Transcript

Rapid Response: A new script for the book biz and Hollywood, with The Black List’s Franklin Leonard

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Join us at masters of scale dot com slash apply twenty six. That's mastersofscom slash apply. Twenty six. If you are a novelist, we'll tell everybody in the publishing world and in the film and television world This is a book you should probably pay attention to. There was a recent study looking at the movies that got made in the last like six years.

And half of them. Roughly. or adaptations of novels. The blacklist now has

Visibility over the inputs that represent fifty percent of the film production. And I don't think anybody really cares. All that much. about whether something was adapted or a remake. They just want it to be good.

That's Franklin Leonard, founder and CEO of The Blacklist, a platform that's reshaped Hollywood by identifying overlooked, unproduced movie scripts from Argo to Juno to Slum Dog Millionaire. Now the Blacklist has announced a new expansion targeting novels. Franklin and I explore the parallels between book publishing in the film industry and how the Blacklist is breaking down barriers to creative and business spaces to unlock billions in potential opportunity. Franklin also talks about what defines risks worth taking with lessons that apply to every business and every brand. So let's get to it. I'm Bob Staffien.

And this Із рапід респанс. I'm Bob Safian. I'm here with uh Franklin Leonard, founder and CEO of The Blacklist. Franklin, thanks for joining us. It's gonna be bad. The last time you were on the show, it was the morning after the Oscars, and we talked about the state of the movie business. But today I I I wanna zero in on the blacklist itself, because you've recently embarked on an expansion

The the blacklist started as a side project for you, an underground kind of crowdsourcing effort aimed at identifying the best Hollywood scripts that weren't getting made. In the years since you built it into a platform for scriptwriters and playwrights for training, identifying talent, linking talent to opportunity. Now you're expanding Into something new. So can you explain to us sort of Where the blacklist is

What the expansion is and why you've gone down this road. Yeah, like you said, it started as this this annual survey of Hollywood's most liked unproduced screenplays that quickly became an arbiter of taste in the business and and sort of served early notice of writers and scripts that the industry should be paying attention to with with great success. And For the last couple of years, a lot of folks in the book space had been asking me when we were gonna expand into novels. And, you know, I tend to be a research data driven person. Um and I also knew that the reason that the blacklist worked was that it had been purpose built for the film and television.

industry ecosystem. I was trying to solve a problem in that space. Something you knew personally. Something you'd lived through, right? Yeah. I mean I've been before we launched the website, I've been in the industry for more than ten years. I've been there for tw more than twenty now. So we were we were building something that could optimize the system the uh in the film and television and that then theater space. And Howie Sanders at Anonymous Content was really adamant that I seriously considered this and set me up on a series of meetings with people in the book industry. And what I was, you know, pleasantly found was that people were really excited about it. That there was a recognition that there was a lot of great writing happening in places that they didn't know about and that they couldn't find. And that we could, you know, be an industrial sized metal detector and take a infinite pile of haystacks and find the needles. And that's really what we built. So the blacklist expanded into fiction in in early September. Uh it means that If you are a novelist, if you are have an unpublished novel, a self-published novel, a published novel, you can create a writer profile on the Blacklist website, list all the things that you created so that they're searchable by people in the publishing film and television theater businesses. And if you

want to get feedback on your work or you want to make it directly available to those people, you can host it on the site, you can purchase feedback. And when that feedback is really positive, we'll tell everybody in the publishing world and the film and television world. This is a book you should probably pay attention to. And again, the goal remains to identify and celebrate the best writing we can find. We're gonna find a lot of great books that a lot of people are gonna put out and a lot of books that are gonna get adapted into film and television. You know, it's a tie that raises all boats. Hm. The the last time you were on the show we talked a bit about American fiction that the Oscar Writing film that

highlights the book business and its limitations. So that film wasn't uh necessarily an instigating factor for your expansion, just a coincidence. No, I think it's largely coincidence, but when you mention it, yeah part of the things that Cord's brilliant movie explores are are things that we're trying to address, which is that You know, th there's a very like in Hollywood, the the system of folks who have access to the resources to to sort of make books that we hold in our hand and sell them broadly and market them broadly. It's a walled garden. And and it's not even a wall garden by intent at this point. The reality is that the people that are working as publishers, as editors, as agents. there's a super abundance of material that's out there. And it's impossible for anybody to plow through it all and find the good things. And so you end up triaging things to the agents that send you the stuff.

or the you know the grad programs that that recommend you to an agent. And the fact of the matter is that like not all talent Was in New York City. went to Iowa or Columbia. But that doesn't mean you're a bad writer. It doesn't mean that the book you wrote isn't not only worthy of serious, but wouldn't make a publisher a lot of money if they knew about it. And so our job is really to, you know, go out and find the writers where they have great material, identify it as such, and then tell as many people as we can who can do something with it.

