“I take it upon myself to be the hype man for writers.”

The TPF Q&A with The Black List founder Franklin Leonard

Franklin Leonard didn’t set out to change the way Hollywood finds scripts. He just wanted to read something good. While working as a development executive at Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company Appian Way, he sent an anonymous email to 75 people asking for the best unproduced scripts they had read. He consolidated the answers and sent it back to his contacts.

Franklin thought this was a one-off experiment. It was not. Word got around, he saw the value, and The Black List became how new screenwriters get discovered. The count, two decades on: more than 400 produced movies including four Best Picture winners. Today, The Black List is a platform with education, programs, expansions into theater and fiction, and, of course, the annual list.

Franklin hopped on a call to talk winding paths, the mistake studios make by not investing in R&D, and why screenwriters are like pro athletes (and should be paid like them, too).

Three Point Four Media: I wanted to start by going way back. Before moving to Los Angeles, you worked at McKinsey. How did you end up there?

Franklin Leonard: The investment banks and management consulting companies came to campus in 2000 during Harvard’s intercession. I had been growing my dreadlocks for a couple years. One of my friends said they’d give me $100 for every management consulting company or banking offer I could get without cutting my hair. I felt pretty good about my resume and my academic record. I ended up interviewing with McKinsey, BCG, and a few others. I didn’t know what these companies did. I went through the recruiting process. I got three offers—made $300—and it became clear to me that McKinsey had the best reputation. And by best, I mean they were the one where everyone else wanted to work.

I didn’t want to be a consultant, but it was a nice thing to have in my back pocket. I ended up deferring for a year. I worked on a congressional campaign from May to November, and then went to Trinidad because I had won a traveling fellowship from Harvard. My mother’s father is from there. Initially, I planned to study multiracial democracy. I ended up writing a weekly column for The Trinidad and Tobago Guardian about the overlap of Trini and U.S. culture, and going to a lot of Carnival parties.

Your bio says “Franklin Leonard is a film and television producer, cultural commentator, and entrepreneur.” How do you manage everything?

Not particularly well. The vast majority of my time is spent running The Black List. The entrepreneur part has really emerged as the dominant feature of my work life. As Hollywood continues to change, I’ve realized that my greatest value is in making the most valuable platform for writers in the industry. That’s where my time is best spent.

As far as film and television producer, there are a few projects that I’m involved in, but I’m rarely the lead producer. I have greater value trying to build a really effective platform than I do trying to get any individual movie made.

The cultural commentary part: some of it is just Twitter, if I’m being totally honest with myself. But also increasingly, whenever I’m in New York, I’ll be on the panel at an Abby Phillips show. I’m a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. I do a little bit of writing for them. When I feel particularly moved by a moment politically or otherwise, I’ll either write a longform essay on Substack or an editorial somewhere. I don’t think about that as a formal role as much as the other things.

Most likely, The Black List will be the first line of my obituary.

Is the cultural commentary something that could benefit The Black List? Is it something that might get you in trouble?

It’s a really interesting question. It all comes from the same root. The reason I founded The Black List is that I think there are some systematic problems with the way the industry functions that result in less good outcomes for everybody. In the case of The Black List, it’s that writers in Hollywood are undervalued relative to what they contribute to the future success of the film. Data and economic studies show this to be true. The industry doesn’t have an efficient platform that allows for a meritocracy vis a vis writers. If you’re an aspiring screen or fiction writer, most people in the industry would still tell you, “move to LA, get a job at Starbucks, and network until someone pays attention to you.”

And that’s terrible. As a black person from West Central Georgia, I’m aware of just how uncorrelated the ability to move to LA and the ability to write a good screenplay are. I’ve tried to build a solution to that problem. If you are great, you can put your work in front of somebody who can do something with it, regardless of who you know, where you live, and what social access you have.

Most of my cultural commentary—and even though it’s in my bio, I will admit a discomfort with calling myself that—comes from the same source: There are these messed up systems. Someone should fix them, or at least call out that they’re messed up.

Are other jobs in Hollywood (directing, producing, and acting) more meritocracies than writing?

This would be a fascinating PhD thesis in economics. One of my fantasies is to go get a PhD in economics and write on the economics of culture. As a person who relies on data quite a bit to come to conclusions and resists conclusions based on instinct, here’s what I’d say: The big challenge around the lack of meritocracy for writers is that knowing whether a script is good requires reading an entire script. You can know the script is bad in 10 pages, but you have to read the entire thing to know that it’s really good. That’s an hour and a half minimum, and there’s a super abundance of material. No one can read everything, or even most things, so the people that are in the important seats reach for the things that are close to them. That means the stuff that’s already in the system at the highest levels, or the stuff that is part of their social world. Is there racism and sexism implicit in some of that? Absolutely. But I actually think it has more to do with the fact that there’s too much stuff to read. They have to triage somehow, so they rely on signals from people that they trust about what’s good. There’s bias implicit in that system.

Directing is the same thing. You need a lot of resources to direct something. Less than in the past, but you still need to be able to make something in order for people to judge it. As a result, opportunity lines up more with access to the resources to make something. But then once you do, it’s easier for people to watch it than to wade through a screenplay.

As an actor, you’re limited by the roles that are available to you. In some ways, they have it worse than writers. A writer can write a script anywhere in the world, whereas an actor needs someone to give them a role.

