Black List creator offers shortcut to success
After a long-haul flight from New York, Franklin Leonard looked a bit tired. But his speech recalling the dramatic birth of The Black List, an influential survey about Hollywood’s most popular but unproduced screenplays, quickly captured the attention of the Chinese audience.
As the founder of the list, Leonard was attending the fourth Chinese Movie Scriptwriters’ Seminar, which was organized by Bianjubang, an online platform for scriptwriters, to discuss the key to distinguishing good stories on April 19.
The title of Leonard’s speech was Without a Writer, There is Nothing.
But the Hollywood film executive’s rapid rise to fame is an interesting story that could just as well be titled Without an Email, There is Nothing.
Growing up in Georgia in the southeastern United States and graduating from Harvard University, Leonard began his career as a celebrity agent’s assistant in 2004. A year later, the then 27-year-old became a junior executive at Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company, Appian Way Productions.
A big part of his daily job was to read scores of novels, articles and scripts, which proved to be a time-consuming way of trying to identify works with real potential. Besides the usual working week, Leonard recalls having to take another 20 scripts home with him to read on weekends.
During one late night in 2005, the exhausted young man suddenly had an idea in the company’s office, high above Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. He sent emails to nearly 100 film industry development executives, asking them to anonymously list their favorite yet-to-be produced screenplays of the year.
“Initially, it (the anonymous survey) was very selfish. I just wanted to make my job easier … There is a long history in Hollywood that people share information in order to do their jobs better, but email was comparatively new in 2005,” says Leonardo during an interview with China Daily after the event.
Unexpectedly, he received a response to most of the emails, which he then made into a list, and then, again anonymously, shared with the people in the survey. A week later, he found the list was forwarded back to him dozens of times. And six months later, he received a call from an agent who tried to sell him a script by confiding in him a “personal secret”.
“Listen, don’t tell anyone I told you this, but I have it on very good authority that this script will be number one on next year’s Black List,” says the agent.
Leonard was dumbfounded. Before that, he had no plans to make another list.
Seeing The Black List going viral and realizing its value, Leonard turned it into an annual survey, which now reaches around 650 film executives who are behind about 90 percent of all Hollywood movies. It has also soared to become an influential index to help Hollywood decision-makers cut the time it takes to find potentially lucrative stories.
For the executives who are busy dealing with selecting screenplays, Leonard says their job is “a little like walking into a members-only bookstore filled with exclusive titles, where the entire inventory is organized alphabetically and every book has the same nondescript cover.
“The Writers Guild of America registers some 50,000 new pieces of material every year, and most of those are screenplays,” he says.
And only 10 percent, or 5,000, of such screenplays are filtered to be read by those in high positions in major studios or big production companies, which produce around 300 features every year, says Leonard.
To date, more than 300 screenplays on The Black List have been made into feature films, grossing a total of more than $26 billion in worldwide box-office takings, and bagging 264 Academy Awards and 48 Oscars.
Among the most acclaimed screenplays are the Oscars’ best picture winners Slumdog Millionaire (2008), The King’s Speech (2010), Argo (2012) and Spotlight (2015).
Despite the Beijing event marking Leonard’s first visit to China, he has been paying attention to Hollywood’s increasing interest in the Chinese market for its huge annual output and growing boxoffice revenue.
“I think the United States is still trying to figure out the pass code to the Chinese market,” he says, adding they have yet to obtain a successful formula.
But he believes cinema has a distinctive charm that helps transport an audience across borders, which is the key to making appealing movies.
“I grew up in a small town. What is most interesting for me is that through watching films, I can go anywhere in the world or in space,” says Leonard.
“I cannot board a plane to China every day, but I can go to the cinema or turn on my television to watch great films about China. I’m really looking forward to seeing more films about China and Chinese life,” says Leonard, who is also a fan of Jackie Chan, Jet Li and Wong Kar-wai.