This is something you should pay attention to. When you talk about the research that you did, like as you talk about the It sounds a lot like Hollywood. I mean both industries are sort Prone to

Limited risk taking, you know, narrow uh entryways. They're both blockbuster driven businesses. Are there things that Surprised you that we're different about the publishing industry? Or did they more surprise you that they were the same? I think what surprised me more was how similar they were. But then when I stepped back and really thought about it, it it didn't come as that big of a surprise, right? Like fundamentally both businesses, film and television and books, like you said, that they're hit driven. They're businesses where the product

is something that does not have An objective value to every potential consumer. Right. Like you're trying to find things that you will put into the market and some people will love and not everybody will. And that doesn't mean that those people are wrong. It just means that they have an opinion about this thing. They are resource intensive in terms of evaluating them. So, you know. To know whether a screenplay is something that you want to invest potentially millions of dollars in, you have to read the entire screenplay. Same thing with a manuscript. And that takes a lot of time, right? Yeah. There's a superabundance. of things that are, you know, written that

No one could actually go through all of them. So I think those fundamental market dynamics, right? A subjective product, a superabundance of supply. no easy way to to filter the the quote unquote best things to the people that are most likely to respond to them. Um and increasing, you know, revenue and cost pressures and and the challenges of doing business at a high level in twenty twenty four. Even for you, like how much of what's on the blacklist Can you read?

personally. Even if the platform is highlighting things for you that are rising, you still Can't Absorb everything. No, it would be impossible for me for any one person to even read all the things that we think are worth people paying attention to that come through the blacklist website, right? Like our job is to sort of filter and sort the world. in a way for each individual that would be most helpful to them. So when we send that email out every week to, you know, several thousand film and television executives about the best scripts and television pilots and plays our readers read that week.

My recommendation to industry professionals is look at the log lines. Does anything there sound interesting to you? maybe then take a look at it because it meets the criteria of A, it's of interest based on subject matter, and B, someone else has validated. Someone you can trust has validated this as being possibly worth your time. And I won't promise that it will be worth your time. You may read it and say, actually this isn't for me, but It's a hot we've created a uh a target rich environment to find high value things. The idea is the same thing will happen with novels for those in the publishing world.

W for those in the publishing world and the film and TV world, because as much as publishers are looking for great novels, film and television people were looking for great novels that they can turn into film and television. So we have a partnership with Simon Kinberg, who fame maybe most famously produced The Martian, which he found as a self published novel. So you know, when I came to him and said, This is what we're doing, I'd love to have a partnership where you commit to optioning a manuscript that we find in our first year. for film or television adaptation. He was like absolutely done because he knows that there are things like the Martian being written that that for whatever reason hadn't found their way into traditional publishing houses. So you're linking up these two worlds, right? Because for a lot of book authors, the biggest upside for them is if it gets made into a a a film or a TV adaptation of some kind.

These two businesses are increasingly interdependent, right? Like getting your book adapted into a movie or TV show is great for book sales and On the Hollywood side, when you think about the movies and the M T V shows that are getting greenlit, having some pre existing material with which an audience is already familiar is a big boost to your marketing plan because you already have some built in Interest. So novels are Posted on the blacklist the same way

Screenplays and plays are the writer would pay a monthly service fee, but you guys don't take a stake. In something if it's Discovered on the platform. Like No. Why not? I mean you're you're foregoing what may be the biggest financial opportunity. Like why not act more like a V C and sort of take a little stake in everything and you know the things that hit you get to Like here's the thing. We are charging you for a specific service. Feeback.

