A new script for the book biz and Hollywood

Note: Transcripts are automatically generated from episode audio, and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.

FRANKLIN LEONARD: If you are a novelist, 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.

There was a recent study looking at the movies that got made in the last six years, and half of them roughly came from original screenplays or adaptations of novels.

The Black List now has visibility over the inputs that represent 50 percent of the film production.

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.

BOB SAFIAN: That’s Franklin Leonard, founder and CEO of The Black List, a platform that has reshaped Hollywood by identifying overlooked, unproduced movie scripts from “Argo” to “Juno” to “Slumdog Millionaire.” Now, The Black List has announced a new expansion targeting novels. Franklin and I explore the parallels between book publishing and the film industry, and how The Black List is breaking down barriers to creative and business spaces to unlock billions in potential opportunity. Franklin also talks about what defines risks worth taking, with lessons that apply to every business and every brand. So let’s get to it. I’m Bob Safian, and this is Rapid Response.

I’m Bob Safian. I’m here with Franklin Leonard, founder and CEO of The Black List. Franklin, thanks for joining us.

LEONARD: It’s good to be back.

Copy LinkThe Black List’s expansion into novels

SAFIAN: The last time you were on this show, it was the morning after the Oscars, and we talked about the state of the movie business. But 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?

LEONARD: 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.

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

LEONARD: 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.

SAFIAN: The last time you were on the show, we talked a bit about “American Fiction,” the Oscar-winning film that highlights the book business and its limitations. So that film wasn’t necessarily an instigating factor for your expansion, just a coincidence?

LEONARD: No, I think it’s largely a coincidence, but when you mention it, yeah, part of the things that Cord’s brilliant movie explores are things that we’re trying to address, which is that there’s a very, like in Hollywood, the system of folks who have access to the resources to sort of make books that we hold in our hand and sell them broadly and market them broadly. It’s a walled garden. And it’s not even a walled garden by intent at this point. The reality is that the people working as publishers, as editors, as agents, there’s a superabundance of material out there, and it’s impossible for anybody to plow through it all and find the good things. So you end up triaging things to the agents that send you the stuff or the grad programs that recommend you to an agent.

The fact of the matter is that not all talent lives in New York City or went to Iowa or Columbia, but that doesn’t mean you’re a bad writer. It doesn’t mean that the book you wrote isn’t worthy of serious consideration or wouldn’t make a publisher a lot of money if they knew about it. Our job is really to find the writers where they have great material, identify it as such, and then tell as many people as we can who can do something with it — this is something you should pay attention to.

Copy LinkSimilarities in the film and book publishing industries

SAFIAN: When you talk about the research that you did as you talk about the book publishing industry, it sounds a lot like Hollywood. I mean, both industries are sort of prone to limited risk-taking, you know, narrow entryways. They’re both blockbuster-driven businesses. Are there things that surprised you that were different about the publishing industry, or did they more surprise you that they were the same?

LEONARD: I think what surprised me more was how similar they were. But then, when I stepped back and really thought about it, it didn’t come as that big of a surprise, right? Like fundamentally both businesses — film and television and books, like you said — they’re hit-driven.

They’re businesses where the product is something that does not have an objective value to every potential consumer. Like, you’re trying things that you will put into the market and some people will love, and not everybody will. That doesn’t mean those people are wrong; it just means that they have an opinion about this thing. They are resource-intensive in terms of evaluating them. To know whether a screenplay is something that you want to invest potentially millions of dollars in, you have to read the entire screenplay. Same thing with the manuscript. And that takes a lot of time.

There’s a superabundance of things that are written that no one could actually go through all of them. So I think those fundamental market dynamics, right? A subjective product, a superabundance of supply, no easy way to filter the quote-unquote best things to the people that are most likely to respond to them, and increasing revenue and cost pressures and the challenges of doing business at a high level in 2024.

SAFIAN: Even for you, how much of what’s on The Black List can you read personally, even if the platform is highlighting things for you that are rising? You still can’t absorb everything.

LEONARD: No, it would be impossible for me, for any one person, to even read all of the things that we think are worth people paying attention to that come through The Black List website.

Our job is to sort of filter and sort the world in a way for each individual that would be most helpful to them. So when we send that email out to several thousand film and television executives about the best scripts and television pilots and plays our readers read that week, my recommendation to industry professionals is to look at the loglines. Does anything there sound interesting to you? Maybe then take a look at it because it meets the criteria of A, it’s of interest based on subject matter, and B, someone you can trust has validated this as being possibly worth your time.

And I won’t promise that it will be worth your time. You may read it and say, actually, this isn’t for me, but we’ve created a target-rich environment to find high-value things.

Copy LinkPartnering with Simon Kinberg

SAFIAN: The idea is the same thing will happen with novels for those in the publishing world?

