After 25 Oscars, Hollywood?s Underground Crowdsourced Goldmine Launches A Business

Over the last seven years, many of Hollywood’s most celebrated original movies, from Slumdog Millionaire to Juno, were studio rejects, resurrected through Hollywood’s little-known online graveyard of unproduced screenplays, The Black List. Executive scavengers scour and evaluate The Black List’s trove of scripts, potentially giving a movie new life if enough hotshots give it high marks. An unintended consequence has been smarter storylines that ordinarily get overlooked in favor of safe, formulaic blockbusters. Now that founder Franklin Leonard has proven that the crowd can effectively skirt the otherwise nepotistic world of moviemaking, he’s transforming the Black List into a full-time, for-profit venture aimed at ranking every script imaginable.?”Gone are the days where the only way into the industry for a screenwriter was hoping your aunt’s husband’s accountant’s brother worked at [talent agency] CAA or you got a job as a waiter at the Grille in the hopes of being able to slip your script to a particularly generous tipper,” Leonard writes to us. The Black List began as a humble side project in 2005, surveying 100 film executives to re-evaluate potentially winning screenplays. The annual Black List quickly became an insider goldmine, as more producers were invited to evaluate an increasing number of scripts, resulting in $16 billion in world box-office revenue and 148 Academy Award nominations (25 wins). Over the years, Leonard has made the site-review process more sophisticated, adding TV scripts and a subscription model for writers to support Leonard’s while he was vice president at Will Smith’s production house, Overbrook Entertainment. Leonard is cautious to credit The Black List for successes such as Best Picture winner The King’s Speech, but admits that reduced theater revenue and the traditional gated studio review process has exaggerated a trend of risk-averse, rehashed movies (how many Schwarzenegger remakes does the world need?). With enough upvotes from respected The Black List evaluators, a thought-provoking script might not seem as risky. Today, Leonard has left Overbrook and is launching a full-time profit version of The Black List, with the ambitious goal to “index every single screenplay of reasonable quality on Earth and provide an efficient ecosystem that matches people who make movies with the kind of screenplays on which (and screenwriters with whom) they’d like to work.” For $25 a month, screenwriters can upload their scripts to the site and get a professional evaluation for another $50. Writers retain all rights, electing if

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