And hosting. If we were going to claim a financial upside in what follows You're making a deal with a a publishing house, you're making a deal with the studio. We should and it's my belief that we should also be adding value. Throughout the value chain. And so

If a VC wants to Do that. And I'm open to this conversation. Yeah. We should be

optioning the material, providing support in producing it, involving the writer in the production of the thing. We should be the best publishing house in the game if we're gonna have our own imprint. And a writer should still have the option. to go somewhere else that they think they can get a better deal. And I think and look, I do I think that we could provide additional services down the line. Yes, but again, I think the writer always deserves the option. Of taking the best deal, and that's what we're trying to enable. In some ways it echoes for me some of the things that I felt when I was an editor in the magazine world, but like you you built the blacklist into this respected, valued brand. It's a great tool for those who use it, you know, creatives on the industry side.

But it's not so easy to translate that into value for the blacklist itself, right? I mean I think if I was Profit oriented. just as like a disposition, it might be frustrating. What we're building

I mean, there's an accrued value that happens just because of the place that we sit in the business. There was a recent study done by a a producer named David Beaubert looking at the movies that got made in the last like six years. And half of them, roughly. Came from original screenplays. Or adaptations of novels.

Right. Specifically fiction novels. So we're The blacklist now has Visibility over the inputs that represent fifty percent of the film production in the business on some level. There are a lot of businesses you can build atop that.

And so my goal has always been Build a business that was focused on impact. Initially. And if you build a business that successfully solves a problem And has that impact, and I think we have.

The business that you could build on top of that. Is quite a profitable one. And that's a conversation that I'm excited to have, especially now that we have expanded into manuscripts, which was for me the last real brick in that initial foundation. It's a classic entrepreneur spot. Like you have to be patient and impatient at the same time, right? Yeah. And look, I think the other thing that differentiates us from a lot of companies is that I've never raised money, right? I own the company outright. We bootstrapped the entire thing and everything we and we were profitable on day one. We've been profitable literally

Every month we've been in existence. And so You know, it was purpose built. To solve a problem. And now that we've solved the problem, like I said, there's a lot of opportunity. That comes from being able to spot.

the best things before everybody else. And these are the conversations that I'm going to be engaging in in the next couple of months, definitely over twenty twenty five. And yeah, I'll just put it I'll just put it out there. Anybody who wants to have that conversation with me should reach out. I'm pretty easily findable on the internet. Yeah. Franklin's just toothing his own horn. For all the impact the Blacklist has had on Hollywood already, he's poised to break things open even further. By exposing billions of dollars in untapped opportunity.

We'll dig into that after the break. Stay with us. When you've built substantial wealth through your business, it's often tied up in a single equity position. The upside is real, but so is the risk, and knowing when to act isn't always obvious. Creative planning works with business owners to build a strategy around concentrated equity.

When to diversify, how to manage tax risk, and how to protect what you've spent years. Building. Creative planning where wealth works together. Lear more at creative planning dot com slash masters of scale. Humans will never be more intelligent than AI. Those were great at AI and those that went out of business because they weren't. How do we build a future?

That is human centered. I'm Rana El Calyubi. And on my podcast Pioneers of AI, we answer that question and so many more. As an AI scientist, entrepreneur, and investor, I know what it takes to build AI that works for everyone. Every week, I sit down with the pioneers shaping our future. And we take you behind the scenes of the AI that's transforming our lives.

Find pioneers of AI wherever you tune in. Hey listeners, Bob here. If you listen to Rapid Response on Masters of Scale, you may be missing half the show because every Friday we release a second Rapid Response exclusively in the Rapid Response feed. The guests and topics are just as compelling and timely. From Ford CEO to NASA's administrator to the lessons from The Devil Wears Prada. It takes about 10 seconds to find, just search rapid response wherever you listen to podcasts and hit follow to make sure you never miss an episode. I hope to see you there. Before the break, we heard Franklin Leonard of the Blacklist explain how uncovering new novelists

can fuel Hollywood. Now he talks about how to unlock billions of dollars in missed potential by addressing faulty assumptions. It's a trap that any industry can fall into. and an opportunity for those willing to reframe old notions of risk. Let's jump back in.

So The blacklist Isn't about Black writers or black talent. per se. It's about opening opportunities more broadly.

There have been some departures in the book publishing world this industry have some high level black executives. Coinciding with pullbacks elsewhere on commitments That were made post George Floyd. Yeah. How does that impact the way

Your plans run with the platform or is that just Not a neighborhood you're gonna go into. I see a lot of this through the lens of irony. McKinsey and Company did this study during the sort of immediate post Floyd George George Floyd era. What is the economic cost to Hollywood of its anti-black bias?

