Q&A: The Black List Founder Franklin Leonard on the Future of Hollywood
An epic, nothing-off-limits conversation about everything that's wrong with the film/TV industry - including the current backlash against diversity efforts - and how to fix it
Two things happened in Hollywood in 2005 to change it forever: I moved there and Franklin Leonard, a production company executive, created The Black List. While the impact of my arrival in the film/TV business is a closely guarded secret, my friend Franklin’s is very much the opposite. Nearly two decades later, it’s impossible not to point to him as one of the most important champions of screenwriting of the 21st century.
At its inception, The Black List was just a yearly survey of the best unproduced screenplays floating around town — voted on by Franklin’s fellow executives, to help them separate the chaff from the wheat — but it very quickly evolved into an event, a shortcut even, for agents, producers, and studio executives to find new, exciting, utterly brilliant writers. You know, like me. I jest, but the reality is I do believe my own career largely took off when the second script I sold, Hyde, landed on The Black List in 2011. Overnight, it seemed as if everyone in Hollywood wanted to meet with me — including Franklin, which is how we first crossed paths. Within two years of being named on it, I’d had a television series greenlit (“Dracula”), sold a spec, and sold another film project on pitch.
In the years since the Black List became a synonym for “quality screenwriting”, more than 400 films have been produced from other scripts that appeared on it, four of these have won Best Picture Oscars, and twelve of them have won Best Screenplay Oscars. As Franklin is quick to point out, he is not responsible for these scripts, but I would argue he’s at least partly responsible for careers like mine that were made because of it. He set something in motion, and as a result I believe we all talk about screenwriting and screenwriters in a much different way than we did at the start of the millennium.
This might be a good place to bring up the fact that the publication of my conversation with Franklin coincides with the big reveal of 2024’s Black List; it’s being dropped online, like, right now.1 This might seem like thoughtful timing, a little promotional angle, but I assure you it is not. It’s a coincidence I only clocked myself last week, as I began to work on this introduction. I’d asked Franklin to join me for one of my chats some time ago because I wanted to dig into the uncertain, scary state of the industry, flagging diversity and inclusivity efforts within it, and the future of screenwriting from his point of view. Part of my pitch was I wanted to talk about the things I didn’t think others were saying aloud.
The result is a blunt, no bullshit discussion of everything from “wokeness” in Hollywood, systemic racism in the industry, and other aspects of the United States’ culture war. But more importantly, it’s a deep look at so many of the things that are wrong with how the film/TV industry works today versus when he and I got into it, the problem with screenplay development and how it continues to disadvantage less-privileged voices, and what Hollywood can do to save itself (my friend has a few ideas, and I tend to agree with them).
What Franklin and I don’t get into is The Black List platform for film, TV, theater, and, most recently, fiction2, his new Hollywood game show “Nobody Knows Anything”3, or all the other amazing shit he gets up to. Our Zoom lasted two hours as it is; I love talking to the guy, so let’s just be grateful our chat is as focused as it is given how much we covered. That all said, let’s dive in. If you want to know what happens when two friends who’ve seen it all get real about Hollywood in private, you’re in for a treat.
COLE HADDON: The last time we saw each other in the flesh was at the Soho House in Hollywood right before the 2016 election. We hugged, and you started up the stairs to the dining floor. I can’t recall your exact words, but they were something like, “Keep it up. We need more woke dudes like you talking about diversity.” In that moment, it felt like we were on the verge of something. Real change in the industry, for women, for people of color, and for other marginalized groups. Eight years later, and “woke” is now a super-charged word more commonly used in English-speaking countries as an insult and, despite the fact that so many white guys I know still complain about how they can’t get jobs anymore because U.S. studios, networks, and streamers will only hire women and non-white people, diversity and inclusion reports repeatedly demonstrate that, while the numbers have improved, they’re still incredibly poor in terms of representation behind the camera - and on the decline again.45 Oh, and Trump is president again. So, here’s my first question to you: what the fuck? That’s all. What the fuck, man?
FRANKLIN LEONARD: Yeah, man, taking an inventory "seriously, what the fuck?" feels like a terribly un-fun rabbit hole to go down at the moment. Maybe the best thing for me to do is to try to address each element of it directly and simply, and I suspect that that will spin out many more questions.
CH: Bring it on, my friend.
FL: To start at the beginning, yes, we've always needed more woke dudes talking about diversity, and I think it's clearer than ever that we will for quite some time. I think it comes down to this, at least in Hollywood — ostensibly, we are in the business of making movies and television for a global audience, and I don't know how you can reasonably expect to do that optimally unless the people making it look at least somewhat similar to the audience that consumes it. And that’s not to say we should be forcing hires to accommodate a DEI agent. It’s to say that the optimal way to capture that audience likely requires a business populated by people with as broad a set of human experiences as possible.
