This is a transcript of the Final Draft Insider View, a podcast that takes you inside the screenwriting industry to talk with screenwriters, television writers, executives, and industry influencers.
Pete D’Alessandro: Hello, I'm Pete D’Alessandro. Welcome to another edition of Insider View. Our guest today is Franklin Leonard. He is the founder of The Black List and blcklst.com, which is a site that pulls together scripts from all over Hollywood. It started in much more humble beginnings than it's grown to now. Franklin, thank you so much for joining us.
Franklin Leonard: Hello. It's entirely my pleasure. Thank you for having me.
Pete D’Alessandro: One of the things we wanted to start out with is kind of everybody’s background on this podcast, so what was your background before this? I know you weren't always in entertainment.
Franklin Leonard: No, I was an Army brat and grew up all over, but my family moved to Columbus, Georgia when I was about 8 years old. Growing up there, I don’t think it ever occurred to me that there were jobs for people like me who had grown up in the deep South and who looked like me, and so my long-term plan for the vast majority of my teenage years was to go into politics, sort of public interest law, and really throughout college that was my long-term goal. When I graduated, I moved to Cincinnati, Ohio to help run a congressional campaign in the first district of Ohio for John Cranley, and then after getting a little bit burned out by politics I moved to Trinidad and worked for the Guardian newspapers and Port of Spain for six months, and then I moved to New York and took a job as a business analyst in McKinsey and Company, you know, focused primarily on media and entertainment at that point but that was just a happy quirk, a sort of mentorship relationship I developed when I was there. It never even occurred to me to come out to Los Angeles and try to work in film until my analyst class was laid off with five months’ severance. So I had a lot of time on my hands and I was spending just an inordinate amount of time watching movies and reading about the film industry, which is something that I’d always done even going back to high school. I remember the first thing I did when I got my driver’s license was drive to Blockbuster and rent all three Godfather movies, but again, it never occurred to me that there were jobs for people like me. So I ended up coming out to Los Angeles for the month of March of 2003 just to explore the city and see what was here and I was lucky enough in my second day here to be offered an interview over at CAA and was offered the job the next day working for Rowena Arguelles in the Motion Picture Department of Creative Artists Agency.
Pete D’Alessandro: That’s amazing.
Franklin Leonard: Yeah, I was very lucky. I had sort of moved by virtue I think of having gone to Harvard for undergrad, and the social circles that that opened to me, I had a friend of a friend who was working as an assistant there who when I had a drink with her mentioned there was an agent looking for an assistant. I sent my résumé over and had an interview the next day.
Pete D’Alessandro: That’s pretty rare.
Franklin Leonard: Yeah. I mean, look, my father would argue that there's no such thing as luck, and my response was always, you know, there's no such thing as luck, there's only preparation…
And I would argue, well…or opportunity meeting preparation, and I would argue that the opportunity part is luck. I think that I was pretty well prepared for a job as an assistant at a major agency but I definitely think that the opportunity presenting itself so soon after I arrived was very much luck, and maybe karma for having worked at a job that I wasn’t as happy in for two years. But whatever it was, I'll take it.
Pete D’Alessandro: So you moved on from being an assistant, you eventually became a development exec at a couple of different places, what did you wind up bringing there? What wound up coming with you?
Franklin Leonard: I think the great education that I had working for Rowena I think was twofold. The first was just generally how to treat people, and I've always been a long admirer of how she does her business as an agent, but I think also just the value and the importance of good writing. I spent a lot of my time as an assistant reading screenplays. It became very clear to me that the ones that were well-written, you would see their careers pick up much faster than those that weren't. And so I got the job working as a creative executive for John Goldwyn’s company after just about a year on Rowena’s desk. My primary focus very early on was to read as much as possible, develop my point of view about what made scripts good, and have a real opinion on how to make scripts that were decent, better, and also just the value of real creatives particularly on the writer and director side. I've always believed that writers are profoundly undervalued in the film industry because without their work the director has nothing to shoot and the actors have nothing to say. You can still make a bad movie from a great script but good luck making a good movie from a bad script.
Pete D’Alessandro: So do you consider yourself a writer?