LEONARD: For those in the publishing world and the film and TV world. Because as much as publishers are looking for great novels, film and television people are looking for great novels that they can turn into film and television. We have a partnership with Simon Kinberg, who maybe most famously produced “The Martian,” which he found as a self-published novel. So when I came to him and said, “This is what we’re doing, I’d love to have a partnership where you commit to optioning a manuscript that we find in our first year for film or television adaptation.” He was like, “a”Absolutely done,” because he knows that there are things like “The Martian” being written that for whatever reason hadn’t found their way into traditional publishing houses.

SAFIAN: So you are linking up these two worlds, right? Because for a lot of book authors, the biggest upside for them is if it gets made into a film or a TV adaptation.

LEONARD: These two businesses are increasingly interdependent, right? Getting your book adapted into a show is great for sales, and on the Hollywood side, when you think about the movies and TV shows that are getting greenlit, having some pre-existing material with which an audience is already familiar is a big boost to your marketing plan because you already have some built-in interest.

Copy LinkWhy The Black List won’t take a cut from a book’s success

SAFIAN: So novels are posted on The Black List the same way screenplays and plays are. The writer would pay a monthly service fee, but you guys don’t take a stake in something if it’s discovered on the platform. Why not? I mean, you’re foregoing what may be the biggest financial opportunity. Like, why not act more like a VC and sort of take a little in everything? And the things that hit you get to—

LEONARD: Here’s the thing, we are charging you for a specific service: feedback and hosting. If we were going to claim a financial upside in what follows, if you are making a deal with a publishing house or a studio, it is my belief that we should also be adding value throughout the value chain.

If a VC wants to do that, and I’m open to this conversation, we should be optioning the material, providing support in producing it, involving the writer in the production of the thing. We should be the best publishing house in the game if we’re going to have our own imprint, and a writer should still have the option to go somewhere else if they think they can get a better deal.

And look, do I think that we could provide additional services down the line? Yes. But again, I think the writer always deserves the option of taking the best deal. And that’s what we’re trying to enable.

Copy LinkHow Franklin Leonard focuses on impact first

SAFIAN: In some ways, it echoes for me some of the things that I felt when I was an editor in the magazine world, but you’ve built The Black List into this respected, valued brand. It’s a great tool for creatives on the industry side, but it’s not so easy to translate that into value for The Black List itself.

LEONARD: I mean, if I was profit-oriented, just as a disposition, it might be frustrating. But what we’re building — I mean, there’s an accrued value that happens just because of the place that we sit in the business. There was a recent study done by a producer named David Beaubaire looking at the movies that got made in the last six years, and half of them roughly came from original screenplays or adaptations of novels.

Specifically fiction novels. So The Black List now has visibility over the inputs that represent 50 percent of the film production in the business on some level. There are a lot of businesses you could build atop that.

And so my goal has always been to build a business that was focused on impact initially, and if you build a business that successfully solves a problem and has that impact, and I think we have, the business that you could build on top of that is quite a profitable one.

And that’s a conversation that I’m excited to have, especially now that we have expanded into manuscripts, which was for me the last real brick in that initial foundation.

SAFIAN: It’s a classic entrepreneur spot. Like you have to be patient and impatient at the same time, right?

LEONARD: Yeah. And look, I think the other thing that differentiates us from a lot of companies is that I’ve never raised money, right? I own the company outright. We bootstrapped the entire thing, and we were profitable on day one. We’ve been profitable literally every month we’ve been in existence. And so it was purpose-built to solve a problem. And now that we’ve solved the problem, like I said, there’s a lot of opportunity that comes from being able to spot the best things before everybody else. And these are the conversations that I’m going to be engaging in over the next couple of months, definitely into 2025.

And yeah, I’ll just put it out there. Anybody who wants to have that conversation with me should reach out. I’m pretty easily findable on the internet.

SAFIAN: Franklin isn’t just tooting his own horn. For all the impact The Black List has had on Hollywood already, he’s poised to break things open even further — by exposing billions of dollars in untapped opportunity. We’ll dig into that — after the break. Stay with us!

[AD BREAK]

Before the break, we heard Franklin Leonard of The Black List explain how uncovering new novelists can fuel Hollywood. Now, he talks about how to unlock billions of dollars in missed potential by addressing faulty assumptions. It’s a trap that any industry can fall into — and an opportunity for those willing to reframe old notions of “risk.” Let’s jump back in.

Copy LinkThe cost of bias in Hollywood

So, The Black List isn’t about Black writers or Black talent per se. It’s about opening opportunities more broadly. There have been some departures in the book publishing world. This industry has some high-level Black executives coinciding with pullbacks elsewhere on commitments that were made post-George Floyd.