I struggle to imagine anyone reasonably thinking that the ability to tell stories well is coincidental with any one gender, race, or any other identity - maybe they do, but that's on them. If you do believe that talent is reasonably well distributed across humankind, then it only makes sense to seek that talent wherever it is and whatever form it takes, which isn't something the industry has been historically great at.
CH: Not at all.
FL: Some of that is actual bias, some version of "we don't think these people have the talent." Some of it is just gross lack of understanding of the audience born of subconscious bias. "Can we really sell a Black movie outside of the United States?" "Do female driven action movies work?"
And some of it is just the simple material realities of everyday life — "There are more scripts to read than I can possibly read, so I'm going to start with the ones that came from folks with whom I have a personal or professional relationship who have expertise on the subject."
All this is to say, the more folks who are outward looking, who value more voices contributing to the art and decision-making processes of this business, the better for this business - financially, artistically, and culturally.
CH: Eight years ago, did you think we were on the verge of real change? Was there ever really a moment that we lost in your mind?
FL: I have to be honest. I don't know that I've ever thought we were, really. I've talked about this a bit on Twitter, largely in the wake of George Floyd's murder and the supposed "racial reckoning" we all witnessed, but I've always assumed that most of the response to these moments has been performative and wouldn't result in long term, sustainable change.
I should mention here that I'm well-aware that I'm possibly too pessimistic by default, but I've been right more than I've been wrong with that default on these issues.
I do think some progress has been made, but as you mention, we now find ourselves in the middle of an undeniable backlash where much of the institutional change that was promised during that era has largely evaporated and even pursuing diversity because it's good for business is somehow a lightning rod.
Everything's a mess, largely, but I lay that at the feet of the folks with the resources to actually change things. The irony is that getting it right would mean significantly better financial outcomes, which is what we all want right? Especially them?
CH: You would think so, right? I have to ask, do you really think you’re “too pessimistic by default” as I mentioned? I think my mistake – and I’d suggest, a mistake made my most people who look like me and identify as I do – as the studios and streamers and Hollywood in general began to respond to the outcry, this being 2015 and 2016, I naively thought reason would win out. Or rather, money. It just wasn’t as profitable to be a hegemonically white male business. I now realize I stopped listening enough to Black friends and other friends of color who didn’t necessarily seem as enthusiastic as I was.
FL: It's interesting. I think I am just pessimistic by nature. It's a facet of all aspects of my life. I think that getting older and therapy helps you develop practice of optimism in the face of that. I'm also lucky enough to be sort of part of the community with really incredible artists that make it almost impossible to be truly pessimistic. And what I mean by that is, I'm around enough amazing people that frequently enough in my life I see something like a movie, or I read a script, or I see some art that makes me say, “Well then, if that shit is possible, what else is possible?”
CH: Any examples you’d care to share?
FL: Last year, I was lucky enough to see Ava DuVernay’s Origin. I don't believe in perfect movies and I don't think I would suggest that it is – I have notes – but to take a swing that big? You're not going to be able to take a swing that big within the context of the traditional industry financing structure, so, Ava went out and collected a bunch of money from nontraditional sources to be able to cobble together the resources necessary to take that swing and to execute it that well, and for it to be that emotional on a human level, it's like, “Okay, okay, if that's possible, what else is possible?” I think that's sort of where my optimism comes from.
CH: I want to come back to the fact you pointed out, that representation behind and in front of the cameras produces better financial outcomes in film and TV. If this is the case – and there is a lot of evidence that makes it hard to argue with – what logic do you think is currently eroding the progress that’s been made? Is Hollywood solely struggling to navigate headwinds created by America’s escalating culture war? Or is it possible this was part of a larger business affairs bamboozle? I’m of the mind it’s both, but more and more convinced the studios and streamers’ lawyers adopted a strategy of playing women and people of color against established white writers to drive down the overall value of all writers’ work and, in doing so, create a climate of scapegoating and antagonism that something like that ridiculous “SEAL Team” lawsuit is the natural outcome of.6 Maybe I’ve become too pessimistic, too, but I think cynical is the better descriptor.