Franklin Leonard: Look, I definitely have written at various points in my life. I wrote for a newspaper in Trinidad, I wrote a regular column for my hometown newspaper in Columbus, Georgia, and I took a lot of fiction writing classes in college, but I've never attempted a complete screenplay. It's something that I imagine that I'll do at some point, and I have a healthy ego about my own writing, but when I read great work my initial reaction is, “On my best day maybe I could manage a page this good, but 110 consecutively seems unlikely and I'm better off and probably the world is better off with me trying to help writers who are truly talented than trying to over time become a talented writer myself.”
Pete D’Alessandro: Well, I guess that brings us to what The Black List is now. Can you talk about what it is and how it started?
Franklin Leonard: The whole thing began in 2005. I was working as a development executive at Leonardo DiCaprio’s company. My job there was sort of to filter the world and bring the best materials to my bosses, at the time Brad Simpson and obviously Leo, and we were getting submitted everything by virtue of the fact that I was working for arguably the biggest star in the world and one that had a reputation of having quite good taste. So if you had a movie that Leo wanted to do, you pretty much had a gold movie. And the reality still was that the vast majority, I'd say well over 90, 95% of the material that I was reading, was still bad to mediocre. And given that my job was to find good material, that meant one of two things. It meant either I was really bad at my job, which was finding good material, or that the job was to read bad material and pass on it, which made my mother’s weekly phone call about going to law school a potentially much more wise initiative than perhaps I had given her credit for.
So I was about to go on vacation for two weeks, I knew I wanted to read some good screenplays while I was on vacation, and so I sent an email to approximately 75 of my peers saying, “Send me a list of your 10 favorite screenplays that haven't yet been produced that you found out about this year and in exchange I'll send you back the combined list.” A number of folks asked if their friends who worked in similar jobs could participate and the first list was sort of borne of that. It was 93 voters and I slapped a quasi-subversive name on it and sent it out and went on vacation and didn't think anything of it. And when I came back from vacation two weeks later, this was before I even had a BlackBerry, I go out, check my email, and it had been forwarded back to me several dozen times. So people were talking about this thing, The Black List, and wondering where'd it come from.
Fast-forward about six months, I get a phone call from an agent, I think it was WME at this point or William Morris, and they said, “Hey, I have this new client, I think Leo’s going to love this script.” And that was a normal call, I get that call on a daily basis, but what was interesting was that they ended this call by saying, “Listen, don’t tell anybody, but I have it on really good authority that this is going to be the number one script on next year’s black list.” I was sort of freaked out by how much the thing had circulated and hadn't decided to do it again, but it was my first indication that this thing that I created maybe had value beyond just helping me find good screenplays and that maybe it had provided some sort of a solution or a partial solution to a problem that everyone had, which is, how do you find good material?
And so I did it again the next year, the LA Times outed me, and then in 2007, or 2008 rather, ‘Lars and the Real Girl’and ‘Juno’ were nominated for Best Original Screenplay, and that was significant because they had been two of the top three scripts on the first black list. And I think that validated the theory, the hypothesis, that if you survey a good percentage of the gatekeepers in Hollywood and ask them about the things that they had a strong emotional response to or that they love separate from considerations of what their boss will like or financial considerations about making the movie, they do a very good job of identifying material that has the potential to be a successful film, both critically and commercially. And since then, you know, we've done the list every year and that sort of hypothesis I think has been borne out.
This December will be our tenth black list, which is quite an exciting anniversary, has me feeling very old, but if you look at the first nine years’ lists, there have been I think it's about 900 scripts on the list, about 270 of them have been produced, they have made over 20 billion dollars in worldwide box office, they’ve won 30 Oscars. Three of the last six Best Pictures and I think eight of the last 14 screenwriting Oscars have gone to scripts that were on this list, that far before the movie went into production these were scripts that the industry as a whole, as a group, collectively, identified as being strong even if they weren't things that they necessarily were clamoring to make. You think about movies like ‘The King’s Speech’ and ‘Slumdog Millionaire’ and ‘Argo’, all of which were on the black list long before I think they even had directors attached, these are projects that have gone on to great success and were identified by the community as a whole long before they were made and distributed and went on to the success that they found.
We still do the annual list every year, like I said, this year will be our tenth year, but around 2009-2010 it became clear that if this thesis was valid that you could crowd source good material, and looking around at the world and particularly the Internet and how it had changed how we interact and how we aggregate information socially, there was an opportunity to create something that functioned essentially as a real-time black list. And you could create a database that had a list of every single script that anyone could possibly want to make, industry professionals could rate those scripts, and in real time we could aggregate those ratings and generate a top list along any dimension. So if you wanted to look for comedies that didn't have a producer attached yet, we could generate that list immediately of top comedies that didn't yet have a producer. If you wanted to find action movies set in China that had a car chase and a love triangle, we could do that. We could create a list of the top material that that fit that bill.
