The Black List founder says Hollywood is thinking about risk all wrong

After altering how Hollywood discovers scripts, The Black List is now targeting the book world. Founder and CEO Franklin Leonard proved that overlooked scripts like Slumdog Millionaire and I, Tonya can become commercial and artistic hits. Now, grounded in his belief that the Black List can act as a giant metal detector for uncovering great fiction, he explains his reasoning and plans for this expansion.  

This is an abridged transcript of an interview from Rapid Response, hosted by the former editor-in-chief of Fast Company Bob Safian. From the team behind the Masters of Scale podcast, Rapid Response features candid conversations with today’s top business leaders navigating real-time challenges. Subscribe to Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts to ensure you never miss an episode.

Today I want to zero in on The Black List itself because you’ve recently embarked on an expansion.

The Black List started as a side project for you, an underground kind of crowdsourcing effort aimed at identifying the best Hollywood scripts that weren’t getting made. In the years since, you’ve built it into a platform for scriptwriters and playwrights for training, identifying talent, linking talent to opportunity. Now you’re expanding into something new. So can you explain to us sort of where The Black List is, what the expansion is, and why you’ve gone down this road?

Yeah, like you said, it started as this annual survey of Hollywood’s most liked unproduced screenplays that quickly became an arbiter of taste in the business and sort of served early notice of writers and scripts that the industry should be paying attention to with great success. For the last couple of years, a lot of folks in the book space had been asking me when we were going to expand into novels. I tend to be a research data-driven person, and I also knew that the reason The Black List worked was that it had been purpose-built for the film and television industry ecosystem. I was trying to solve a problem in that space.

Something you knew personally, something you lived through, right?

Yeah, I mean, I’ve been in the industry for more than 10 years before we launched the website. I’ve been there for more than 20 now. So we were building something that could optimize the system in the film and television, and then the theater space.

And Howie Sanders at Anonymous Content was really adamant that I seriously consider this and set me up on a series of meetings with people in the book industry. What I was pleasantly surprised to find was that people were really excited about it, that there was a recognition that there was a lot of great writing happening in places that they didn’t know about and that they couldn’t find. And that we could be an industrial-size metal detector and take an infinite pile of haystacks and find the needles.

And that’s really what we built. So The Black List expanded into fiction in early September. It means that if you are a novelist, if you have an unpublished novel, a self-published novel, or a published novel, you can create a writer profile on The Black List website, list all the things that you’ve created so that they’re searchable by people in the publishing, film, television, and theater businesses. 

And if you want to get feedback on your work or you want to make it directly available to those people, you can host it on the site. You can purchase feedback. And when that feedback is really positive, we’ll tell everybody in the publishing world and in the film and television world that this is a book you should probably pay attention to.

And again, the goal remains to identify and celebrate the best writing we can find. We’re going to find a lot of great books that a lot of people are going to put out and a lot of books that are going to get adapted into film and television. It’s a tide that raises all boats.

So much of it seems to be about what is seen as risky, right? Like at the Emmys recently, Baby Reindeer‘s Richard Gadd echoed what American Fiction director Cord Jefferson said at the Oscars, right? The industry needs to take more gambles on original work. And it sounds like what The Black List is trying to do in some ways is to make that easier by kind of pre-vetting things, right?

Yeah, I think that’s fair.

I always have anxiety when people say that they need to make more risky work. Because I actually think that if you’re thinking about things rationally and you’re trying to optimize for your economic outcomes, making more risky work is not necessarily the strategy.

My argument is, what if our assumptions about what is risky are deeply flawed? And so we’ve been making decisions about risk assessment that are wrong, right? And I think there’s considerable evidence to that effect.

For years I was told in my career that female-driven action movies don’t work. They just don’t work. Everybody knows they don’t work. I remember thinking, okay, I guess that’s true.

And look, this is why Hunger Games was passed on by literally almost every studio. “Female-driven action doesn’t work.” That wasn’t universal at the time. But this is conventional wisdom that’s like all convention and no wisdom. Similarly, Black movies don’t sell abroad. I genuinely don’t know why people think that, but it was an assumption for a long time in the industry that I still think we’re growing out of, but people weren’t looking at the data.

Coming to America made several hundred million dollars internationally in the ’80s. Will Smith, Jamie Foxx, Denzel, they’ve been global movie stars for years.

But those are the assumptions that define what is perceived as risky and not risky.

And so my point of view is these assumptions are wrong. And when we change these assumptions, we’re going to end up making more things that would have in an old paradigm been perceived as risky but actually are optimal to make more money. And here’s my favorite example of this:

Harvard Business School did a study on The Black List a couple of years ago, the annual Black List survey. And these are scripts that at the end of the year are in production, but they are very much beloved by Hollywood executives. There are things like The Imitation Game, Slumdog Millionaire, and Juno.

But Harvard Business School found that movies made from Black List scripts—the weird ones, the things that people think, “Oh, it’s impossible to make this. Those are too risky”—90% more in revenue controlling for all other factors than movies made from scripts not on the annual Black List. 

And that’s because great writing has a lot of value, no matter how risky the perceived subject matter is. But if you nail a good story, well told, it’s probably a good investment. It’s probably your best investment.

I had Janice Min of The Ankler on recently after the Emmys, and she talked about how she feels like the entertainment industry is sort of running away from doing anything that’s different. After the Oscars, you were pretty excited about the quality of the work that was recognized this year. Are you optimistic or wary about the future?

I will always have a great deal of optimism about the potential for creative people to solve problems in the pursuit of creating great art.

Every year when the Emmys happen and the Oscars happen, if you look around at the nominees, you look around at the best movies that are made every year, the best TV that’s made every year, you can make a usually a pretty compelling case that this is a pretty exciting time, that amazing things are being made.

I think at the same time, the challenges that face those creatives to execute on those singular visions continue to increase.

It’s harder to get budgets. It’s harder to get the resources that you need to get distribution in a way that can allow your thing to even be found, but I’m also optimistic because this remains the first era where a lot of kinds of people even have a chance to make anything.

A lot of people have nostalgia for 20 years ago, 40 years ago, 60 years ago, “Ah, better things were being made. They were more idiosyncratic, and people, filmmakers had actual resources to do things.” It’s not true. It’s a fiction.

Some filmmakers had resources to do things, but women filmmakers didn’t. Filmmakers of color didn’t. Queer filmmakers didn’t. Disabled filmmakers didn’t. And so I’d rather be in this era and be able to enjoy the bounty of those folks than a fictive history where everything was easier. I’ll also say that we have a sort of nostalgia about past eras in terms of where movies came from. Everyone’s like, “Oh, there were so many more original movies made years ago.” I was looking back at the top 30 movies in 1999. The vast majority of those are sequels and remakes and adaptations.

So even then—

Even then?

Even then, and by the way, if you think about it, Gone with the Wind is an adaptation of a novel, right? Like, heck, Birth of a Nation is an adaptation of a novel, if we’re being real about it. So it is not as though we were already not, as a business, saying, “Wow, we’re investing a lot of capital into making this thing that we’re going to try to distribute to a lot of people.” Wouldn’t it be helpful if they were sort of already familiar with the story and the thing so that they were more excited to go to it?

And I don’t think anybody really cares all that much about whether something was adapted or a remake. They just want it to be good.