This week Neil Calloway comes to praise, not bury The Black List everyone wants to be seen on…
What have Juno, In Bruges, Source Code, Easy A, The Social Network and Argo all got in common? They’re all good, well written films from the past ten years. Invite me over to watch any of them and I’ll be there. They also all appeared on The Black List before going into production.
When it comes to Hollywood, the Black List has connotations; people denied employment, forced into exile in Europe or to use pseudonyms to find work when their sympathies, real or imagined, were found to be more left wing than was deemed acceptable in America. The new Black List, however, is a list of unproduced screenplays released every December. It’s a black list people are proud to be on. The tenth one was released this week, won by Kristina Lauren Anderson for her Catherine The Great script. Anderson has had previous success in screenwriting competitions, but has never had anything go into production. I imagine that will soon change.
The list was the brainchild of Franklin Leonard, an executive with Leonardo DiCaprio’s production company. In 2005, he sent an email to 90 other people in Hollywood asking what their favourite unproduced scripts they’d read that year were. Pretty soon, it went viral (The Things We Lost In The Fire came top that year, edging out Juno by a single vote. Since then it has gone from strength to strength, and in 2012 the survey expanded into a website where anyone can upload a script (for a fee, of course) and get it read by people in the industry. In 2013, Gary Graham, who had studied film at Columbia University but was working at an Apple store in Manhattan, uploaded a post apocalyptic screenplay to the site. He’s now represented by the Creative Artists Agency and is retooling his script into a new I Am Legend film. They are also now in their second year of a fellowship, open to writers who have not earned more then $5000 during their career. They will get a trip to next year’s Sundance festival and be mentored by producer Cassian Elwes. Last year Matthew Hickman won, and like Gary Graham, he had no Hollywood connections, but is now having his screenplay produced. This year they began a series of live reads of unproduced scripts that have made the list in previous years. Whether this leads to any of them getting made is another story.
A certain type of film does well on The Black List; looking through previous lists it’s clear that political films are appreciated more than you’d think, which makes me ask if these films are so beloved of Hollywood executives, why aren’t we seeing more of them in the cinema? The list is always published with the caveat that it is a most liked list, not a best screenplay list. When does the person who loves a script end and the hard nosed Hollywood executive who says “well, it’s a great screenplay but it’ll never get made” begin? The 2012 list featured a film about a young woman torn between joining the investigation in Richard Nixon in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal and her ex boyfriend who was teaching law in Arkansas. The film has struggled to find a star and a director, but given that the script is named after the lead character and is called Rodham, I can’t imagine it will be far from our screens soon. This year the list features two films about the making of The Wizard of Oz, probably inspired by the success of Saving Mr Banks, which appeared on the list in 2011.
I wish I could be cynical about The Black List, and believe me I’ve tried. They have monetised an original idea and are now profiting from people wanting to be the next Shane Black or Diablo Cody, but I can’t see what is wrong with that if they are giving unknowns access to Hollywood, and giving Hollywood access to unknown screenwriters. I could be cynical that films like The Social Network and Inglourious Basterds appear on the list, given that they are written by established writers and would have got made anyway, but not letting scripts like that onto the list would be the equivalent of having a football league but not letting the top four win because they had the most money and the best players and were going to win anyway.
I like The Black List; it’s well worth checking out, if only to see trends in Hollywood. I’m off to write a script to get on the list in 2015.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future installments.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=PL18yMRIfoszFJHnpNzqHh6gswQ0Srpi5E&feature=player_embedded&v=Z2vq4CudKRk
Originally published December 21, 2014. Updated April 13, 2018.
