Qumra is an industry event comprising lectures, masterclasses, labs, and mentoring sessions, held annually in the Qatari capital Doha for the benefit of emerging filmmakers from the region and worldwide, sponsored by the increasingly influential Doha Film Institute.
FADE IN: INT. LA STARBUCKS – MORNING. A HIGH-POWERED STUDIO EXEC accidentally spills her coffee and barista JIM, a John Krasinski-type, cleans it up. As he works, the Exec notices a dog-eared screenplay, title visible, sticking out of his back pocket. “Did you write that? It’s exactly what we’re looking for!” Jim tosses his apron in the trash as they walk out arm-in-arm towards the sunrise, which glitters on the horizon like an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay.
Until recently this patently unlikely scenario (or one only slightly less glib) had enough legitimacy as a route into Hollywood for an untested screenwriter with no prior connections, that it at least kept Starbucks fully staffed. That was before Franklin Leonard, speaker at the recent Qumra event in Doha, almost by accident, founded The Black List in 2005 — and then very much on purpose, created its website in 2012.
READ MORE: 2015 Black List Topped By Script About Michael Jackson’s Chimp Bubbles
Now pretty much a Hollywood tradition, the annual list of the year’s best-liked unproduced screenplays has yielded 1200 scripts in total, 400 of which have been made. Those films have taken over 26 billion in worldwide box office, and garnered 60 Academy Awards out of a huge 280 nominations. Four of the last 12 Best Picture winners were based on Black List-ed scripts, and 10 of the last 24 Screenwriting Oscar-winners. And crucially, as Leonard explains, it has changed the landscape for emerging screenwriters.
In a fascinating, frank talk (Leonard acknowledges the List’s limitations, chiefly its English-language-only rule) that is of value not just to writers but to anyone interested in a behind-the-curtain peek at the business end of the Hollywood machine, Leonard spoke about founding the list, the diversity issues he hopes it helps to address and why the future, for him and The Black List, is to move into production. Here are some highlights.
With the first Black List, Leonard believed he had violated some unspoken Hollywood code.
Franklin Leonard: In 2005, I was relatively new to Los Angeles. I was working as a junior executive at Leonardo DiCaprio‘s film production company. My job was basically to consume the world — to read every screenplay, every novel, every narrative or nonfiction book, every article — anything that could theoretically be adapted into a movie. And I was finding that 99% of the things that I was reading, I was passing on. They were mediocre to bad, because the reality is that writing a good screenplay is a very difficult thing to do.
I was about to go on vacation at the end of 2005. I’m a bit of a workaholic, but I desperately wanted what I was going to be reading while on holiday to be good. And so one afternoon in late November, I went through my calendar from that year and everyone that I had breakfast, lunch or dinner within a professional capacity that had a job similar to mine, I made a list of their email addresses and I sent an anonymous email. I asked very simply: “Send me a list of your 10 favorite unproduced screenplays. In exchange, I will share with you the combined list.”
I ran the votes, exported to PDF and put a quasi subversive name on it: The Black List, which is a simultaneous reference to the Hollywood Blacklist of the 1940s… and also a version of the notion that black as a descriptive term somehow had a negative connotation in the U.S….something that I felt acutely having grown up in the American South as African-American.
So I sent the list out and I went on vacation and I really didn’t think anything of it. I took the scripts with me, many of them were very good. And I returned to Los Angeles and checked my email (it’s very easy to forget that in 2005 iPhones didn’t exist. Most people had Blackberries and I didn’t even have one of those.) So I checked my email and this list that I made anonymously, had been forwarded back to me several hundred times. My immediate thought was that I’m going to law school, because I’m surely going to get fired.
And so I just didn’t tell anybody that I had done it for the first year that it existed. I would go to events in Hollywood and meetings and people would talk about this thing. And I’d just sort of sit there and nod along and ask questions and try to be in on the mystery: “Well I heard it might be this person…” just trying to distract attention away from myself. Because I didn’t think that the idea was terribly brilliant. I just assumed that there was some unwritten Hollywood rule that had prevented other people from doing it.