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Hey, listeners, I've got a trivia question for you. What do the following movies have in common? 500 days of summer, Spotlight, the Imitation Game, Argo, Juno, the King's Speech, Little Miss Sunshine, Slumdog Millionaire. The answer is that before there were famous films, they were screenplays that made the blacklist. The Blacklist is an annual compilation of the most liked but not yet produced screenplays in Hollywood. Since 2005, more than 500 blacklist scripts have been made into feature films, grossing over $30 billion in box office sales worldwide. Blacklist movies have won 60 Academy Awards, including four Best Picture Oscars. And today's episode is a conversation with the founder of the Blacklist, Franklin Leonard. It was filmed at our live show in Los Angeles. You can watch our conversation on Spotify. Live from the El Rey theater in Los Angeles. Welcome to the Journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Ryan Knudsen. Coming up on the show, Franklin Leonard on the blacklist and the biggest challenges facing Hollywood.
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So good, so good, so good.
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It is so much more fun recording this podcast here than in, like a dark studio.
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I can't imagine why.
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Okay, so I want. You've told this story before, but I want to start by talking about the origin story of the Blacklist. Take me back to 2005. You were working at Leonardo DiCaprio's production company and your job was to find good scripts. First of all, why was that a hard job?
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I mean, it's a hard job because great scripts are rare, right? Like, writing a great screenplay is a really hard thing to do. And it's also impossible. You have to read the entire thing to know if it's great. So that means, look, I knew very early on I was a math nerd. In high school, I went to college thinking I'd be a math major. I knew very early on in my career that my competitive advantage, if I had one, was not going to be like being the guy that's friends with celebrities, right? But I knew that I could take home a lot of screenplays and read them and come back and have something to say about them. So I'd take home a banker's box full of scripts every weekend, and I'd diligently read them. And my boss would ask me every Monday morning, like, did you read anything worth my time? And the answer was almost always no. Because if I was going to recommend something to him, that meant that he was going to take two hours with it. And if there was two hours and he came back thinking, why did I waste my time? The next time I recommended something, he wasn't going to read it again. And So I think 18 months in, I was at a point where I was reading a lot of screenplays that I couldn't recommend to my boss. And that was just time that disappeared and I needed to solve the problem. Or my mother's weekly phone calls asking me if my LSAT scores were still valid was something that I should take more seriously. And I really didn't want to go to law school. And so I just surveyed my peers, like, what were the best things that you read that haven't been made yet, aggregated that information and sent it back out anonymously under this quasi subversive name.
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You also sent this email out to people, 75 people that you knew, but you did it anonymously.
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I did.
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Why did you think anybody would respond? Because isn't having a good script valuable? So why would they want to share it with some anonymous email account?
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It's a good point. I think that there was the promise that if you sent your recommendations, then you would get the combined list back. And I think that the people that I was surveying were not the people that had green light authority. They were the people that were reading things and recommending them to their bosses, who may or may not have agreed with their opinions because they may have said, look, I read this amazing thing. It's about a high school student who gets pregnant and is trying to decide whether to have the baby. And, oh, by the way, it's a comedy. And their boss says, yeah, I'm not reading that right.
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And it turns out to be Juno.
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It turns out to be Juno.
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It's an amazing movie.
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And when you can walk into your boss's office and say, you know, what 40 people agreed with me that this is one of the best things they read this year that hasn't been made. Your boss then views it with new eyes.
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Well, also, the screen, like the process for finding screenplays is like, wildly disorganized. Right. I mean, there's not like some library that you can walk into where you're like, let me go through it A to Z.
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It's completely disorganized. You know, there's nowhere to go to find the thing you're looking for other than to call every agent, you know, and say, well, do you have a thing like this? And more broadly and really the reason we launched the Blacklist as a business concern and a website is that there's no way, if you've written a script and you're not already in the system to get your work in front of somebody who can do something with it. Right. You know, the advice that people generally give someone that wants to be a professional screenwriter is some version of, you know, move to Los Angeles, get a job at Starbucks network until someone pays attention to you, you know, across a long enough timeline, the business is a meritocracy. And that's just not true. Right. You can write something great, but if no one pays attention to it, it's no less great. But you've hit a roadblock. And that's something that sort of more broadly we're trying to solve now.