And so we sort of launched that notion in a very soft beta in early 2011…well, actually no, I think it was late 2011 or early 2012, and as we sort of began to experiment with that we realized that we had also potentially solved another problem that I think is actually even a bigger preoccupation of mine, which was that every time I went to do a panel or talk about The Black List or was asked to sort of speak about The Black List, inevitably the first question that was asked was, “I wrote what I think is a great script but most of the scripts that are on the black list are represented. I don't know anybody in the industry. How can I get my script from Iowa or Sweden or wherever I am to people who can do something with it and get it on the annual black list?” And there wasn’t really an answer to that question that was satisfying to me. Most people’s reaction had been, when I asked around town or when I was on panels with other people, their recommendation was, “Submit to the Nicholl Fellowship and if you end up in the top 30 people will call you.”
“Or pack up your life and move to Los Angeles, take a crappy job that can keep the lights on, and network yourself until you die or until someone reads your script.” That’s good advice if you're recently out of college and you're an upper-middle-class kid and your parents can help you with your car payment, but if you're a single mom with a mortgage and two kids living in Nebraska, it's terrible advice. You can't move to Los Angeles and take a job at Starbucks and network until someone pays attention to you, and your inability to do that has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with your ability to be a good writer.
And so this database that we had created, this sort of ecosystem, we realized that if we could allow for a really strong filter to the stuff that was being submitted to the database, we could allow anyone on earth to upload their script to our website, have it evaluated. Both of those services require a payment, obviously, but if your material was good we could then advertise the fact of that good material to the entire industry, and because we were a trusted brand having done the annual black list for years, people would take it seriously and there was an opportunity for writers who were well outside the system to get their work to Hollywood in a way that was safe and protected and really efficient.
In October 2012, we launched the site as it exists now, which allows anyone on earth to upload their screenplays to the website, and you can pay 25 dollars a month to have it hosted and then you can pay 50 dollars to have your feature, screenplay or your hour-long pilot evaluated by a team of readers that we have hired, all of whom have worked for at least a year for a major reputable Hollywood company wherein a significant amount of their job was reading scripts, and we've hired fewer than 15% of those who have applied with that minimum of experience. And if your script was good, then we would tell the world, and that’s really what we've been doing for almost two years now and we've seen dozens of writers get signed to major agencies and management companies and sell or option their scripts as a direct consequence of introductions made via the site. We've had over 25,000 downloads of unrepresented material via the site, which is I think probably the best indication that folks in the industry are paying real attention and when we say, “Hey, there's a script written by a writer who lives in Sweden, you should pay attention to it, people are…”
And then beyond the website, which allows screenwriters to upload their scripts, and I think it's important that I also say that if you're a member of the Writers Guild East, the Writers Guild West, the Writers Guild of Canada or the Writers Guild of Great Britain, all of whom we’re partnered with, you can list your scripts on our database free of charge. So instead of uploading it, you can list it with tags and a log line and your representation information. So if you've written an action movie set in China with a car chase and a love triangle, and a producer or a director or an actor, all of whom are members of our site, are looking for something like that, people can find out that it exists and then call your agent to say, “Hey, I'm actually looking for something that it sounds like your client has already written. Can I get a copy of it?”
So we're trying to just provide a more efficient marketplace for all material both from outside the system and that’s already in it. And then, in addition to that, we're doing a lot of sort of community building events now. We did our first live stage script reading of Stephany Folsom’s script, 1969: A Space Odyssey, or How Kubrick Learned to Stop Worrying and Land on the Moon in June. It's part of the Los Angeles Film Festival. We'll be announcing another one of those readings in late September very soon. We're doing monthly events at the Melrose Umbrella Company just inviting screenwriters to sort of get together and drink. It's not an open bar but it's a great way to get together and meet other screenwriters. We're doing monthly dinners for working writers based on various themes. We had a dinner for women comedy writers last month and we're doing a dinner next week for summer action writers that Simon Kinberg is cohosting.