And what they found was is that it runs about ten billion dollars. Every year. the lack of investment in black films on a f on a budgetary level, on a marketing budgetary level, and then in terms of international distribution. Like there's more money to be made. Hm. They did subsequent studies about the Latinx community. That's

12 to 18 billion a year and the Asian American community, which is two to four billion a year. So we're talking about thirty billion dollars a year that Hollywood is leaving on the table because they're not optimizing for the audience that they're trying to serve. So when I see you know, black executives leaving in mass from a culture industry, I begin to wonder about the competence of the people that are making those decisions, not because of some moral and ethical DEI imperative, but because their job is to make money for their company and not thinking about how to maximize that audience that is available to them. is really gonna cost that company money. I always wonder like how long are our stockholders You know gonna

be satisfied with leadership. But isn't optimizing For economic outcomes. But You know.

Over time the hope is is that you know Economic success after economic success. will validate the thesis and people will have to move based on wanting to optimize their economic ends. So much of it seems to be like

What is sien as risky. Right. Like at at the Emmy's recently, baby reindeer's Richard Gad echoed some of what Court Jefferson uh American fiction said at the Oscars, right? That the industry needs to take more gambles on original work. And it sounds like What the blacklist is trying to do in some ways is to make that easier by kind of prevetting things. Yeah.

I think it's fair. I I always have anxiety when people say that they need to make more risky work. Because I actually think that like If you're thinking about things rationally and you're trying to optimize for your economic outcomes, making more risky work is not necessarily the strategy.

My argument is What if our assumptions about what is risky are deeply flawed and so we've been making decisions about risk assessment that are wrong. Right. And I think there's considerable evidence to that effect. But you know, for years I was told in my career Female driven action movies don't work.

They just don't work. Everybody knows they don't work. I remember thinking like okay, I guess that's true. And look, this is why Hunger Games was passed on by literally almost every studio. It was female driven action doesn't work. I wasn't Universal at the time. But these is conventional wisdom. It's like all convention and no wisdom. Similar thing. Black movies don't sell abroad. I I genuinely don't know why people think that. But

Th it is a it was an assumption for a long time in the industry that I still think we're growing out of, but people weren't looking at the data. Coming to America made several hundred million dollars. Internationally in the eighties, you know, Will Smith, Jamie Foss, Denzel, they've been global movie stars for years. But those are the assumptions. that define what is perceived as risky and not risky. And so m my point of view is These assumptions are wrong. And when we change these assumptions, we're gonna end up making more things that would have in an old paradigm been perceived as risky.

But actually are optimal. To make more money. And and here's here's my favorite example of this. Harvard Business School did a study on the blacklist a couple years ago, the annual blacklist survey. And these are scripts that at the end of the year are in production, but they are very much Beloved by

Hollywood executives. There are things like the imitation game and Slum Dog Millionaire and Juno. But Harvard Business School found that movies made from blacklist scripts. The weird ones, the things that people think, Oh, it's impossible to to make this those are too risky. Ninety percent more in revenue controlling for all other factors than movies made from scripts not on the annual blacklist.

And that's because Great writing has a lot of value. No matter how risky the perceived subject matter is. But if you nail a good story well told It's probably a good investment. It's probably your best investment.

I I had uh Janisman of the Anchleron recently after after the Emmys, and she talked about how she feels like the entertainment industry is sort of you know, running away from doing anything that's Different. After the Oscars. You were pretty excited about the quality of the work that was recognized.

This number. Арі оптимістик. Or wary about the future. I will always have a great deal of optimism about the potential for creative people to solve problems in the pursuit of creating great art.

Every year when the Emmys happen and the Oscars happen, if you look around at the nominees, you look around at the best movies that are made every year, the best TV that's made every year. You can make a usually a pretty compelling case that like this is a pretty exciting time, that amazing things are being made. I think at the same time the the challenges that face those creatives to execute on their those singular visions. Uh continue to increase. It's harder to get budgets.

It's harder to get uh the resources that you need to get distribution in a way that allow that can allow your thing to even be found. But I'm also Optimistic because This remains the first era where a lot of

kinds of people even have a chance to make anything. Right. Like a lot of people have nostalgia for twenty years ago, forty years ago, sixty years ago, oh, better things were being made, they were more idiosyncratic and people filmmakers had actual resources to do things. It's not true, it's a fiction. It's um some filmmakers. had resources to do things.