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So you sent out this list initially and you had kept it a secret that you're. That you were involved with it. Yes. And it kind of took off in that first year. And you've talked about how you were
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like, I was terrified.
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Maybe this is.
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I was sure I was going to get fired and have to go to law school.
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So. But then why do you think it resonated with people? And why do you think it grew? I mean, you decided to do it again, obviously. Why did you think it grew into something where it's sort of like now it's really almost. It's prestigious to have a script be included on the Blacklist, because I think
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everyone knows that, that you need, like, in an ideal scenario, everything starts with a great script. If you find a great script, you really have something, because you can probably get a great director, you can probably get a great cast. And if you have all those things, you can probably get the money to make the movie. And one individual person can't read everything. But if you're able to sort of crowdsource the opinions of a lot of people about what's worth your Time. It makes sense to start there. Even if, look, I read things on the annual list every year. I'm like, I didn't like it. All of this is fundamentally subjective. But if you have a menu of things that other people like, no matter how odd they seem, this is a thing that draws attention and makes people pay attention to it.
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So there's movies that have been on the list, like Slumdog Millionaire, the King's Speech, Argo, Spotlight, near and Dear to My Heart journalism movie. Don't you think a lot of these movies would have been made anyway?
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I mean, I'll take Slumdog Millionaire as an example. I remember being pitched that by the producer. He was like, yeah, it's about an Indian kid from the slums who goes on who Wants to be a Millionaire to find his long lost love. And I was like, good luck with that. And that movie famously was in the can. It was made by one studio who then said, this isn't commercial. We're not gonna make money on this, and sold it to another studio, sold it to Fox Searchlight, who then obviously ran it to multiple Oscars, including Best Pictures. Some of the movies that are on the annual list absolutely would have gotten made without the blacklist. I think other movies, and there have been writers who've said, like Ben Affleck found out about the script for Margot because it was on the blacklist. Benedict Cumberbatch said in an interview that he read Imitation Game because it was number one on the blacklist. Meryl Streep said she read a script because it had been on the blacklist. Which high point of my career. Probably she knows I exist pretty much. But I think the blacklist doesn't get a movie made. What gets a movie made is that the script is excellent. I think what we do is redirect a spotlight on a great script and make people see it with new eyes. And that has the power to catalyze or accelerate something in a direction that it probably should have been going anyway were it not for a bunch of conventional wisdom about what's viable. That, in my opinion, is all convention and really no wisdom at all.
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Of all the pieces that are required to make a movie, do you think that screenplay is the most important piece?
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I mean, I'm certainly biased, but yes. Here's the thing. I think that the screenplay is the thing that is the beginning of it, all, right? Like, in the beginning was the word, and no one else can do their job until a writer has done theirs. And I think that we, as an industry really undervalue the economic value of a writer's contributions. Right. And fun stat. My mother's still disappointed I didn't go to grad school, but I do have this going for me. Harvard Business School did a study on the annual blacklist a couple years ago, found that movies made from scripts on the annual list, controlling for all other factors, make about 90% more in revenue than movies made from scripts not on the list. And. Yeah, right. Thank you. I think it's really important that I say whenever I cite these numbers, and frankly, whenever you sort of run through the. Like, these are all the movies that won Oscars. Like, I didn't make those movies. I didn't produce them. I didn't gaffe them. I didn't do craft service on them. But I think what we did do is validate the thesis that writing has real economic value. If you start with a great script, you have a better chance of commercial success. And this very rudimentary data study that we built was pretty good at identifying the scripts that were good and then could result in real commercial value.
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So around 2012, you turned the blacklist into more than just this annual list. You turned it into a company where writers can pay to post their scripts and pay to have an industry professional critiqued that script. Why did you decide to do this? What was the need that you were hoping this business could solve for?