And then we're also providing another service for Guild members: If you have a script that you're working on and you feel like it would be beneficial to hear that script performed, we're working with Deb Aquila and the Aquila Morong Studio to do what we're calling “works in progress readings” where writers can submit their script for consideration and we can turn around in a week a private read performance of your script that you as a writer control the invite list for. So if you want to get feedback from friends, from directors who you know, from producers, your agents, your managers, you invite them. We don’t publicize the fact that it happens. We've already done one of these. We're doing another one in about two or three weeks. But you can get the feedback of having your work performed rather than hearing it in your head as you're writing it, which I think is another service that we provide totally free of charge.
We look at our goal as being a tie that can raise all boats in the industry but especially the boats of writers and most especially the boats of really good writers, so anything that falls under that general description is something we're trying to explore. That was a very long answer but hopefully it covers the bulk of what we do.
Pete D’Alessandro: [Laughs] And it sounds like what you guys are doing really had social proofing to the scripts that are out there that people are trying to get read, and if you have a couple of good recommendations on The Black List site, then you start to look pretty good to anybody.
Franklin Leonard: Yeah. I think that’s right, and I think that’s how the business really functions in practice now. We're just trying to do it in a more efficient, more complete way.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah, yeah.
Franklin Leonard: The annual list is essentially a social proof document, like you said, and the website functions as a real-time version of that. And in reality, people are always talking about, what did you read maybe that was good? It's just that we can aggregate all of those conversations industry-wide into one central location that benefits everyone in the industry. Rather than having it be, you know, I talk to five people who I think are pretty wired and have good taste, we can actually aggregate the entire industry as a whole and give you the sort of full results of all of those thousands of conversations that are happening on a daily basis.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah, I mean, you're converting the information into data.
Franklin Leonard: That’s exactly right, yeah.
Pete D’Alessandro: You said before you did The Black List, I mean, 90, 95% of scripts that came across your desk were pretty bad. What do you think that percentage is now from your experience almost 10 years later as you're reading scripts?
Franklin Leonard: I don't think that percentage has changed. I mean, I think the real reality is that writing a screenplay, writing a good screenplay, is difficult, and that’s one of the reasons why I think the great writing in this town is really undervalued. Just as rare that you have an actor that can come in and give an amazing performance and attract an audience as there are writers who can come in and whip out a great screenplay that’s going to get everyone excited and turn into a good movie. Hopefully, the work that we've done has slightly reduced that figure only because more good scripts are passing people’s desk so they're more readily able to identify them, but I don't know if we have singlehandedly or multi-handedly changed the reality of how many bad scripts are out there. We just want to make it more easy for everyone to find the good ones that exist.
Pete D’Alessandro: If there's a writer out there right now who has just gotten his first good review on The Black List, he doesn’t have representation, that’s kind of the dream, that someone in Iowa who submits that script and they pay for a recommendation or two, a rating or two, and they do alright. What should they be doing next? How do they maximize the potential there?
Franklin Leonard: There are a few things. One is that the system itself will do a pretty good job of promoting you to our members. Every Monday we send an email out to everyone on the site saying, “Hey, here's a list of every script that got an 8 overall or better in the previous week.” We're reasonably secure in the fact that if you get an 8 overall or better, you're going to see at least a dozen or so downloads of your script almost immediately. We sort of maintain a very open platform in large part because we wanted to see how writers would be creative about using the information that we're providing about their material to benefit them and expedite the process of them getting signed and noticed, and one thing that I would recommend that I think a lot of writers are doing to great effect is, use your feedback that you're getting from The Black List in your query letters. If you get a really high score and there are glowing things from your evaluation and your query, query agents, query managers, query producers and say, “Hey, I have a script that's currently hosted on The Black List website, it got x or y score, and here are some of the really good things that they said. And if you want to download the script, here is the link to downloading it on the site.” I think that, generally speaking, I've heard from a lot of writers that that’s a really effective approach to drawing a lot of attention to your material period but particularly to your information on the site, and industry professionals, once they read the script, can then rate it themselves and it sort of creates a virtuous cycle – the more good ratings you get, the more visibility you get on the site.
Pete D’Alessandro: An avalanche effect if you really have something that’s good and people like.
Franklin Leonard: That’s exactly right and that’s the hope.
Pete D’Alessandro: What is the acceptance process like?
Franklin Leonard: So anyone who wishes to be an industry professional member of The Black List can apply for membership via the site. Those approvals are made by me and me alone right now. It pretty much comes down to one simple fact, which is, can this person during the course of their normal business advance the career of a writer and/or their project? That includes agency assistants because if an agent’s assistant loves a piece of material they can share it with their boss or will share it with other assistants, and that sort of critical mass builds very quickly. That includes producers with deals with studios, executives and assistants at those companies. It includes financiers who have a record of financing films in the independent space, same with producers who have a record of making films in the independent space.
