The first time he knew it was a big deal was when he heard an agent lie about it.
Six months after I made the first list, I got a phone call from an agent at William Morris. It was very much the same as the call I got every day, which was: “I have this new client that I just signed! I love their script! I already sent it to Brad Pitt‘s company so you should probably get in pretty quickly!” But he ended the call by saying, “Listen, don’t tell anybody but I have it on really good authority: This is going to be the number one script on next year’s Black List.”
I was not going to make another list! And even if I was, it’s a survey so you can’t know anything. So that was my first realization that this thing that I created largely selfishly had had greater consequence in the industry. So I decided the next year that I would do it again. And then somehow the Los Angeles Times newspaper figured out that I was the person that created it and they wrote an article naming me. I had a lot of awkward conversations.
The List’s big break came when the 2007 Screenplay Oscar nominations were announced.
“Juno” and “Lars and the Real Girl” were both nominated for Best Original Screenplay. That was significant because “Juno” had been the number two script on the first Black List and “Lars and the Real Girl” was the number three. And that made the industry sit up and realize [these unusual scripts] can not only make a lot of money, which is one of the primary driving forces of people working in Hollywood, but you can win Awards which is the other major driving force.
The key difference between Black List scripts and regularly greenlit projects was that the List is (still now) based on the preferences of the professionals consulted, rather than their assessment of commercial viability, which has resulted in a strong showing for original screenplays.
[The List is about what] we actually love, not what we think will make money, not the next Marvel movie or DC movie or sequel or remake. In late 2005 before I actually took the first survey, I spoke with a friend about “Lars and the Real Girl.” We had a breakfast scheduled, I’m doing the banal social formalities and she’s like, “I don’t have time for that. I read the craziest script last night.” And then she told me the plot for “Lars and the Real Girl” and sends it to me and that night, I read the script and the next morning, I had another breakfast with someone else and I was like “I read an amazing script last night…” Very slowly, virally, information gets out there. And that’s really what The Black List does, catalyze that process.
The next major step was the establishment of the website in 2012, which improved access for both the industry players and the submitting screenwriters.
[By 2012] I realized that this idea of a once-yearly PDF that circulated via email had become rather quaint. And so when Will Smith‘s company came to recruit me to work there, I negotiated as part of my contract that I could develop the Black List into a for-profit venture simultaneously. So basically I worked 9 a.m. to 9 p.m. for Will Smith and then from 9 p.m. to 2 a.m. roughly, for myself and went about building what we initially described as a real-time Black List. It would allow anybody in the industry to go online to list the scripts they read, rate them on a scale of 1 to 10 and those ratings would aggregate and you could filter them along any dimensions. So if I wanted to find an action movie with a female lead set in China for a budget of 20 million dollars, I could do that search and there’d be a list.
And as we were building this we realized that we could solve another problem that I encountered in the industry during at my (then) six years in Hollywood. And that was whenever I went to speak anywhere as “The Black List guy” the first question that I would be asked was “I don’t know anybody in Hollywood. I live in Columbus, Georgia, or I live in Doha, Qatar, how do I get my work to someone who works in Hollywood so that it can end up on the Black List and maybe one day get made?”
There was no good answer to that question. I would ask people who were far more senior in the film industry than I was. And the answer was always the same and it was frankly rather stunning to me. It was some version of “Well, the Academy has a screenwriting competition every year called the Nicholl Fellowship. They should enter that and if they place in the top 100 out of 7,000, someone will probably call them.” And the other option was well, just move to Los Angeles. Get a job at Starbucks. I know it sounds absurd but that is actually the answer that most people would provide: figure it out and eventually you’ll be able to network your way into a relationship with someone who can help your career.
Leonard’s own background informed his determination to improve access to the List for a more diverse and representative set of writers.
I grew up black in a small town in the American South. I’m acutely aware of the ways in which access issues can render a culture non-representative of the world in which we actually live. You’re a single mother in Chicago or a suburban dad in North Carolina and your kids come home from school one day and you’re like, “Back of the minivan, kids, we’re moving to LA because mommy or daddy is going to be a screenwriter!?” (And that’s totally separate from the question of what if you live outside the U.S.)
But that doesn’t mean that you can’t tell a story that deserves to be on screens 40 feet high around the world. And so we tweaked [the site] to basically allow anybody on Earth, for a small fee, to upload their English-language screenplay. We hired a team of readers all who’d worked for at least a year at the major agencies and management companies. And then we vetted them additionally for their ability to write high-quality analytical feedback.
We launched that website on October 15th, 2012. The first writer to be signed by a major agency from the website signed at CAA late November of 2012, that writer’s script made the annual Black List a month later in December, and we have been moving forward ever since. We had scripts from all 50 states, and from 49 countries. We had more submissions in that first year than the academy screenwriting competition has ever had in a single year. We’ve been live now for just over six years. We’ve seen over 60,000 screenplays submitted to the site and written more than 100,000 script evaluations, literally hundreds of writers have had their scripts sold or they’ve been signed by major agencies and management companies. We’ve seen over a dozen films get made and every single one of those films has premiered at a major Film Festival. The first film from the new site, “Nightingale” starring David Oyelowo was nominated for a Golden Globe.
