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Team Deakins
Franklin Leonard, the founder of The Black List, joins us on this episode of the Team Deakins Podcast for a fascinating conversation. Franklin, a Harvard-educated military brat, starts by recounting his many travels across continents and industries before finding his footing as an assistant in the motion picture literary department at CAA. Having transitioned into development, Franklin shares how The Black List was born out of an innate desire to do better in his job as a junior executive at the time. We learn how The Black List has since evolved and how Franklin’s experiences influenced those evolutions to address industry access issues. We later consider what makes a good script, the inherent subjectivity of evaluating art, and how a script appearing on the list can vindicate one’s interest in “weird” material. Franklin stresses how the ultimate goal should not be to get on The Black List but to get your movie made, and he exposes the psyops he executes to avoid leaking which scripts end up on the list.
WTF with Mark Maron
Franklin Leonard helped change the way movies get made in Hollywood. It’s not what he expected as a young Black math wiz growing up in Georgia. But after a love affair with movies that started at Kim’s Video in New York City, Franklin established The Black List, a tool that became one of the hottest commodities in show business and opened doors for people who weren’t getting a shot. Franklin and Marc talk about how The Black List movies made millions, how it pushed back on conventional wisdom, and how Franklin is still paving a way for undiscovered talent.
Recode Decode with Kara Swisher
The Black List founder Franklin Leonard talks with Recode's Kara Swisher about how he accidentally created one of the most important lists in Hollywood and how he turned it into a real business for connecting screenwriters with producers. Leonard also talks about the statistics that show the benefits of reading scripts from diverse writers and the mostly-white 2020 Oscar nominations, about which he wrote a satirical Op-Ed for the Washington Post. Plus: Why he doesn't expect AI to replace human readers.
The Assignment with Audie Cornish
We hear from Franklin Leonard, founder of The Black List, about the state of cinema and the cultural necessity of going to the movies. And he tries to convince a very reluctant Audie Cornish to go back to the movie theater.
Hell & High Water with John Heilemann
Heilemann and Leonard discuss this year's Oscar nominations, and in particular the historic levels of diversity among the slate of nominees, as well as the epic fail that was the recent Globe Globes; filmmaking amid the continuing threat of Covid-19, the explosion of streaming fueled by the pandemic, and what it might mean for the future of the industry; the story of how and why Leonard started the Black List and the long-term effects he hopes that his work and other democratizing influences will have on the entertainment industry; structural racism in Hollywood and new initiatives, including one led by Leonard, designed to combat it; and the powerful legacy of the late Chadwick Boseman.
On Point Live
Hollywood is like the NBA before integration. In other words, it's an industry that hasn't yet figured out how to look far and wide for the best talent.
That's Franklin Leonard's bold view of the entertainment industry he loves.
Leonard is founder of The Black List, a company and production studio that searches for the best screenplays that aren't getting attention from Hollywood execs.
In a web exclusive, Leonard joins Meghna Chakrabarti for a special live event at KPCC's Public Radio Palooza series in Pasadena, California.
World Reimagined
Risk: the tug-of-war between innovation and the looming prospect of failure that is behind the scenes of every business and industry. And few industries see greater tension between innovation and failure than that of motion pictures. So, how do we innovate and transform a risk-averse industry, especially one that shapes our culture and how we see ourselves? In this episode, Gautam Mukunda is joined by the Founder and CEO of the Black List, Franklin Leonard, to discover what can be learned from his experience taking big risks in the film industry, which can lead to losses but also to monumental pay-offs.
How to be a Better Human
Do you think Hollywood needs to change? How about your own industry? It’s difficult to get decision makers to step outside of the tried and true and attempt something new. Franklin Leonard is Founder and CEO of The Black List-- a company that elevates great screenplays and the writers who create them. In this episode, he discusses how he shifted the way Hollywood works and how anyone can catalyze change if they start by questioning whether the conventional wisdom is all convention and no wisdom. More than 400 scripts from the annual Black List survey have been produced as feature films, earning 250 Academy Award nominations and 50 wins, including four of the last ten Best Pictures and ten of the last twenty-two screenwriting Oscars.
Masters of Scale
Forget looking for a needle in a haystack – instead, build a new type of metal detector. Whatever field you’re in, no doubt it’s crowded and you’re looking for your competitive edge, you’re looking for that mythical needle in that confusing haystack. And so is everyone else. So stop looking. Your competitive edge is going to be finding under-valued assets that others overlook. That’s exactly what Franklin Leonard did when he started The Black List, an annual survey of screenplays everyone loved – but no one produced. Instead of spending hours, days, weeks pouring over screenplays, looking for that one shining needle – just like every other Hollywood exec – Leonard found a new way to sift through the material and use data to find screenplays worth producing, and stories that needed to be told. And you can do the same. We’re all searching for something valuable and rare – employees for our team, opportunities for our company, unicorns for our portfolio. Devise ways to find things no one else has found – or didn’t know to look for – and it could be the difference that drives you to scale. Cameo appearance: Tatiana Mac (software engineer).
Little Gold Men by Vanity Fair
The founder of the Blacklist joins to discuss the entertainment industry's response to the George Floyd protests, and who seems to actually be getting it right. And horror author and screenwriter Tananarive Due discusses the piece she wrote for Vanity Fair about her childhood experience with protests, what positive change she's seen in Hollywood, and why horror movies can be the perfect way to process the scary things happening in the real world.
How Franklin Leonard and The Black List Changed Hollywood
In 2005, Franklin Leonard was a junior executive at Leonardo DiCaprio's production company. A big part of his job was to find great scripts. The only thing — most of the 50,000-some scripts registered with the Writers Guild of America every year aren't that great. Franklin was drowning in bad scripts... so to help find the handful that will become the movies that change our lives, he needed a better way forward.
Today on the show — how a math-loving, movie nerd used a spreadsheet and an anonymous Hotmail address to solve one of Hollywood's most fundamental problems: picking winners from a sea of garbage. And, along the way, he may just have reinvented Hollywood's power structure.
The Town with Matt Beloni.
Matt is joined by Franklin Leonard, a film executive and the founder of the Black List, a yearly publication featuring Hollywood's most popular unproduced screenplays, to discuss the market for original screenwriting, the value a good script still holds in Hollywood, why comedies have disappeared, how the Black List helps anoint the next generation of writers, the potential writers strike this spring, and how AI could affect the careers of screenwriters