Another sort of rule of thumb we use, if you've directed, produced or financed a film that was sort of WGA-approved or sort of under WGA purview in the last two or three years, you're probably going to be eligible to join, and we certainly welcome directors, actors, producers, and financiers who meet that bill who might not have a studio deal to apply for membership. It's highly likely that if you have that base standard of experience you are going to get approved. But again, the rule of thumb is really, can this person through the normal course of doing their job help move a project or a writer’s career forward?
Pete D’Alessandro: A high standard and you're obviously doing the curation.
Franklin Leonard: Yeah, I mean, what we didn't want to create was a situation where writers were hearing from people who couldn't be additive, right? Like you didn't want to have a situation where a writer gets a phone call from a producer who's never made a movie or someone who doesn’t work practically in the industry saying, “Hey, I read your script and I loved it. I want to do something with it.” That doesn’t really help a writer trying to make a career. What does is getting a phone call even from the lowliest agent assistant saying, “Hey, I read your script and I think it's amazing. I want to pass it to my boss who’s an agent at x company. Do you have anything else that I can sort of give them informationally?” That’s a call writers want to get. A call from someone who has never made anything and can't get their material to anyone who can help get their thing made is really just sort of a nuisance and is not something we want to encourage.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah, sure, I can see why. And you can obviously get feedback from people who can't help without The Black List.
Franklin Leonard: Exactly. That’s exactly right.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah. It feels good but probably doesn’t do much. I know reading has changed a lot in the 10 years you guys have been doing this. What are people actually reading scripts on these days? I mean, from your perspective, what do you think people are using? Are people still putting things out or is it Kindle, is it iPad?
Franklin Leonard: I think people are still putting things out. I think for the most part though there's been a wholesale transition to eReaders. I have no idea what the breakdown is, iPad to Surface to Kindle, whatever other implements people are using now, but I would say the vast majority of scripts are now read on some sort of eReader. But there are definitely people, myself included, that sometimes just want to read a paper script.
Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah, sometimes it just still feels good, feels fast.
Franklin Leonard: Yeah, and we provide, you know, like when you download a script on the site you can obviously either print it out, you can send it to your Kindle or your Kindle app, you can send it to your email. We want to make it as flexible as possible so that people can read it as soon as they want to. Or you can read it in your web browser as well.
Pete D’Alessandro: What are some of the other clichés we can pass along to writers who are trying to break in and what are some of the things they need to avoid, from your experience?
Franklin Leonard: I think for me the biggest mistake that a lot of aspiring screenwriters make is focusing too much on marketing their material and not enough on making the material amazing. You hear the complaint all the time like, “Well, my script is at least as good as [name a movie that bombed in recent weeks],” and I don't know that people understand that like you're not competing against the most recent bomb, you're competing against the best material that is out there. There are plenty of other people that are already in the system that can write that bomb or get a rewrite job on that bomb. If you want to break in, people are looking for someone that will not make the bomb but write something utterly amazing. And so my best advice to aspiring screenwriters is write something incredible. Don’t share it, don't think you're done, until it is incredible, because good enough is never good enough.
Pete D’Alessandro: When do you cross that line?
Franklin Leonard: One of the things that I've noticed that people use the website for is to get a sense of how far along they are, right? They have a script, they have it evaluated, it's a relatively low-cost way to get feedback about how you'll be evaluated by the industry. So if you're working on a script and you feel like you're almost there and you upload it and you get like two 4’s from our readers, that’s a pretty good indication that you've got a long way to go. If you upload it and you get two 8’s in a row, that's also a pretty good indication that maybe you're more ready for primetime than you realize and it might be time to start sharing the script aggressively and querying aggressively because you've got a piece of material on your hands that is likely to attract the attention of somebody working in the industry.
Pete D’Alessandro: Can you talk a little bit more about the algorithm that actually recommends scripts to the members, people who are actually reading?
Franklin Leonard: Yeah.
Pete D’Alessandro: I mean, I know that you guys went to people that worked on Netflix and worked on other algorithms that are ridiculously complex and ambitious.