LEONARD: Yeah.

SAFIAN: How does that impact the way your plans run with the platform? Or is that just not a neighborhood you are going to go into?

LEONARD: I see a lot of this through the lens of irony. McKinsey and Company did this study during the sort of immediate post-George Floyd era. What is the economic cost to Hollywood of its anti-Black bias? And what they found was that it runs about 10 billion dollars every year.

The lack of investment in Black films on a budgetary level, on a marketing budgetary level, and then in terms of international distribution. Like there’s more money to be made.

Subsequent studies about the Latinx community — that’s 12 to 18 billion a year — and the Asian American community, which is 2 to 4 billion a year. So we’re talking about 30 billion a year that Hollywood is leaving on the table because they’re not optimizing for the audience that they’re trying to serve.

So when I see Black executives leaving en masse from a culture industry, I begin to wonder about the competence of the people who are making those decisions, not because of some moral and ethical DEI imperative, but because their job is to make money for their company and not thinking about how to maximize that audience that is available to them is really going to cost that company money.

I always wonder, like, how long are stockholders going to be satisfied with leadership that isn’t optimizing for economic outcomes? But over time, the hope is that economic success after economic success will validate the thesis, and people will have to move based on wanting to optimize their economic ends.

Copy LinkWhen risk assumptions are wrong

SAFIAN: 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 Cord Jefferson, “American Fiction,” 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?

LEONARD: 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 percent 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.

Copy LinkWhy Franklin Leonard is optimistic about the film industry

SAFIAN: 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?

LEONARD: 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—

SAFIAN: Even then?

LEONARD: 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.

Copy LinkHow The Black List won’t be leveraging AI

SAFIAN: So I want to ask you a little bit about AI. AI is everywhere. Creatives tend to push back on it, certainly some creatives. I’m curious where you stand on it. Would you ever entertain having AI review manuscripts and give feedback?

LEONARD: No, that I wouldn’t entertain. The answer is just flat no. Serving up a writer’s manuscript or screenplay to a LLM so that it can be trained on it and potentially repurpose what it’s learned from that manuscript without compensation to the writer is a no-no. And also, I don’t think that AI has yet made anything remotely close to a compelling case that it is interpreting information in the way a human brain does, specifically as it applies to emotion, which is ultimately the thing that art is trying to have an effect on. I believe on some level, and this gets a little high-minded, that art is a human being consuming something about the experience of what it means to be human and translating that into something they want to share with somebody else. The hope is that what you’ve shared with somebody else creates an emotional effect in the person that you’ve shared it with.

And so what we’re really testing for on The Black List is whether reading this thing makes you feel like you’ve got to go tell everybody else you know about it, or if you wouldn’t wish reading it on your worst enemy. I don’t know that an AI can replicate that. Maybe it can identify patterns, it can identify a lot of things, but I think as audience members, we’re not looking for a replication of what we’ve seen in the past; we’re looking for something that surprises us and enraptures us, and I don’t think AI has proven any case that it can approximate that.

SAFIAN: Do you think the profession of being a writer, like in the years ahead, is going to change a lot?

LEONARD: I think it probably already has, right? If you talk to a lot of writers now, even just in the Hollywood context, there was a time when you would be on a TV show, there was a very specific schedule in the year. You’d be working for 24 to 36 weeks, and then you’d have a few weeks off, and then you’d go up for another show. That would be how you sustain your career.

Now, you might be in a room for six weeks or less, and there could be any time during the year you might be looking for a job. You’re probably not going to set up a spec script, and you’re trying to promote that and using social media to promote your own personal brand. So all those things have definitely changed, but at the end of the day, to be a professional writer, you have to be writing. And that hasn’t changed. You have to go into a room by yourself and put one word after the other and tell a story that moves people.

That’s part of the reason why I have such reverence for writers is that they’re going into rooms alone and willing worlds into existence. The ones that are exceptional, like truly exceptional, who write the things that move all of us, deserve a heck of a lot of attention, a heck of a lot of praise, and probably a heck of a lot of money too.

SAFIAN: Franklin, as always, this has been great to talk with. Thanks so much for doing it.

LEONARD: No, thanks for having me back.

SAFIAN: Franklin has a real passion about the value of hidden talent. And he’s committed to dismantling faulty assumptions, whether that’s in Hollywood or in publishing. What I find myself thinking about most when it comes to The Black List is the arc of entrepreneurial disruption. After a decade of tangible, measurable impact on Hollywood, The Black List may still have only scratched the surface. It’s like a steamroller ready to be unleashed. And isn’t that what often happens: an overnight success that’s years in the making? That’s a storyline that’s always fun to watch. I’m Bob Safian. Thanks for listening.