FL: I think on some level that's just capitalism. What you're describing is management pitting labor against each other so that they can reduce the amount that they pay labor. And that's happening everywhere. I think that it's particularly dangerous in the business of culture because it's one thing if that happens in auto parts or toothpaste and those products become worse and the people that make them are poorly compensated. That’s obviously very bad, but it's arguably worse when that product is projected forty feet high and into devices in our hands and into our eyeballs all around the world. At billion-person scale, it's worse when the consequence of not paying people enough means that it is impossible for anybody who does not grow up wealthy or with immediate social proximity to Hollywood can even attempt to have a career of creating those images.
I don't necessarily believe that business affairs is engaged in that magic trick intentionally. Maybe some people are, and maybe some people can run game at that level. I don't think most business affairs executives can or intend to. I think just at the end of the day, that is an inevitable consequence of poorly regulated, poorly implemented capitalism. And the irony of that is that if you were able to take a step back to a 40,000-foot view or even operate as a sort of right-thinking actor within a marketplace - Adam Smith Wealth of Nations style - you would not force down the cost of labor in this way because doing so threatens to destroy your most valuable resource.
I've long said that if someone put me in charge of a studio, the first thing I would do is call every head of a major agency and say, “Listen, if you sell any piece of intellectual property, any script or hire out any writer without making me aware of it first, you’re in violation of your fiduciary duty to your client. I will happily ‘overpay’ for great writing. If I like it, whatever anybody else is paying, I'm paying 50% more.” Fundamentally, I know that that resource is undervalued so overpaying for it is a risk I’m willing to take long run. The movies and television that I make will be better, and they’ll make more money as a consequence.
Maybe I’m naïve, but I don't understand why more people don't function that way, and that's wholly separate from race, gender, or whatever. Because I also know that if I'm choosing the best stuff to service a diverse global audience, I'm going to have to hire diversely because I'm going to need to be making enough different kinds of things that I can serve a diverse audience that has a lot of niches with tastes that vary widely.
CH: You talk about this often, I think probably one of the loudest voices in terms of the money that's left on the table in terms of representation or a lack thereof in the stories that are getting told for the screen.7 But I have to say, even if business affairs isn't that nefarious, even if these lawyers aren’t actually doing something so calculated, you still have everybody else in Hollywood saying the same thing — whether that’s execs telling the producers it’s hard out there for white men or the agents who manipulate clients, producers, everyone with their own nefarious shit. In the end, you’re still left with this whole system where the best way to make more money is to embrace diversity while everybody working in that industry acts to undermine it and build dissension for their own gain.
FL: Let me try to clarify that. What I mean is that I don't think that there's a nefarious project at a macro level. I don't believe that any head of business affairs is like, “Alright guys, the game plan is separate out the whites. Underpay the people of color. Tell them it's a privilege to be there. Tell the white dudes that their spot was taken, and they're going to have to take less money if they even want to be in the room.” I don't believe that that’s happening in boardrooms. I do believe, however, that there's a constant series of on-the-spot decisions that result in that essentially being the reality whether the fix was in from the beginning or not. So, when the agent calls the studio and says, “Hey man, why didn't my client get hired?” the response is something like, “Uh, I don't know – we had to hire diverse.”
When it's a business affairs conversation with an agent about their underrepresented client, the narrative is something like “Look, you know how hard it is out there for everyone right now. You should probably just take this deal and be happy about it.” And the agent is then in a position thinking, “Great, yes, well, I want to fight tooth and nail for my individual client, but my agency does so much business with this studio because there's only a few major buyers.” Each of those companies can have outsized influence on another because this business is on some level oligopolistic and highly interdependent.
So, again, I don't think it’s necessarily evil. It's an aggregation of a lack of accountability and honesty about why these things are actually happening.
CH: Would another definition of that just be systemic racism?
FL: Yes. And I think that's the other problem: on some level what we're really talking about here is white supremacy, misogyny, anti-homophobia, all these sentiments are sort of congealed/baked into society, and I think that they're particularly baked into systems where there are very few people making big decisions that have ripple effects that affect everybody else.
For the folks who have that power, the failure is ultimately one of two things: incompetence or nefarious intent. I think I’m giving people the benefit of the doubt by assuming that it's incompetence. My assumption is, “Oh, y'all really just don't realize it. You're part of a system that incentivizes you to make what you think are conservative decisions based on a conventional wisdom that is all convention and no wisdom. There's no real incentive for you to break out of that. If it goes wrong in the short term, you'll get fired from your job immediately. So, it’s entirely rational for you to play the game to cover your downside and not optimize for the long term.” And if you're doing that, the results are going to be roughly what the decisions that we see.
CH: Do you think the re-election of Trump and what feels like a pretty decisive shift in America’s culture war will have a significant impact on what Hollywood produces going forward? Will this be the thing that really undoes whatever progress that’s been made?