies.”38 So for each film, he travels to a new international territory at the time of a major local event—carnival in Rio, Brazil, or South Korea during the World Cup, for example. The argument goes that each movie that Smith has starred in has grossed so much since Independence Day and Men in Black that a film with him is likely to make at least $150 million. It is a claim no other actor can currently match.39
Smith code-broke the film formula. His reliable results underscore why studios are often reluctant to support excellent but unusual scripts. Yet Franklin’s Black List shows why studios can also benefit from going formula-free.
The Black List inadvertently identified a weakness in the film industry. In an economic environment where studios may make more conservative decisions when there is more pressure on both the revenue and cost side of the equation, the list allows studios to invest in quality writing instead of relying on trends and historical data. It halts what we could call a Lot’s Wife Syndrome, where studios try to move forward by looking back to past films for metrics of success.40 For financiers, the Black List can offer quantitative evidence to argue for the brilliantly written script that might not seem to have the makings of a huge commercial release, but has a good chance of being a box-office success if the film is well made.
It’s a reminder that value is not just associated with superheroes, sequels, or presold properties, but that the quality of a well-told story can justify itself. “Celebrate good work. Good work is not where you think it is all the time.” This is the ethic of the Black List.
The examples are legion. Slumdog Millionaire was a joke: “Oh, yeah, the Indian who wants to be a millionaire movie? That’s gonna be huge,” Franklin recalled, “but you know, the script was excellent.” Even when Slumdog Millionaire’s Oscar-winning director, Danny Boyle, was handed the screenplay, he refused, not wanting to make a film about a game show. After ten minutes of reading the script, he changed his mind. “I knew I was going to make it.”41 The sort of recognition that came with landing on the Black List in 2007 was especially important given the closure of Slumdog Millionaire’s production company, Warner Independent Pictures. Warner Brothers considered sending the film straight to DVD. Slumdog Millionaire won the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto Film Festival in 2008 out of 250 eligible films and received ten Oscar nominations as well. (The year before, Juno was the crowd favorite and runner-up for the People’s Choice Award.)
The Black List “signals to industry insiders that a given project deserves a second look,” Franklin said to Michelle Kung of the Wall Street Journal.42 When the former co-president of production at Sony’s Columbia Pictures, Matt Tolmach, started his own production company, and found Oren Uziel’s 2010 Black List script Kitchen Sink, a Breakfast Club-toned story (its title referencing the fact that the writer had given the screenplay his all), he was surprised that no one had picked it up. Spotting it was like spying “the talented kid passed over in the first round of the draft,” he said.43
By reducing the impact of the Asch experiment, the Black List has made a stance for excellence in writing in a field where there is a tension between art and commercial value. Director Martin Scorsese describes the pressure that pulls apart the twin pillars of merit and popularity, no matter someone’s stature: “People say you should do it this way, someone else suggests that, yes, there’s financing but maybe you should use this actor. And there are the threats, at the end—if you don’t do it this way, you’ll lose your box office; if you don’t do it that way, you’ll never get financed again.”44 As a result, what gets made doesn’t always correlate with the best writing. The Black List is one of the rare forums that offers an encomium to writing without it being presented for acquisition through the prism of a director’s vision or an actor’s performance, which is often a distortion of the original.
It can help to face public evaluation. Screenwriters have to pass the Asch experiment about their own work often on a daily basis. It happens often with the film industry’s pitching sweepstakes, where a writer is bidding for a job, goes into an executive’s room, sits on their couch with two or three people staring at him or her as the writer tells them an imaginary story that outlines the movie. “Beyond being a little bit awkward, creating a fictional universe sitting on a couch,” said Noah Oppenheim, whose script Jackie was the second-highest-rated Black List script in 2010, “there’s something about it that makes you really vulnerable, especially since, most of the time, someone says to you, we like someone else’s version better.”45 Rejection and perseverance requires discounting the voices that say that your work doesn’t measure up. To get through it requires what some call tenacity, or others call faith, and it requires more courage than it may seem. It’s a constant auto-correct.
The Black List has also become a productive focusing mechanism because of its unexplained nature. It simply, one day, appeared. We tend to ponder mysteries more than incidents that we can explain, particularly ones that start with the headline “Black is the new white.”46 Near failure has become the new success.