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Yeah. So the annual list started in 2005. I sort of was unmasked as the person that created in 2006. And for about five years, I'd be invited to speak at film festivals, film schools, wherever film fans were gathered. And the first question in an open Q and A was always some version of like, hey, I wrote what I think is a pretty good script. How can I get it to somebody who can do something with it? And there was really no good answer to that question. And I think I grew up. I'm black, and I grew up in west central Georgia. I'm acutely aware of the ways in which those access issues make it, like, pervert labor markets on some fundamental level. And I wanted to build a solution because it shouldn't matter where you live. It shouldn't matter who you know. What should matter is, did you write a banger of a screenplay? And if so, everybody should know about it. And so I wanted to build a solution to that problem. You know, Hollywood's. I use this analogy recently. Hollywood's a little bit like, imagine if the NBA said, oh, you want to be a professional basketball player? Our headquarters are in Midtown Manhattan, move to New York, play, pick up ball near our headquarters. Someone will probably see you, and then we'll assign you to a team. Right. Like that would be insane.
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That might be how the Portland Trailblazers do it. That's my team.
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And yeah, I was gonna say, look, if that's what the NBA did, Bronny would be the MVP every year. Yeah, but that would be insane. And it would. And as you would not have, people would not watch basketball. They certainly wouldn't watch the NBA as much, and the franchises wouldn't be as valuable as they are. But that's kind of how Hollywood approaches finding great material. And it doesn't make sense. And I wanted to build a discovery layer that allowed anybody, no matter who they are and who they know, if they could write something great, they could put it in front of the people who would do something with it. And that was sort of the ecosystem that we built to solve that problem.
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What would it mean for the industry if you're able to solve this talent discovery problem?
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I mean, what does it mean for the NBA that they could find Victor Wembanyama? Right.
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It means that Portland Trailblazers lose in the playoffs.
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I joke, but it's true. All of this for me is a selfish enterprise so that I can watch more better movies and TV shows. But I think that's what we get. We get better movies and tv. We get better economics for the industry. We get a better culture, we get a more sustainable business if we actually look for the talent where it is and not just, you know, in a few zip codes where we where the people who work in the industry already live.
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After the break, Franklin explains why so many bad movies are still getting made. Study and play come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best.
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So I want to zoom out and talk about some bigger industry trends and issues that are going on. And so this is kind of a nice segue to that because I have this burning question which boggles my mind to this day, which is, why are bad movies still getting made? And I mean this quite literally. Like, we know what makes a good movie. We know what good dialogue looks like. And every time I watch a movie with bad dialogue in it, I'm like, how does they not see that?
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Yeah, I mean, I think it's. I keep coming back to the reality that making a good movie is really, really right. Even you can start with a great screenplay. And there are a million decisions between that screenplay being greenlit and the movie that we all see on the screen. There are compromises that have to be made because of budget, because of location, because of preferences that an actor may have, because of tax credits that force you to shoot in a location. That changes everything. Right. So I think that's why we also have to appreciate more the great things when we have them. And that's part of the reason why, as somebody who's worked in the industry as long as I have, when I see a great movie, I'm just in awe of it because I know all of the ways in which it can go wrong. So I think that's part of it. I think the other part of it is that the people that are making the decisions about what to make, there's a taste gap, There is a conventional wisdom about what audiences want to see. That again, is all convention and no wisdom. And there's a lot of rules that guide what people think can work, that prevent a whole lot of things from getting made that might be better. And then there's that talent discovery gap. We're not taking advantage of all the talent that's out there. We're just reaching for the people that's nearby. And so you end up with an NBA that's populated by Bronny James. And what's lesser, the other big force
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in Hollywood, or what we're seeing is the reheating of existing IP all the time, sequel after sequel, bringing franchises back. What are the forces that are driving that? And do you see them changing?