Franklin Leonard: Under the very sort of loose definition of algorithm, there are sort of two buckets within the site that sort of qualified for that kind of consideration. The first is just how we rank the scripts, which is a really simple bayesian algorithm that, or a bayesian modifier, rather, that allows us to look at the number of ratings the script has had, what those ratings are, and say, “Given those ratings and the number of them, what is the predicted next rating based on all of these ratings?” And so we rate scripts in the same way that Amazon ranks their books. Same exact thing. But I'm a big nerd and for a very long time I've been obsessed with the notion of algorithmic recommendations, and I mean literally one of my favorite writers of all time, Ryszard Kapuscinski, I discovered because Amazon recommended it to me after I had rated a bunch of things on their website.
So when we launched the website, in addition to being able to tell people what everyone liked, we wanted to be able to tell people what we thought they would like based on their individual taste because as great as it is to have a script that everyone likes, if you don’t love it, it's sort of irrelevant to your willingness to work for the next 10 years to try to get it made. It really is about what you individually are enthusiastic about. So what we did was we reached out to a number of the folks who had won the Netflix prize several years ago and I emailed them via Facebook and said, “Look, this is who we are. This is what we want to try to build. We can't pay you because we don’t have any money, but if you could give us some guidance on how to build a recommendations algorithm we’d really appreciate it.” And they were incredibly generous with their time and information. And my partner, Dino Sijamic, who's built the entire website, built a recommendations algorithm that was really effective. I was really surprised after I rated 30 or 40 scripts on the website I started getting recommendations of scripts that I had forgotten about and loved.
And then as it happened, one of my college roommates, a guy named Sean Owen who's now the Vice President of Data Science at Cloudera, had spent the 10 years after college essentially becoming one of the world’s experts in recommendations algorithms and had actually built a company of his own that built recommendations algorithms. So I reached out to him and asked if he could do some improvements to our algorithm, and he said, “Yeah, let me just take it over and I'll soup it up and give you guys something better than frankly you probably deserve.” So, well, now we have a recommendations algorithm built by one of the greatest minds on the subject in the world that is far more sophisticated and far smarter than anything we deserved to have being the company we are.
And I actually think that it's one of the great unutilized features on the site, is that if you rate a number of screenplays that you read, we would be able to with pretty good accuracy recommend you material that you don't know about that you are likely to like, and that’s amazing in the context of the scripts that are uploaded from writers from all around the world, but as more writers who are members of WGA East, West, Writers Guild of Great Britain, and Writers Guild of Canada list their scripts in our database, we're going to be able to do something that even their agents can't do, which is, you know, when an agent has a piece of material, they're going to do their best to say, “I think this person might like this, so I'm going to make these 10 calls and call these 10 people, but there may be people that they don't know, whose taste they don't know, whose taste they're not familiar enough with to know if their client’s script might be well-liked by them, and we can create an incoming call business for those writers and those representatives from people who say, “Oh my God, I didn't know this existed. I don’t even have a great relationship with this agent, but hey, can you send me a copy of the script? It sounds right up my alley.” And the message there is, writers who are members of the Guild, list your back catalogues and your scripts in your database. There is real upside. We can supercharge your agent’s work on your behalf, turn old business and dead business into new business, which is I think really a good thing for everybody.
Pete D’Alessandro: What would happen to a script that if it sits there long enough and sure it's been rated fine, it's done okay there but it's still sitting there and that writer hasn’t gotten anywhere with it and producers or whoever have fallen through, money has fallen through, it's still kind of sitting there, what happens? Does the algorithm kind of factor in how long it's been there?
Franklin Leonard: The top lists are sort of segmented by, you know, over the last month, over the last quarter, over the last year, and all time. Recommendations are definitely not affected by time on the site. One of the things that we tell writers who have uploaded their scripts to the site and who are paying us money, we try to provide as much transparency as we reasonably can about the traffic to their script. So you can see as a writer the number of times your script page has been viewed, the number of times it's been downloaded, how that’s changed over time, etc., etc. And so what we tell people is like, “Look, if you're paying us money and you're not getting traction for your script on the site, stop giving us your money. We provide a service, we provide the ability to get that traction, but if you're not seeing it because the script is bad or there's no market for your script or people just aren't interested in it, you're probably well-advised to remove the script from the database and stop hosting it on our site. Maybe go back to the drawing board and consider another script that might attract more attention, or improve the script that you've already got, elevate it to a place where just based on quality alone, putting aside the content of it, the quality alone people are going to pay attention. We have a great platform to reinvigorate the attention once you've done that edit. But if you've got a script that’s gotten two 3’s, no one seems to be coming to your script page, and I've said it before and I'll say it again, stop giving us your money. You should probably go back to the drawing board and focus on your craft because you're probably, and you may get signed, but you're probably not going to do it through our system.