Franklin has turned the e-mailed Black List into a customized digital service that constantly churns out lists of unproduced screenplays based on the viewers’ preferences. The number of film executives he polls has swelled to around 650. His goal is now to turn the digitized Black List into the conceptual equivalent of Silicon Valley’s Angel-List, which connects investors with start-ups, but in this case to introduce studios and investors to scripts they wouldn’t have ordinarily found. He has partnered with Dino Sijamic, who went to Tufts University to study programming, and while working for Akamai Technologies by day still took on the role of the chief technology officer for the list. Sijamic built the entire site with a collaborative filter and algorithm for the Hollywood ranking system.
“Is the digital Black List done out of a desire to make it all more scientific, more precise?”
“A little bit, yeah,” Franklin confessed. “The inner math nerd in me geeks out over its algorithmic potential. I’ve been geeking out on algorithmic ratings since I discovered them through Amazon.” Before I could dismiss Franklin’s repeated insistence that he is, really, a nerd, he told me about the time he was at a birthday party for a manager of screenwriters when he learned that the man who led the move to create Amazon ratings was there. Franklin, a one-time member of Georgia’s state team, introduced himself, and doused the man with such praise that he still feels embarrassed over the incident.
Given the large amount of data the server will amass about how information moves and how taste functions in the business, could the Black List change the way that agents connect their clients with quality projects? While Franklin is careful not to overstate the role of the Black List, he has come to embrace its place in his industry. Its potential has him excited.
It may be too early to tell where this Hollywood list will go. But in the first twenty-four hours, over 1,000 professionals were on the wait list to subscribe to the premium digital version. As soon as the site was live, users could filter the scripts by genre, and get recommendations for which scripts they might like after answering a Netflix-like series of survey questions. The site would later allow writers to upload their scripts to the site with or without an agent, and has also become a popular gathering place for the industry, featuring in-depth interviews with screenwriters. The Black List site is a way to exit Franklin’s nightmare of the coverless, mammoth library of scripts. Thousands are now catalogued and accessible, sorted based on past ratings.
Late in the summer of 2012, Franklin left Overbrook and focused all of his energy on expanding the Black List’s digital reach. One could say that it’s the “real time” Black List, “a rolling screenplay competition that grants access instead of a check.”47
The expanding venture remains about the bravery of the iconoclast. What motivates him is still the writer who potentially won’t get her work seen, and finding ways to combat that. It is a way to expand access by offering “a meritocratic way in,” one that he admits is not perfect, but still strong.
For some, creating the Black List itself would have been enough, but Franklin still seems to be searching, trying to close a kind of gap—the distance between quality screenplays within a thousand-script-high pile and those executives who should have them in their hands. It is, in part, a curatorial pursuit that I identify with, an interest in scouring the world for what we’re failing to see, to proffer it back in the form of a list, a show organized by theme and sequence, splayed out before all. Yet Franklin’s work is coupled with another aim—to create a more accessible platform for the works themselves. The result of this goal does something even more: It eliminates some of the dynamic tension between art and commerce such that excellence is not amputated in the process.
Many responses to the Black List’s digital expansion were optimistic. The digital Black List proved so popular that it has partnered with the Writers Guild of America, West. Others made clear how much the significance and good intentions of the list’s endeavor had endeared Franklin to a coterie of writers whom he’s admired from afar, and has never met.48
A few have been more circumspect, questioning the depth of the undiscovered talent pool. “At the risk of sounding pessimistic,” wrote Amanda Pendolino on her site for aspiring screenwriters, “I’m not sure there are thousands of fantastic scripts floating around out there, just waiting to get read by the right people.” Most people think that their problem is not “writ[ing] a great script,” but being able to “find someone important who likes it,” she said. In her experience, it is the other way around.49 It is a comment that could apply to the beginning of the Black List itself.
Talking to Franklin just after the digital launch gave me the sense of a man standing apart from a once-familiar creation and assessing it anew. He was witty, but weary. He sounded like many artists I’d spoken to after the public presentation of some hard-won creation, knowing that now it must exist on its own. Out of the slew of press about the digital launch, Franklin mentioned a negative one first, an article that says, “The Black List has jumped the shark.” Shrugging it off, he adds, “I’ve learned that there is absolutely no value in pessimism.” It was a lesson he could have learned from the writers on the Black List themselves.