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I mean, I think the forces that are driving that are, you got to. Movies are expensive and you got to convince a lot of people to show up for them. And if you have, if you can tell them, hey, you liked this thing before, it's the same thing or it's an extension of that story, come see it again. People are more inclined to do that, right? They're following in some way what they believe the audience wants. And again, I don't think that that's necessarily bad. There are tons of movie sequels that are amazing, but the Godfather 2 is a sequel, right? It being a sequel does not make it bad. So I think the real question is, are these movies good? Not, are these movies sequels? I also think it's important to remember Gone with the Wind is an adaptation. They made Gone with the Wind because they knew people were familiar with the novel. And if we make the novel that people love, maybe they'll show up to the movie. I think that's really what is driving the these decisions. And again, I don't really. I don't think most audience members care whether a movie is a sequel or an adaptation. They just want it to be good. And if you make a good movie, they'll show up.
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So do you think that that's going to continue this trend of just.
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I think these things ebb and flow, right? I think that, you know, if there was a minute where everybody thought that Marvel was just a juggernaut that was going to roll through the industry, and every movie would be a Marvel movie forever, and I think that's probably quieted a little bit. And even Marvel themselves has sort of taken a step back and said, maybe we make a fewer of these so that when they happen, people get more excited about them. So I think that this is just. It's an economic reality that making and marketing movies is very expensive. And if you're trying to reduce your risk, making something that is adjacent to something that they've already said they like is a rational response to that reality.
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All right, in the last couple minutes that we have, I want to ask just a couple of quick questions and get your take on it.
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Bring it on.
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So Hollywood is in a bit of a recession right now. As you know, employment in motion picture and TV production has fallen 30% since its peak in 2022. A lot of people are out of work. Do you think the industry in Los Angeles will rebound, or do you think that this is its new size going forward?
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Look, I think that peak in 2022 was a product of a lot of the studios and streamers chasing Netflix and trying to make a lot of content to service their new streamers. And so there was A combination of a receding from that super production, when people realized that they needed to really look at their streaming economics to figure out how to make the business actually work. I think there was the pandemic, which was sort of a second element of that. And I think that consolidation is never great for a business like ours.
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That's my next question. What do you think of the merger? Paramount and Warner Brothers Discovery?
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I think that fewer buyers is a bad thing in a competitive marketplace. I think that means more debt and fewer buyers and more conventional thinking. That doesn't serve a culture business terribly well. So I'm not optimistic about it. I do think that production in LA will rebound and I think it will require leadership at both the studios and in the government to make that happen. And so I think it's going to require voters to make good decisions about who they elect as mayor and who they elect as governor, and the companies that are deeply vested in good decisions about how to make the business sustainable and maybe a little bit less focus on quarterly earnings.
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All right, my last question is, do you get a lot of insight? Go ahead, See Better than Recording in a Closet. You get a lot of insight into movies that are coming down the pipe because you're seeing a lot of scripts that are coming in. Are you seeing any new or different or interesting trends in the types of movies that we're going to be made in a few years time?
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I don't know that I'm seeing a lot of. I'm always reluctant to sort of say that I see trends because I'm acutely aware of the fact that I'm not seeing everything. And again, as like a very data driven person, I want the full data set. I think one of the things that I'm most excited about though is the globalization of film and television storytelling, period. Like, we no longer live in a world where we can reasonably assume that the best or most commercial movies that we see and get excited about are things that are gonna come from a Hollywood studio. Right? Like I'm really excited about a world where Parasite exists, where Squid Game exists. You know, there are. There's a bunch of teenagers in Nigeria who I happen to encounter on Twitter seven years ago and I got on a Skype with them cause it was pre zoom. And I asked them, you know, what movies are you guys into? And I was expecting them to say like Marvel or whatever. And they were like, you know, we like David Defender, but we find his work a little cold. And these are kids who live in like rural Nigeria, right? And they were making short films with camera phones and laptops that most of us would probably throw away. And their work was really strong. And they've continued to make stuff. And their first feature that was co directed with a filmmaker out of New Zealand just premiered at the Berlin Film Festival. Yeah. And so a world where that exists and where that's just the beginning is a world that I'm really excited about.
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All right. Franklin Leonard, thank you so much for joining us.
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Thanks for having me.
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I've actually got one more question for you before we go. Where would you like us to do another live show? Let us know in the comments on Spotify. That's all for today. The Journal is a co production of Spotify and the Wall Street. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.