I can’t honestly rank them based on least and most meritocratic with any confidence. I genuinely hope somebody does that as a PhD thesis.

We constantly hear about the dearth of writing jobs in Hollywood. What’s your impression?

There’s always a market for incredible work. The market contracts and expands based on a lot of factors. But if you have written an exceptionally well-executed screenplay for a high-concept idea, someone is always gonna buy it. I wrote an essay called “The Moral Case for Selling Out” about the fact that the industry desperately needs great ideas, brilliantly executed.

That said, sustaining a career is harder than ever. I started in 2003. For the next couple decades, there were open writing assignments. In between writing your brilliant spec idea, you could go write for X, Y and Z. Even if there was no realistic chance of that movie getting made, you were getting reps in and you were bringing in income.

Today, the number of OWAs is way down. The studios are not investing in R&D the way they previously did. There are fewer jobs in television, which is another way to sustain your life and livelihood as you develop your craft. Aaron Sorkin, Matthew Weiner, and Bill Lawrence did not start as major writers. They started writing for mediocre sitcoms, and then they wrote something brilliant that became a big thing. There isn’t as much of a ladder. In the past, you could be good enough to get a job and then you got better. Those jobs are fewer and fewer today.

Netflix, and the response to Netflix, has a lot to do with this. Netflix shows up with a massive budget and makes a ton of content. All the other studios think they need to launch their own streaming services and fill their pipeline with content to compete. This also coincides with the pandemic, when everyone is at home watching streaming services. There is massive demand and overabundance of supply, particularly episodic stuff. The demand curve and the supply curve shift out.

At some point, these streaming services realize subscription is maybe not the best business model and they might not be able to achieve limitless growth. They cut back on content spend, and there are not as many jobs.

That sounds like freelance writing in the 2010s. There were a handful of VC-backed publications that paid well. For a while, it was good. But the business model didn’t work so they folded. There were fewer opportunities for writers, who are in infinite supply. That’s hard. We can have a conversation about who gets the remaining opportunities, what structural impediments are in place, and how to overcome them. The Black List is one example of changing the balance in the screenwriting and fiction world. On the other hand, I get frustrated by this idea that anyone who wants to be a writer should be able to be one. Not everyone gets to do what they want as a profession.

My argument around why the studios—and why capital generally—has to spend more on developing the ladder is that if you want to optimize for getting the best movies and TV in the long run, you have to invest in developing what will become the best talent. It’s like a soccer team investing in their academy system. You can 100 percent rely on buying the talent that exists in the world, but a better business strategy is investing some money in training the kids in your area. The best ones will play for your team. They won’t cost as much as buying a world-beater from somewhere else.

I tend not to get involved in moralistic arguments, particularly as it applies to business. I don’t know what the studio heads’ morals are, but I think I can reasonably assume that they do want to make money. If I can make the argument that by investing more in the inputs, in this case writers, they’ll make more money—if I can make the argument that if they invest more in equity—they’ll make more money, maybe they’ll be more likely to do it. I’ve learned over time that this isn’t necessarily true. They have other incentives beyond making money, which is ironic in a capitalist system. But I tend to start with that argument as a show of good faith if nothing else.

The other thing I’d say is that people, and especially writers, devalue their own work by thinking that anybody can do it, and that anybody who makes even a modicum of effort deserves to do it. We don’t think that way about professional athletes. There are roughly the same number of writers who get a movie made every year as there are players who get drafted by the NFL. We know how hard somebody has to work to be an athlete of that standard. I will never understand why people feel that they can spend six months writing a screenplay and have a multi-million dollar movie. It’s a craft. The people who sell million-dollar scripts have invested time in becoming very good at what they do. As a culture, we need to respect writers more. Doing so allows us to appreciate the work and compensate the writers more fairly.

There’s something about writers downplaying their own talent and their own ability. It’s whiny to complain about how hard it is to be a writer.

Yes, there are undeniably harder jobs that are less appreciated relative to their value. Teachers come to mind immediately.

I get that. I also think that it feels weird to complain about something you are good at. We fetishize struggling through things and improving in skills you are bad at. People should become professionals in things that they are good at, that come easily to them.

There’s a Japanese concept, ikigai. It means something like “a reason for being.” Do the thing you’re good at and then work super hard at it. When we talk about the people who will have the opportunity to make this their entire career, that is a small number of people. In all probability, those people have some gifts, but they also spend an extraordinary amount of time taking that gift and turning it into a craft.

I keep coming back to the professional athlete example. LeBron had a lot of innate gifts. So did Kobe Bryant and Lionel Messi, and frankly all of the greats. The thing that everyone around them will also tell you is that their work ethic is also absolutely freak show. You get the best stuff when you have someone with real gifts who also has a real commitment and a love for what they do. They’re going to make it hard for themselves because that’s the standard they’re going to hold for themselves. That’s what allows them to touch greatness. I don’t know very many Hollywood writers who I personally think are amazing who don’t work really hard.

So I do think it’s important for people who don’t have that job to be the hype man for the people who do amazing things. I take it upon myself to be the hype man for writers. I know how painful I find writing. Anybody who can walk into a room by themselves and create worlds on pages, I’m going to tell everybody how amazing that is. As a general rule, it’s a good way to live your life. Find somebody that you think is amazing and impressive, and make sure the rest of the world knows how amazing they are.