Pete D’Alessandro: Let's talk about some of the other stuff The Black List has going on right now. I mean, you guys have other programs. I know you're in the middle of a Black List Labs selection process as we record this now. You want to talk about that a little bit, just explain what the labs are going to do?
Franklin Leonard: Yeah. So we did our first Screenwriters Lab last year. I've been a long-time admirer of the Sundance Labs and the labs that are sort of smaller throughout the industry mainly because I think that it's rare that as an aspiring screenwriter or a screenwriter early in your career that you can take a week and do nothing but focus on your craft. And those people have day jobs or they have other things that they have to deal with, so I love the idea of a small group of writers on retreat working on their craft and being able to exchange knowledge and experience.
I had a meeting in Downtown Las Vegas with Tony Hsieh, the founder of Zappos, doing extraordinary things and reinvigorating the downtown community of Las Vegas and he's a big film as well, and he offered us the use of 10 condos in Downtown Las Vegas for a week. I mean, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to do it. So basically what we do is we're looking for six up and coming writers who have never made more than 100,000 dollars in their career as a writer, we choose six of them, we fly them out to Downtown Las Vegas for an all-expense-paid week there. Four mentors, and last year they were Jenny Lumet, Kiwi Smith, Ryan Koppelman, and Billy Ray, and that week includes a peer sort of workshop session for a day and then two hours with each of the mentors over the course of Thursday and Friday when we're there wherein they get their workshop by a working writer who can probably give them real insight into how to proceed on a rewrite or what their next steps in their career should be.
It's been really gratifying. I think the majority of the writers who participated in last year’s lab are now represented. The feedback that we got from them was extraordinary about the extent to which it changed their thinking and their focus about their writing and then the trajectory of their careers. And again, just in the interest of being a force for good in the writing community and supporting writers both up-and-coming and established, it's just something that I think, you know, if we had the opportunity to do it it's well worth it for us and it's incredibly inspiring for me personally.
Pete D’Alessandro: One of the other ones that I was reading about on the site is the Cassian Elwes partnership that you guys have, going to be sending an unrepped writer to Sundance. I mean, I'm more curious about that because it seems like the Sundance is such a wild kind of experience. What is it that you guys think that a writer will be getting who otherwise might not have the chance to get to Sundance?
Franklin Leonard: So we have a number of partnerships that are similar to that, actually. We're partnered with right now, and I might forget at least one or two of you, we're partnered with Warner Bros., Disney, Turner Networks, Fox, the WIGS YouTube channel, the National Football League, Hasty Pudding Institute, and then a few others to identify writers for opportunities that didn't exist before. So Warner Bros., for example, every six months we send them a list of up to 10 writers from previously underrepresented communities in the screenwriting world and they review those scripts with an eye towards offering one to two-step Guild minimum line deal worth about 100,000 dollars, the first of which was awarded in December to a writer named Tasha Huo.
The Cassian opportunity, Cassian came to us I think probably in the wake of these other partnerships that we announced and said, “I want to help a young writer who’s writing scripts to try to break into the industry that are independent in their spirit. They're not trying to write the next Taken redux. They're writing like heartfelt, character-driven work that would have a nice home at Sundance. I want to find writers who have never made more than 5000 dollars in their writing careers and who are unrepresented and I want to offer them an all-expense-paid trip to Sundance wherein they can basically shadow me during the festival and find out how the independent film business really works,” which was an amazing and incredibly generous offer for him to make. And if I'm being honest, I was worried that we weren't necessarily going to deliver scripts that sort of lived up to what he was hoping to find. What was amazing though is that we sent him 10 screenplays that we had identified that fit that bill and he identified one that he loved, a writer named Matthew Hickman, who was working in retail at The UPS Store in Santa Monica when he submitted the script. He came to Sundance with us last year, all expenses paid, shadowed Cassian. He's new represented by Circle of Confusion and actually just got his first writing job, and amazingly, and I think this is really exciting too, Cassian has since optioned his script to the other 10 that we sent Cassian. So three of the 10 scripts that we sent Cassian for consideration for this opportunity he has since optioned with an eye towards producing them himself.
