Franklin Leonard

Founder and CEO of the Black List.

I created the Black List in 2005 as an annual survey of Hollywood executives’ most liked unproduced screenplays. Since then, we’ve built an additional discovery layer for the film, television, and publishing businesses. Writers anywhere in the world can get read by professionals, and the industry can find great material and the people who wrote it.

The company that supports the platform is about ten people, and the reading itself is done by more than 150 freelance readers across film, television, theater, and fiction, and on average, including bonuses, two-thirds of every evaluation dollar goes to the readers who do that work.

Before I started the company, I worked in feature film development at Universal Pictures and at the production companies of Leonardo DiCaprio, Sydney Pollack and Anthony Minghella, and Will Smith. I started my Hollywood career as an assistant in the motion picture lit department of Creative Artists Agency, working for Rowena Arguelles, who hired me with no industry experience whatsoever. Prior to all things Hollywood, I was a business analyst at McKinsey & Company and briefly wrote for the Trinidad Guardian newspaper in Port of Spain, Trinidad. I graduated from Harvard, where I studied Social Studies.

I’m a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, where my feature on the 2026 World Cup qualifying tournament ran in May 2026. I’m Bowdoin College’s inaugural Herman S. Dreer Leadership Fellow, and I advised the Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s 2022 exhibition In America.

The first time I thought seriously about working in film was in New York in 2002, shortly after leaving McKinsey. For several months, I spent most of my free time treating the film section of Barnes & Noble in Union Square like a reading room and watching movies that I had rented from Kim’s Video on St. Marks Place. That was the beginning of my film education.

In 2019 the Writers Guild of America East gave me the Evelyn F. Burkey Award, for elevating the honor and dignity of screenwriters. Past recipients include Norman Lear, Joan Didion, Václav Havel, Arthur Miller, and James Schamus, who presented me the award.

It is the one I care about most, and not just because my name has no business alongside those I just mentioned. The Black List exists to serve writers, so to be honored by the community of writers has no real comparison.

It was surreal to receive that award from James, the producer whose work I still specifically remember reading about back in 2002, thirty-odd blocks uptown from where it all began.

It’s been the honor of my life working with writers of all kinds, on all fronts.

What I said on that stage I’ve always believed, and I still mean:

You go into rooms alone and will worlds into existence. You are the creators of the myths and legends that span the globe — the mothers and fathers of our understanding of how we have lived, how we live now, and how we might live in the future.

71st Writers Guild Awards

I live in Los Angeles.

Franklin Leonard

Governance & service

Selected recognition

  • 2026–27
    Inaugural Herman S. Dreer Leadership Fellow, Bowdoin College
  • 2024
    Gotham Anniversary Tribute
  • 2019
    Evelyn F. Burkey Award, WGA East
  • 2015
    Special Achievement Award, African American Film Critics Association
  • Juror
    Sundance Film Festival, U.S. Dramatic Competition (2016) · Mumbai Film Festival, head of the India Gold jury (2019) · Toronto International Film Festival, short film program jury (2014)
Franklin Leonard on the red carpet at the Writers Guild Awards
Writers Guild Awards, Los Angeles, 2025, presenting to the filmmaker of Nickel Boys.

Written about

The Atlantic published a profile of me in March 2017. I’ve also been the subject of a dedicated Planet Money episode, and of interview episodes of Masters of Scale with Reid Hoffman and WTF with Marc Maron.