Founder & CEO, The Black List

In 2005 I asked seventy-five
Hollywood executives
to name their favorite
unproduced screenplays.

I published the answers in an anonymous email that quickly went viral, and the list born of that has run every year since. The company that grew out of the list now reads writers working in English from anywhere in the world and connects them to the film, television, and publishing industries. Both the annual list and the company have launched writers no one was looking for, which taught me the thing I’ve been arguing ever since: the work was never the scarce thing. A way to find it was, and almost nobody is building one.

Franklin Leonard alone on a stage beside a row of empty chairs, beneath the Telluride Film Festival SHOW logo
Telluride Film Festival, 2024

The writing

I’m a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where most recently I followed Jamaica, New Caledonia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to Guadalajara, where their men’s football teams played for the final place at the 2026 World Cup.

Generally, I write about film, culture, politics, and football. Some of it runs in other people’s pages. Some of it runs on my own Substack.

Read the work

The company

Writers working in English anywhere in the world can host their screenplays, pilots, plays, and novels on the Black List website and have them read by professionals. The very people whose job it is to find material search it and read what they find. Some even get involved in bringing that work to audiences.

When I was early in my career, my boss used to ask me every Monday morning whether I’d read anything worth his time. I took a banker’s box of screenplays home and read them all diligently every weekend so that I’d have an answer. Mostly, I didn’t have one. This is the thing I wish had existed then.

How it works

The argument

Many industries’ approach to discovery is akin to the NBA encouraging prospects to move to New York City and play pickup basketball near their midtown headquarters.

I’ve spent twenty years on that problem in Hollywood. I like to talk about what it might mean for other industries.

Talks & conversations

The annual list

The list is a snapshot of what the business already believes

Hundreds of film industry professionals already hold these opinions about the best material they’ve read, but no one had a venue to share them out loud, collectively. Publishing their answers was the thing that changed everything.

The list didn’t get any of them made. It got people to look.

What came of it

The conventional wisdom was all convention and no wisdom.

Watch the TEDx talk

Elsewhere

What I keep arguing about

Discovery systems are broken, no one’s doing much to fix them, and the cost of that failure is enormous, financially and otherwise. I’ve made the case in the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Hollywood Reporter, and Vanity Fair, and at greater length in my own essays.

The writing

Also