The List is only the tip of the iceberg.
We do major events in Los Angeles. We take some of the best screenplays that we find on the website and cast them with big-name actors and we put them on stage in a theater in Hollywood three to four times a year and we sell out most of those events. We had a podcast where we took scripts also from the website and we would record a table read of those screenplays and do a bunch of post-production audio work and release those as radio plays for the podcast generation. We were chosen as one of Apple’s best podcasts in 2015.
And we do screenwriters’ labs, very similar to the way that Sundance does them every year. We invite screenwriters who have the best scripts on the website to Los Angeles, all expenses paid, to be mentored by screenwriters like Graham Moore, who wrote “The Imitation Game” or Karen McCullah and Kirsten Smith who wrote “Legally Blonde.” We have two additional Labs that are only for female writers — reckoning with the reality that the numbers in Hollywood are frankly just embarrassing in terms of the number of male and female writers. I think it’s 80% male 20% female which is in no way representative of the way talent is distributed amongst the genders.
Speaking of women writers, some of the demographic data from the website revealed an interesting phenomenon.
Eventually, we had a large enough sample to look at the scores for men and women. What was fascinating was that men and women had a perfect Gaussian bell curve in terms of distribution, but for women, the scores just dropped off at the bottom-right: women just were not submitting bad scripts to the site. Men would basically go “I wrote a script, where’re my million dollars? I’m a genius.” Whereas women clearly were like, “you know, I don’t know. Let me check and make sure the second act is good.”
Or we’d give them feedback and they’d take that feedback on board to improve the script and then resubmit it whereas men would get the feedback saying that the script was terrible and then spend five hours writing a very angry email saying that our readers were idiots. I wish I was exaggerating. I don’t think this is, by the way, an intrinsic difference between men and women. I think it’s sort of a result of a culture that trains men to expect that this thing that I did must be amazing, while letting women know they’re not going to get a second chance when they submit, so they have to put their best foot forward.
The next phase is production, which has been Leonard’s endgame all along.
My goal in Hollywood was not to build the Black List website. For me, it was always to make movies and The Blacklist was a tool that I created so that I could more efficiently find the things that I wanted to make. And we did [such] an efficient job of finding great scripts that everyone in Hollywood was following our lead. And I would sit on my couch during the Oscars and applaud and celebrate them and think to myself, God if I had that money I could have made that movie.
And so we wanted to put ourselves in a position where we can say: This is a really good script, you should do something with it, and if you don’t, we will. And so I raised a bit of money out of China two years ago, and financed and produced our first movie: “Come As You Are,” a small comedy about three disabled men who escape their overbearing parents to go lose their virginity. And I’m proud to say that it just premiered at SXSW. Next, we’ll go into production in June with Tate Taylor, who directed “The Help” and it’s a movie starring Allison Janney and Laura Dern from a script that was on The Black List two years ago by a woman named Amanda Idoko, a Nigerian-American woman who happens to write like one of the Coen brothers. And we’ve just done a first-look deal with Endeavor Content so that we’ll be able to make movies using their money.
I’ve always thought our North Star is identifying and celebrating great screenplays. We can do that with an annual survey. We can do that with a website. But I’ve always said that the best way to celebrate a great screenplay is to get it made, which is why that’s the next stage for us.
And finally, a couple of success stories that illuminate what the Black List, at its best, can do. First Minhal Baig and “Hala”:
Our first screenwriters lab we did in 2013. One of the six writers selected was a young woman, Minhal Baig, a 22-year-old Muslim who grew up in Chicago, had gone to Yale University and had written a very, very strong thriller script. It was a sort of academic thriller, set at a university, about rival professors and it did very well. All the mentors were very impressed with her, but I remember the last night. She and I were talking over dinner and I asked why did you write this script? She was like, well, I just figured that’s what people want to read. I said, but do you feel passionately about this story? She’s like no, no.
So I said, “You are a young Muslim woman living in America in 2013. That’s not something that I have gotten to see on screen very often and I can tell you [that story] will read like science fiction to [Hollywood execs] because it’s so far from their reality. I’m not telling you what to write, just that that’s a script that I would want to read.” Fast forward two years. She’s written a script called “Hala” that ends up on the annual Black List. That movie gets optioned by Will Smith and it premiered this year at the Sundance Film Festival in competition (she directed it) and it actually ended up being Apple’s first ever film acquisition.
Now I can say Minhal Baig is incredibly talented. I believe that she would have navigated her way into the Hollywood system and been able to get “Hala” made without the Black List. I just don’t know how long it would have taken. The role of the Black List is to catalyze these things, not necessarily to discover them or make them good when they’re not. But what I can say is that the industry is historically not been set up to welcome people like that — there’s a reason why the vast majority of people who run Hollywood don’t look like me and don’t look like Minhal. The proudest aspect of the Black List for me is that, historically there have been a large number of people that are incredibly talented that have been excluded from participating and we are saying these are the talented people. These are the people you should be working with.
And secondly, “Zinzana.”
There are a husband and wife from Atlanta Georgia who wrote a small Gothic thriller about a rural prison and they wanted to direct it. It did really well on the website and they were hoping to find a producer a financier that would give them the money to make the movie.
They got signed by a management company in Hollywood and shortly thereafter, they got a phone call from Image Nation Abu Dhabi saying “We really wanted to make a movie in this genre. We couldn’t find a script. We love yours. Can we buy the Arabic language rights to your movie?” And they were like, this is a practical joke, right? But also, well, we’re not doing anything with them. You’re welcome to them.”
So they bought the Arabic language rights, translated it, made it and that movie, “Zinzana” actually premiered at Fantastic Fest and at the London Film Festival. [So this UAE-made Arabic thriller] was originally an English language script written by a husband and wife from Atlanta. I don’t think that’s possible before the existence of The Black List.