So again, I think for us it's about increasing the visibility of all kinds of writers, whether you're writing big commercial movies that might fit well at Warner Bros. or contemplative, sensitive, nuanced indie pictures that might fit well with the producer of Dallas Buyers Club and The Butler. We want to make sure that we're routing your script to the right person, and I think Cassian’s offer, first and foremost, what about providing a no-cost education to writers who are being particularly ambitious with their storytelling but, as you can see, it also creates a pipeline of good material for him.
Pete D’Alessandro: Sure. I mean, it goes right back to that percentage, 30% is much more than the five or 10 you were talking about earlier.
Franklin Leonard: I think most producers in town, if we could promise them that for every 10 scripts we would send them there were three that they would want to option, would jump at the opportunity for that kind of pipeline, and in reality that’s really what The Black List offers.
Pete D’Alessandro: Wow.
Franklin Leonard: And so to all the directors and actors and producers and financiers that are out there now listening, join the site. Come to blcklst.com. It's B-L-C-K-L-S-T dot com. Explore the site. Just using the site itself will help you find good material, and if you want a more sort of tailored concierge service similar to what we did with Cassian, by all means reach out. We want to be very creative and our goal is to help solve problems and be more efficient to help you find good material.
Pete D’Alessandro: That's really inspiring. So what are the other long-term plans you guys have with The Black List? I mean, what other big aspects of screenwriting and the screenwriting business do you guys hope to tackle in the long-distance future?
Franklin Leonard: To the extent that we have long-term plans, I tend to keep them close to the vest because I think there's a value in the announcement and how that is…
Pete D’Alessandro: Yeah.
Franklin Leonard: Then there's a large part of me that frankly just doesn’t know. I think there's a lot that we can still do in the space that we're in right now to make the market more efficient, to increase visibility for good material, to better identify good material, and that’s the large part of it we're focused on right now to provide better tools to people who are trying to find good scripts to help them identify them and find them more quickly. But I also know that the site functions best when everyone’s using it. There are effects whereby the more people that are using the site, the more valuable the site is to everybody, so a lot of my time right now is spent educating and evangelizing on behalf of the work that we're already doing and making sure the people are using the site and benefitting from it. Beyond that, I don’t really have a master plan. I think for us we have a pretty clear true north morally, which is “be a tide that raises all boats but especially the boats of writers and especially the boats of writers doing great work,” and I think to the extent that there are things that we can do that fit that bill, we're just going to try to make the next right decision and move along that line.
One thing that I can say without very many specifics is that this being the tenth anniversary of the first list and our tenth list, you can expect some sort of event at the end of the year celebrating the tenth year of The Black List. Look like, I can't quite yet say or I'm not really willing to say, but suffice it to say it's going to be a very good time. It is going to benefit a very good cause. Folks that are working in the industry would be well-advised to attend.
Pete D’Alessandro: Well, we look forward to that. Is there anything else you want to plug?
Franklin Leonard: I'd say two things, two big things. Well, three big things. The first is, come to the website. It's blacklist with no vowels, B-L-C-K-L-I-S-T. Explore what’s there. I think there are a lot of assumptions about what The Black List is and what we're doing. Hopefully this conversation has disabused people of many of the incorrect ones and thank you for asking the questions that allows me to do that. But I would encourage people to come to the website and explore it. I think you'll be very happy with what you find there. We exist to be a tool for everybody and a valuable one at that, and I think we're doing a pretty good job and we'll continue to improve.
The second is that we are doing a number of really exciting events, and if you come to the website and go to the events page you'll see a running tally of the events that we've done and the events that we have upcoming. And then the last thing, and this is just a message to writers, we have your backs to the best extent that we can. Me personally, I'm a huge fan of writers and I like to joke and many of my friends who are writers joke that fundamentally I'm just a writer groupie. I like to think of myself more as Puff Daddy to the writing community’s Notorious B.I.G., but we want to be your hype man for your best work. To the extent that we can do that and the extent to which we can sort of undo the really, really unfortunate undervaluing of writing and screenwriters that goes on in the industry, we're going to do everything we can, and if you have suggestions or thoughts or concerns about how we're doing that or how we could be doing that, we want to hear your feedback. It is very important to us and it's the only way that we're going to be able to do what we do and do it better.
Pete D’Alessandro: Well, Franklin, thank you so much for being here with us and thanks for talking to us.
Franklin Leonard: No, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
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