But Women filmmakers didn't. Filmmakers of color didn't, queer filmmakers didn't, disable filmmakers didn't. And so I'd rather be in this era. And be able to enjoy the bounty of of those folks.

than a sort of fictive history where, oh, everything was easier. Um I'll also say that we have a like a a sort of nostalgia about past eras in terms of where movies came from. Everyone's like, oh, no there were so many more original movies made years ago. I was looking back at the top Uh thirty movies in nineteen ninety nine, the vast majority of those are sequels and remakes and adaptations. Right. So even then.

Even the Even then. And by the way, if you think about Gone with the Wind is an adaptation of a novel. Right. Again, birth Birth of a Nation is an adaptation of a novel, if we're being real about it, right? So it is not as though w we were already not as a business saying, wow, we're investing a lot of capital into making this thing that we're going to try to distribute to a lot of people. Wouldn't it be helpful if they were sort of already familiar with the story and the thing so that they were more excited to go to it?

And I don't think anybody really cares. All that much. About whether Something was adapted like adapted or a remake. They just want it to be good. So

I I wanna ask you a little bit about AI. AI's everywhere. Creatives tend to push back on it, certainly some creatives. I'm curious where stand on it. Like would you ever entertain having AI review manuscripts and give feedback? No. That I wouldn't understand.

The answer is just flat no. You know, serving up a a a writer's manuscript or screenplay to a LLM so that it can be trained on it and potentially repurpose what it's learned from that manuscript without compensation to the writer. Like that's a no no. And then also I don't think that AI has yet made anything remotely close to a compelling case, that it is interpreting information in the way human brain does, specifically as it applies to emotion, which is ultimately the thing that art is trying to have an effect on. Like I I believe on some level, and this gets a little bit high minded, but that like art on some fundamental level is a human being ha uh consuming something about the experience of what it means to be human and translating that into something that they want to share with somebody else. And the hope is that what you've shared with somebody else creates an emotional effect in the person that you've shared it with. And so what we're really testing for on the blacklist is

Does reading this thing make you feel I've got to go tell everybody else I know about this thing, or I wouldn't wish reading this on my worst enemy. And I don't know that an AI can replicate that. Can it maybe it can sort of identify patterns, it can identify a lot of things, but I but I think as audience members We're not looking for replication of what we've seen in the past. We're looking for something that surprises us and enraptures us. And I don't think that AI has Prove in any case that it it can approximate that.

Do you think The profession of being a writer. Like it in the years ahead. Is it gonna change a lot? I think it probably already has, right? Like if you talk to a lot of writers now

Yeah. E d even just in the Hollywood context. You know, there was a time when you would be on a T V show, there was a very specific schedule in the year you'd be working for twenty four to thirty six weeks and then you'd have a few weeks off and then you go up for another show and that would be how you sustain your career. Now you might be in a room for six weeks or less. And they could be any time during the year, you might be looking for a job, you're probably not going to set. You've got a you've written a spec script and you're trying to promote that and you're using social media to promote your own personal brand. Like so all those things have

Definitely changed. But at the end of the day. To be a professional writer, you gotta be writing. And that hasn't changed. You have to go into a room By yourself. And put one word after the other and tell a story that moves people.

That's part of the reason why I have such reverence for writers is that they're going into rooms alone and and willing worlds into existence. Um And the ones that are exceptional, like truly exceptional, who write the things that move all of us. Um deserve a heck of a lot of attention, a heck of a lot of praise and and probably a heck of a lot of money too.

Franklin, as always, this has been great to talk with you. Thanks so much for doing it. No, thanks for having me back. Franklin has a real passion about the value of hidden talent, and he's committed to dismantling faulty assumptions, whether that's in Hollywood or in publishing. What I find myself thinking about most when it comes to the blacklist. is the arc of entrepreneurial disruption.

After a decade of tangible, measurable impact on Hollywood, The blacklist may still have only scratched the surface. It's like a steamroller ready to be unleashed. А ізніта вот. An overnight phenomenon that's years in the making.

That's a storyline that's always fun to watch. I'm Bob Safian. Thanks for listening. Rapid response is a wait what original.

I'm Bob Safian. Our executive producer is Eve Tro. Our producer is Alex Morris. Assistant producer is Masha Maku Tonina. Mixing and Mastering by Aaron Bastanelli. Theme music by Ryan Holiday. Our head of podcast is Letal Malad. For more, visit rapidresponsshow.com.